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This was my reading of the paper/summary too - a demonstration of correlation but not the evidence of a causal link that the headline suggests. My understandin
by tomalpha 9y ago
This was my reading of the paper/summary too - a demonstration of correlation but not the evidence of a causal link that the headline suggests.
My understanding of neuroscience is limited however. Can someone with a better understanding point me at what I’m missing?
- growlix 9y agoYour comprehension seems spot on to me, though maybe you feel like you're missing something given the apparent discrepancy between the hype vs. value of this research. I think there are two relevant factors here: 1) MIT is very good at publicity and press. 2) Causal neuroscience experiments are still technically challenging to implement in complex behaving organisms (e.g. monkeys and humans). We have methods such as microstimulation (invasive) and transcranial magnetic stimulation (non-invasive), but these methods are pretty ham-fisted. They indiscriminately activate (or deactivate) all the neurons in and passing through a given volume in the brain (optogenetics is promising in this regard, but it's still a nascent technology in monkeys). So while this study may appear weak because it's correlational, it may actually represent a meaningful step forward in the field.
- tomalpha 9y agoThank you. That’s pretty much spot on for my thought process and interesting, possibly even positive for the future. At least I’m not going crazy. Or if I am, I’m not alone :)
- jnordwick 9y agoIs the current thought that brainwaves affects the brain? What's the mechanism for this? They aren't even really waves like we think of radio waves or magnetic waves. Saying that brain waves have a "function" like a Scientific American article seems so backwards. I'm a little confused why the language used around them is of casuality.