As with the testimonial line from The Matrix, “I know Kung-Fu.” We have a notion from modern popular science fiction that some day humanity might be able to overcome the cumbersome notion of learning from books and experience and directly implant education into the brain via some as-to-be-known sort of technological osmosis.

According to an article published by the National Science Foundation (NSF) we might be one step closer to that technology.

Vision scientists at Boston University and ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, have recently demonstrated that brain activity can be induced through the visual cortex—the portion of the brain responsible for processing visual stimulus and information gathered from the eyes. The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to induce brain patterns seen previously effected from visual stimulus.

This is the long way of saying that the researchers watched the brain react to a particular image, recorded the state that it put that module of the brain in, and then could play that back via a method called “neurofeedback” to induce it again. Apparently this works extremely well for tasks that have a strong visual component (e.g. recognition of  objects, etc.) In fact, researchers discovered that it could affect even people who didn’t know that they were learning.

Let’s suspend disbelief for a moment and let me explain how it might function. Basically, we take someone who is good at a particular task that requires a lot of performance from the visual cortex. Say something like catching a ball. An expert at this particular capability is taken and put into an fMRI and her brain is recorded learning to catch the ball over and over; after that state has been recorded by the fMRI we take that recording and play it back into your brain instead using neurofeedback.

You don’t even need to be aware that the brain states are being impressed into your brain. The fMRI encourages your brain into states similar to those that the expert ball-catcher had settled into whilst she expertly caught the ball. As this goes on, your brain becomes familiar with the visuals of catching the ball and when it comes time for you to catch the ball it hearkens back to the expert-patterns encouraged into it via the fMRI as if you’re already extremely familiar with catching balls.

The current research suggests that the above example isn’t entirely science fiction, but a likely outcome should this technology prove to be as functional as it seems. Researchers have said they believe that the data suggests that this fMRI treatment proposes “novel learning approach sufficient to cause long-lasting improvement in tasks that require visual performance.”

It may not quite be the “I know Kung-Fu” of The Matrix or direct-senses-to-senses recording and playback from Strange Days but it’s a beginning that might enable rapid training for visually oriented tasks.

As a video game player, I almost could see competitive gamers looking to this to increase their hand-eye-coordination for a new video game by training their brain to be quicker on the draw for recognizing the shapes and motions necessary during gameplay. In fact, this technique could be a good way to rapidly train a person to use a new type of user interface (a highly visually oriented learning curve.)

Links via NSF.gov, “Vision Scientists Demonstrate Innovative Learning Method”, and Science Magazine [subscription required].