I have high hopes, but read the actual paper.

https://academic.oup.com/cercor/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cercor/bhac426/6814397

This could scale to general learning but their study only tested a very narrow type of pattern recognition. Also the timing of the info, not just the flashing lights, was critical.

What do you mean by "somewhat indicative"?

@zQ4Z82W Enough to spur further research or make people more interested in trying it themselves.

That seems like a low bar. Even noisy initial results might spur more research or generate interest since the potential payoff is so huge.

@zQ4Z82W What would you suggest?

@IsaacKing What about "overall results will be positive to the extent that most (or "some" or "X%") of the people who tried it intend to keep doing it regularly?"

This is easy enough to test that if the effect is real and anywhere near as large as reported (3x faster learning), I'd expect mainstream media to report on it by 2025, so maybe the criterion could just be that N reliable sources report on positive results.

I'm also fine with resorting to your personal opinion, e.g., if you think there's a >X% chance the effect is real, this resolves YES.

it's incredibly easy to get a 'trending toward significance' or spurious significant result on a psych topic. the entire field is filled with published papers like that. I'd bet a ton on no if the market was 'will it actually replicate, in the sense of is it true', but 'enough to spur further research' is meaningless

@EMcNeill That seems reasonable.