training alpha asymmetry?

[Anonymous No.11199712]

Hot off the presses:
https://scitechdaily.com/mit-neuroscientists-demonstrate-controlling-attention-with-brain-waves/
>In a new study, the researchers found that people can enhance their attention by controlling their own alpha brain waves based on neurofeedback they receive as they perform a particular task.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2019.11.001
>Subjects learn to control alpha synchrony in left versus right parietal cortex
>Modulation of alpha synchrony causes a spatial bias in visual processing
>Attentional bias persists even after neurofeedback training
>Alpha synchrony plays a causal role in modulating attention and visual processing

>The results support the proposal that alpha synchrony plays a causal role in modulating attention and visual processing, and alpha training could be used for testing hypotheses about synchrony.

Any neuroscientists in here? I'm hardly qualified to understand the methods and jargon in the paper.
What I get from it is:
- by desynchronizing alpha waves between the left and right parietal lobes, the average amplitude of alpha waves in the brain is reduced
- there's some intricate process where the test subjects train themselves using an MEG and some feedback from software; the subject magically "figures out" how to do it based on the feedback alone

Is there a way to at least try to train this on the cheap, without paying a local clinic thousands for therapy for a potentially dubious outcome?

[Anonymous No.11200854]

>>11199712
>Racial IQ threads hard bumped to page 1
>Threads about ways to unironically raise your IQ / focus / cognition slide to page 10
We have failed at white supremacy. Our ancestors would be ashamed. Shockley rolling in his fucking grave.
Untermensch spending more time arguing about proof that minorities have lower IQ than actually talking about math, chemistry, and physics.
It's only a matter of time before bugpeople overtake us.

When you look at the original paper and the papers it cites you see greeks, indians, iranians, ethiopians, chinese researching neuroscience, when all I can find from americans and bongs are treatises on white superiority which is hardly worth researching even if it's true.

[Anonymous No.11201254]

Bump! I don’t have time to read the papers now, but they look very interesting. Thanks anon, I hope to contribute later

[Anonymous No.11201487]

I'm clueless about neuroscience but I'll bump anyway since it sounds interesting

[Anonymous No.11201494]

>>11199712
>Is there a way to at least try to train this on the cheap, without paying a local clinic thousands for therapy for a potentially dubious outcome?

Meditate, don't use social media, don't F5 on chan all day. The paper is just a hyper-pseudoscientific way of saying "calm your shit, be mindful of where your focus goes, and magically your attention span increases!"

[Anonymous No.11201553]

>>11201494
Somehow I don't think you know what "pseudoscience" is

[Anonymous No.11201563]

>>11201553
Are you the self-acclaimed "hardly qualified to understand the methods" OP?

[Anonymous No.11201580]

>>11201494
>The paper is just a hyper-pseudoscientific way of saying "calm your shit, be mindful of where your focus goes, and magically your attention span increases!"
yeah, and newton's laws of motion are just hyper-pseudoscientific ways of saying "if you drop something, it falls to the ground"

[Anonymous No.11201584]

>>11201580
>muh brainwaves
>muh neurofeedback

Get fucked, faggot.

[Anonymous No.11202699]

Bump

[Anonymous No.11202773]

>>11199712
I've specialised in neuroscience.

I'm on the shitter so I haven't read the whole paper, just the parts that seem to be relevant to understanding the key points; but I might make errors in my understanding.

You measure activity in the left and right regions of interest.
You present an image to the individual being tested.
The clarity of the image is altered by a computer that takes the activity of the left and right regions of interest as input, and either favours the left vs the right, or the right vs the left.
They have to try to make the image appear as clear as possible.
They are given 100 trials of this process.

Before and after after this process they are given a different test.
It appears that left vs right performs better on this task after training compared to before training than the right vs left group.

There have been studies on other frequencies in different regions of interest; for example alterations in gamma frequencies and their relation to alzheimer pathology (specifically microglia activity and amyloid load).
Paper here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5656389/

[Anonymous No.11203169]

>>11202773
Thanks for the breakdown of the training process anon.

There's something I don't understand, though.
>They have to try to make the image appear as clear as possible.
What exactly is the subject's approach to achieve this end?
How do they intentionally alter the activity of regions in their brain? Is it a conscious process?

[Anonymous No.11204138]

>>11203169
I don't know.

I already doubt there is much meaning to the term conscious:

nature.com/articles/nn.2112
"There has been a long controversy as to whether subjectively 'free' decisions are determined by brain activity ahead of time. We found that the outcome of a decision can be encoded in brain activity of prefrontal and parietal cortex up to 10 s before it enters awareness. This delay presumably reflects the operation of a network of high-level control areas that begin to prepare an upcoming decision long before it enters awareness."

I can kind of relate to my own experience where I'm looking at something and it's out of focus because I think it's further or closer than it is. Kind of like a camera.

Then after a bit my eyes readjust.

I imagine they know their objective, and they see the object getting blurrier or clearer, and their brain automatically adjusts.

Or in other terms, they know their goal, their brain does random things and reinforces the right activity

I'd guess it's the interaction of conscious and sub-conscious; if such a thing exists

[Anonymous No.11204152]

>>11204138
>>11203169

I know my answer isn't particularly satisfying.
You can find simple functions being encoded by about 40 neurons; like pic related, which is a "circuit diagram" of the stomatogastric ganglion in decapods.

"The neurons it contains form two central pattern generators (CPGs), namely the pyloric and gastric mill CPGs. The pyloric CPG controls striated muscles that dilate and constrict the pyloric region of the stomach in a cyclic three phase rhythm. The gastric mill CPG produces a slower six phase rhythm that control muscles that produce chewing by three ossicles in the gastric mill."


If i recall correctly, we can measure (theoretically) the activity of 1000s of neurons at a time using genetically encoded voltage indicators in optogenetics. But there are pragmatic limitations which limit the distance into a human brain we could measure due to defraction of light and other factors. Then you have the ethics.

You may be interested in two-photon microscopy which is used in optogenetics

The kind of functions you are interested in, their exact mechanisms are hard to determine on a cellular level.

MEG has about a few millimeter spatial resolution. You'd want ideally less than 100 micrometer resolution, and a way to measure even relatively deep brain activity through skin and bone. My understanding is that we can't use two-photon microscopy to measure beyond even one millimeter depth

[Anonymous No.11204154]

>>11200854

[Anonymous No.11204157]

>>11200854
>It's only a matter of time before bugpeople overtake us.

[Anonymous No.11205126]

>>11204138
>I don't know.
Yeah, actually I dug some more and found an interview about it (apparently published after the paper release) with the study authors, turns out this is exactly what everyone would like to know.

http://news.mit.edu/2019/controlling-attention-brain-waves-1204
>“Alpha manipulation really was controlling people’s attention, even though they didn’t have any clear understanding of how they were doing it,” Desimone says.

>where I'm looking at something and it's out of focus... Then after a bit my eyes readjust.
Yeah, that's a really good analogy.
I don't know "how" I focus or unfocus on stuff... (like if I held a piece of paper up close and focus on it, then focus on what's distant instead). I just kind of do it without any awareness of the physical process taking place.

Strange stuff.