yizzle Posted January 6, 2014 Posted January 6, 2014 Takao Hensch, professor of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard, is studying a drug that restore your brain’s early-life learning abilities. In an interview with NPR, Hensch discusses how a pill might be to give adults perfect pitch:Hensch is studying a drug which might allow adults to learn perfect pitch by re-creating this critical period in brain development. Hensch says the drug, valprioc acid, allows the brain to absorb new information as easily as it did before age 7.“It’s a mood-stabilizing drug, but we found that it also restores the plasticity of the brain to a juvenile state,”notes Hensch.Hensch gave the drug to a group of healthy, young men who had no musical training as children. They were asked to perform tasks online to train their ears, and at the end of a two-week period, tested on their ability to discriminate tone, to see if the training had more effect than it normally would at their age.In other words, he gave people a pill and then taught them to have perfect pitch. The findings are significant: “It’s quite remarkable since there are no known reports of adults acquiring absolute pitch,” he says.Source: synthtopia.com Quote
wrxfiend Posted January 7, 2014 Posted January 7, 2014 Interesting article. Ysm where do you find this stuff lol Quote
AlexJ Posted January 7, 2014 Posted January 7, 2014 i have actually spoken to a molecular biologist/chemist doing a similar sort of thing but focused on learning gross info (as opposed to intuitive patterns indicative in pitch recognition) at newcastle uni. what they generally find though is that while they can improve neuroplasticity other areas of pattern recognition tend to fail. for example, a person can take the drug to improve their ability to learn languages but during the period in learning language that same person cant learn to drum, play darts etcit all ends up coming down to resource allocation within the brain, as to overstimulate a neurochemical to achieve a particular result often results in deficiencies elsewhere.The ultimate miracle drug will come when they can work out how to increase the total nuturient uptake (as they already know how to convert heightened uptake into more useful chemicals to influence behaviour and learning) so that other areas dont suffer. Quote
yizzle Posted January 7, 2014 Author Posted January 7, 2014 well in fairness this guy is is Harvard Quote
AlexJ Posted January 7, 2014 Posted January 7, 2014 ysm said: well in fairness this guy is is Harvard so he paid 300k for an education i can now find online for free? Quote
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