Jack of many, and master of all – possible!

Imagine if you could play cricket exactly as good as Sachin Tendulkar, paint like Mr. M.F. Hussain, play chess tricks like Vishwanathan Anand and come up with astonishing theories like Einstein. Well, I m sure you must be thinking that this is only a fantasy, rather a deepest wish that only a jinni can fulfil. But to all your surprise, this is possible and the jinni is none other than a Biomedical Engineer.

The researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have shown that inhibiting a filter that can help irrelevant thoughts, perceptions and memories from interfering a task can boost performance for tasks in which unfiltered, creative thoughts present an advantage. But how is it possible to filter the unwanted thoughts and take only the ones relevant to the situation? The answer to this was given by Sharon Thompson-Schill and Evangelia Chrysikou (their work appears in Cognitive Neuroscience).

Their studies show that the prefrontal cortex – in particular, the left prefrontal cortex – is one important area of the brain that supports cognitive control. The method the team used, called transcranial direct current stimulation, or tDCS, involves passing a weak electrical charge through the brain, aiming the charge’s path so it intersects with areas thought to be associated with an ability or behaviour. This method is also non-invasive saving oneself from surgeries and its risk.

To experiment its use, people were made to wear this prototype headband and shown pictures of everyday objects and were asked to quickly come up with uses for them that are out of the ordinary, such as using a baseball bat as a rolling pin. Participants see a sequence of 60 objects, one every nine seconds, and they measure how long it takes for them to come up with a response. The researchers hypothesised that high levels of cognitive control would be a detriment to coming up with kinds of uncommon uses.

When we use objects in daily life, our cognitive control helps us focus on what the object is typically used for and ‘filters out’ irrelevant properties. However, to come up with the idea of using a baseball bat as a rolling pin, you have to consider things like its shape and the material it’s made of. It is not easy to erase its existence in your daily life as a baseball bat. But the ability to shunt that thought and help the participant thing in the direction of the question asked was provided by the headband. The task was not only performed efficiently, but also a second quicker and only eight on an average answers were missed.

It looks like a fairy’s magic stick which shall solve all the problems of a human brain. From something involuntary like dyslexia to a mere inability to paint or sing.

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Researchers place the electrodes of this tDCS system so that the current passes through the area of the brain being studied. The current suppresses the prefrontal cortex making the participants creative

Is this kind of a headband beneficial in the already-so-competitive world today?

These systems which will help you excel in all that u intend to do, is very close to coming in the real world from our dream world. But what will happen when it goes into the hands of d common people? Everyone will b equally n fully intelligent. No one will ever be able to grade one less than the other. It will never show the actual intelligence of a person. Till now only the body worked like a machine. But no sooner even our brain will. This is the utmost way to make man a slave of machine. Jack of many n master of all… Yes, very much possible now. But at the cost of your natural intelligence. Are we ready for that?

 

-Drasti N. Kanakia