For Travis Hill, it was an offer too good to refuse. Last year when the 30-year-old neuroscientist was admitted to a new program at the NYU School of Medicine that would allow him to complete medical school in only three years and guarantee him a spot in its neurosurgery residency, he seized it. Not only would Hill save about $70,000 -- the cost of tuition and living expenses for the fourth year of medical school -- he would also shave a year off the training that will consume the next decade of his life.
"I'm not interested in being in school forever," said Hill, who earned a PhD from the University of California at Davis last June and started med school in Manhattan a few weeks later. "Just knowing where you're going to be for residency is huge."
So is Hill's student loan debt: about $200,000, dating back to his undergraduate days at the University of Massachusetts.

And he won't begin practicing until he is 40.
The chance to finish medical school early is attracting increased attention from students burdened with six-figure education loans: The median debt for medical school graduates in 2013 was $175,000, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. This year, the combined cost of tuition and fees for a first-year medical student ranges from just over $12,000 to more than $82,000.

Brain Remember concepts

The researchers explain that "processing loops," in which visual information flows from the retina to the "top" of the visual processing string in the brain and then back down again for more processing, were previously thought to be necessary in identifying specific scenes or objects.
As such, they expected to observe a substantial decline in performance around the 50-millisecond mark, the time other studies have suggested it takes for visual information to complete such a loop.

But they found that the participants still continued to perform better than chance when the image exposure time dropped from 80 milliseconds to 53, 40, then 27 and finally 13 milliseconds, which was the fastest possible speed their computer monitor could manage.
"This didn't really fit with the scientific literature we were familiar with, or with some common assumptions my colleagues and I have had for what you can see," says Prof. Potter.
As the images were progressively shown faster, she believes the subjects' better performance may be attributable to the practice they had in fast detection.

'Feedforward processing' enough for brain to remember concepts

Prof. Potter says that she and her team were able to "show more evidence of knowledge than in previous experiments where people hadn't really been expecting to find success, and didn't look very hard for it."
The study shows evidence that "feedforward processing," which is the one-directional flow of information from the retina through visual processing centers in the brain, is sufficient for the brain to recognize concepts without needing to do more feedback processing.
Additionally, the researchers add that although the images were only seen for 13 milliseconds before the next image appeared, the results suggest that part of the brain continues processing the images for longer.
Prof. Potter says that in some cases, participants were not asked about the presence of a specific image until after they had seen the whole sequence, adding:

"If images were wiped out after 13 milliseconds, people would never be able to respond positively after the sequence. There has to be something in the brain that has maintained that information at least that long."
She notes that the ability to identify images seen for such a short span of time may help the brain decide where to focus the eyes.

The team is now conducting research on how long visual information presented for a brief period can be held in the brain, as well as investigating - via magnetoencephalography scanners - which brain regions are active when a person completes the identification task.
Medical News Today recently reported on a study that suggested directing ultrasound at the human brain improves sensory perception.