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Using Magnets To Turn Off the Brain's Speech Center
An editor for the Telegraph, Roger Highfield, recently volunteered to allow a UK researcher to shut off the speech center of his brain with a high-powered magnetic pulse. Regular speech is controlled by a section of the brain called Broca's area. Once the precise location is determined in the subject, a magnetic pulse can temporarily disrupt speech without impairing other cognitive functions. The link contains a video in which you can watch Highfield stutter and twitch while attempting to recite a nursery rhyme. A later test shows that he's able to sing the rhyme without difficulty, since singing is controlled in a different part of the brain (as you may remember from Scott Adams' speech disorder). Researchers believe that the ability to stimulate or quell activity in specific areas of the brain may help in treating conditions like epilepsy and migraine headaches.
needs a zappie!
pff... real networks have been doing this stuttering thing since 1995.
Hack your mind out of its sandbox.
... that take away my speech centers when I meet a pretty girl.
I wonder what would happen if the magnetic pulses were applied to more important sections of the brain, such as the area that controls autonomous bodily functions, like the heart. I suppose, if it is capable of knocking out the area of the brain that controls speech, it should be capable of knocking out the section of the brain that controls other, critical bodily functions. Is it only me, or do you see a potential weapons application for this in the future?
shouldn't it be from the bzzt-ow-bzzt-ow-bzzzzzzzt-........ dept?
A man spends the first half of his life accumulating stuff, the second trying to get rid of it all.
but can they make you sing folk songs?
Monstar L
What makes you think they will hear your objections?
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
There, I fixed that sentence for you. What I wondered was what else these guys were zapping while they were finding the subject's Broca area. Maybe they convinced him it was safe, but they'd have to do a whole lot of talking to convince me.
The notion that this pulse "turns-off" the targeted segment of the brain isn't correct. The pulse does NOT remove power from the brain or suppress neuronal firing. Instead, it disrupts coordinated firing of the neurons by inducing a spurious current in the neurons. Thus it is more like randomly applying a signal to the pins of a CPU than to cutting power or clipping pins.
I can't imagine that this pulse is very good for neuronal tissue in the short-term or long-term.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
This is very exciting as it could point to a future where you can literally hack your own brain. So far it looks like he can only temporarily disrupt parts of a person's brain... what about enhancement? What about non-invasive brain I/O?
... now I think after seeing this video ... perhaps it had a grain of truth? Hopefully someone will conduct some experiments.
What I think could also be very interesting is what kinds of background effects do things like the Aurora have on people's brains? I lived in far-north Alaska for many years and I remember that anecdotally everyone talked about strange dreams when the Aurora was active. It could have been merely a sub-conscious suggestion that active Aurora leads to altered dream states or
[signature]
So here I was, speedreading through /., and the scientific suggestion of
"Using Maggots To Turn Off The Brain's Speech Center"
snatched my Sunday morning mind's attention like a zombie. Litereally. So, is there something here I'm missing? Like how does one direct those blood suckers to the speech center of a brain, assuming it's not major surgery to introduce them? And why...? Is DARPA going over to the dark side in the fight against terrorists?
Alas, after 15 second of grimacing and beweilderment I realized my sleep-hazed eyes were misreading.
Dang, I hope I didn't give some royalty fee collection company another bad idea to file a patent for...
You're making the classic engineering mistake: mis-defining the problem.
Disrupting the speech centers of the brain does not preempt attempts at communications. And you need communication; it's just that men, left to themselves, would communicate by passing terse status messages: "I'm hungry"; "I'm angry"; "I'm going to sleep"; "I want sex."
Women send the same status messages, but they seem to gain satisfaction out of the process itself. Therefore they send messages in steganographic form: the basis status messages are there, wrapped all kinds of other data which do not require your immediate action. It pays to pay at least some attention; she may start an "I want sex" status message by telling you that her sister's neighbor's aunt is going in for a gall stone operation.
The wise man knows that he should celebrate the differences between the sexes if he wants to celebrate the difference between the sexes.
Therefore, it is best to cultivate the skill of appearing mildly interested and engaged, making reflexive, non-committal listening responses, and paying just enough attention to pick out any cues that indicate something that requires immediate action. It's a lot like driving, actually. You get that sixth sense for when somebody is going to cut you off, or roll into an intersection without coming to a stop. It's not magic, it's practice.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
how does one direct those blood suckers to the speech center of a brain KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!!!
You can't take the sky from me...
Insightful? When governments are twisted enough that they could "legally" do this, they could also do it the low tech way, namely cutting off your tongue. Throwing you into prison might help too but that's too high tech.
..." paranoia on slashdot has to stop. What if governments used TV to promote neo-Nazism? What if governments used dining knives to execute political dissidents? What if governments drugged me with pot to deprive my right to free thought? What if governments built androids that follow me every day for surveillance purposes? OH THE HORROR!!! HAIL THE GOOD OLD DAYS IN STONE AGE WHEN THE TRIBE LEADER THREW STICKS AT HIS ENEMIES!!
/rant.
I mean, I didn't know my freedom of speech was *that* valuable... imagine all those expensive high tech gadgets required to silence me...
Seriously, this stupid "what if governments
I mean, you guys need to understand how oppressive governments work. They don't care about you, so they'll just find the least complicated ways to "reform" you. You won't get the privilege to be silenced by these kinds of expensive tech if cutting your tongue or throwing you into prison works better and cheaper. Wake up dudes, you guys have read too much sci-fi.
Don't quote me on this.
What if the government decided to do away with the fourth ammendment and declare it was their right to search and seize simply becuase they're fighting a war against a noun?
What if the government decided to completely ignore the right to legal representation and a free trial because they were holding you in a special, magical place where they decided those rules didn't apply?
What if the government started shipping people off to be tortured by third party nations so they could pretend they weren't doing it themselves.
What if the government wrote a statement that said certain forms of torture was OK, completely refused to list what those forms are, then pretended to be shocked when, exactly as intended, junior troops did what was expected of them?
What if the government could demand your library and bookstore records and had a special way of doing it where, legally, no one was ever allowed to report they'd been demanded, let alone fight the demands?
Or, the classic "crazy" one: What if the government was secretly spying on your phonecalls? Don't tell me there are laws against that. They could do it if they really wanted, right?
You want me to keep going?
The government tends to do the insidious crap because, exactly as they've done with most of the above, they can then deny they're even doing it for several years until the weight of evidence becomes completely overwhelming then they stop that one specific thing and start the next one.
You cut someone's tongue off, you've left a really big piece of physical evidence that sickens and outrages the world.
You toss someone in jail without trial, in normal circumstances, and a lawyer seeking to make a name for themselves is on your ass within months.
Pull the shady crap like suspending habeus corpus and you've got years before they even get it reinstated and can begin trying to get the guy you jailed back out.
Keep shipping him off to Syria or Egypt for "questioning" and you get to torture, whilst claiming innocence, the whole time.
Insidious works far better than blunt.
Continuing the insidious theme:
The British government is having major issues with a cleric they can't deport because he might face torture but who they can't make charges stick on in England.
Blunt option: Jail without trial. They tried that, it caused outrage. They had to release him.
Subtle tinfoil hat option: Zap him with a magnet. "Oh, the poor dear's had a stroke. He can't preach anymore. How awful." Then you take him to a nice secure hospital to protect him from the people who might do him harm and you keep repeating. Problem solved. You're helping him, not harming him.
As long as the person is expecting their speech to be disturbed, and they can hear/feel the exact moment that the magnet is pulsing, the effect could be purely psychosomatic. They really need to test this on someone who's not expecting these effects. It may be ethically a bit strange, but it's the only true test.
There's actually a few different types of controls which are used experimentally. Here's what I can think of off the top of my head:
* use a sham coil that triggers the same sorts of clicking sound but doesn't actually stimulate anything
* more recently, a different type of sham coil has been developed which allows you to modify current directions on-the-fly, allowing you to create the sound/sensation of scalp stimulation, but causes minimal stimulation in the brain region (disclaimer: this coil was devised by people from the same lab as me)
* you can switch which side of the brain you're stimulating on, and if the subject isn't familiar with neuroanatomy they'll be none the wiser. About midway down this page there's a video of someone counting upwards, and it shows that even though there's a disruption when you stimulate Broca's area on the left side of the brain, no effect is observed when the symmetric area on the other side of the brain is stimulated.
So they gave him instructions before they started, "If you start to feel pain, tell us to stop. OK, now we're going to disrupt your speech center."
- the effects are local. Whereas using electrodes, you basically fry the whole brain.
- much finer tunning : you can slightly increase or dicrease the probability of neurons firing in target area, and have a lot of freedom of controlling how much "slightly". In my opinion, there is more fraud. Here is a quote from the article: 'Prof Allan Snyder, at the University of Sydney believes TMS can act as "a creativity-amplifying machine".' Not exactly, this the "... and maybe one day, we'll cure cancer / produce fast and cheap petabyte sized harddisk / eliminate terrorism / develop WMD", also known as "money whoring". Just putting some outrageously far-reaching speculation, in the hope the someone in the government will notice them and pour money in.
Their "creativity stimultion application" is probably just shutting down some brain regions and stimulating other to see how this altered state of mind influence creativeness. Actual artists have been doing this for age using marijuanna, LSD, etc... except for *much* *much* *much* cheaper.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]