I'd have liked to have seen two control groups. One group which received the "mock brain stimulation" and another which received no brain stimulation. It may be the case that playing noise into someone's brain has a detrimental effect on performance which is less prevalent when the stimulus roughly corresponds to the activity of a healthy brain.
If you drop a heavy weight onto someone's foot, they're likely to perform better on tests of mental acuity than if you were to drop a heavy weight onto their head. That doesn't necessarily mean that dropping the weight on their foot improved their performance, just that it was less harmful.
Unless I'm missing something, the poor experimental design coupled with the small sample size makes me very skeptical of the results. I'd love to see another experiment with more conclusive findings either way.
I read the "mock brain stimulation" as meaning the headset seemed to be doing something but was doing nothing. I guess the critique of the experiment would more or less stand, though it'd be slightly rearranged. Maybe dropping weights on any part of the body improves performance?
It's "sham stimulation" (that's the technical term used in research) and, in the case of direct current stimulation, it means what you described. The current used for tDCS is too low to be perceived, so no current is an acceptable placebo.
Ah, now I know! Serves me right for not reading the original paper before criticizing their experimental method. Thanks for the technical term. I see that the sham stimulation can still incorporate some ramp-up and ramp-down current, but I'll have to dig deeper to understand how those brief currents (or lack thereof) affect the quality of the control and the specifics of this experiment.
I think there needs to be another control group - people who are not aware that they are doing the experiment.
The reason is that I am not convinced that this experiment shows causality with regards to the transferred brain waves - rather that it shows that novice pilots who think they may be getting expert-pilot brainwaves sent to them, simply perform better.
Which is to say, I think that what this experiment shows is that those who have willed themselves to be recipients of expert-pilot brainwaves, simply become better pilots.
If you drop a heavy weight onto someone's foot, they're likely to perform better on tests of mental acuity than if you were to drop a heavy weight onto their head. That doesn't necessarily mean that dropping the weight on their foot improved their performance, just that it was less harmful.
Unless I'm missing something, the poor experimental design coupled with the small sample size makes me very skeptical of the results. I'd love to see another experiment with more conclusive findings either way.