> 'strengthening' neurons with a fiber like substance around it reduces the electrical activity required to achieve the same neural-result. I think you're talk

> 'strengthening' neurons with a fiber like substance around it reduces the electrical activity required to achieve the same neural-result. I think you're talking about myelination, which is a result that's been around for quite a while. Myelination probably wouldn't confound this kind of "brain reading" because it's relatively stable, i.e. changes occur over the course of days at a minimum, and supposedly infrequently in the fully developed brain. Any "brain reading" will have to account for changing neural efficacies, as that's what learning is, and the tricky stuff would be learning on the scale of seconds or minutes (e.g. changes in synaptic efficacy) rather than things like myelination. That being said, while the conventional wisdom is that myelin is stable over the course of months/years in the adult brain, perhaps it's results suggesting more ongoing myelin plasticity that are the more recent results you're referring to (a general trend in recent neuroscience). If so, I'd love to see those studies. Disclaimer: I'm soooo skeptical of this kind of extracranial signals being used for "unlocking the brain's secrets." There's lots you can do with those signals, sure, just look at the past decades of EEG research. But they seem to be wanting to go far deeper with fundamentally the same technology, which seems like a dicey proposition to me. So while I think there are lots of potential critiques of this technology, I just don't think myelination is the critique to go with.