The researchers who did Our long-term memory usually selects what we pay closer visual attention to study were back zapping subjects’ brains again in this 2015 human study.

Prior to zapping subjects’ brains:

“In healthy individuals, these theta waves were steady and synchronized, but in people with schizophrenia, the waves were weak and disorganized, suggesting that they were having a harder time processing the mistake. And the subjects’ behavior bore that out—the healthy subjects slowed down by a few milliseconds when they made mistakes and did better in the next round, while the subjects with schizophrenia did not.”

Processing of an appropriate control group wasn’t clear to me from reading supplementary material. Subject patients were diagnosed with schizophrenia and took psychoactive medication which these researchers equated to chlorpromazine (Thorazine) dosages. Control group subjects had neither the condition nor were prescribed medications.

• How did these researchers differentiate influences of psychoactive medications on experimental results from other influences on subjects’ conditions?
• Were there numerical calculations not shown in supplementary material that somehow nullified effects of psychoactive medications?
• To be sure that zapping was effective for subjects’ conditions, wouldn’t control group subjects need to take the same medications so that experimental data reflected only differences attributable to schizophrenia?

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These researchers also asserted:

“Causal changes in the low-frequency oscillations improved behavioral responses to errors and long-range connectivity at the single-trial level.”

However, brain waves can’t be termed as base causes of human behavior. Studies such as:

• Are hippocampal place cells controlled by theta brain waves from grid cells?
• Research that identifies the source of generating gamma brain waves

clearly established that brain waves are effects of base causes.

• Was there something that stopped these researchers from investigating generating sources of brain waves?
• Was it that they work in the same Vanderbilt University department as researchers of A study of visual perception that didn’t inform us about human conscious awareness, and were similarly biased against brain research that may lead to finding evolutionary biological causes for human behavior?

http://www.pnas.org/content/112/30/9448.full “Synchronizing theta oscillations with direct-current stimulation strengthens adaptive control in the human brain”

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