Brain stimulation: The military’s mind-zapping project
▻http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140603-brain-zapping-the-future-of-war
An unusual trial is underway at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, near Dayton, Ohio. An airman sits at a monitor in a laboratory, wired up with electrodes, his jacket slung over the back of his chair. Plane-shaped icons keep entering his airspace. He has to decide whether each incoming plane is a friend or a foe. If it’s a foe, he must send a warning. If it flies off, fine. If it doesn’t, he must bring it down. The lab is silent, apart from the bleeps as he hits the buttons, and the smash as a software missile destroys an uncooperative plane.
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Trans-cranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) has been investigated as a possible treatment in healthcare for decades. In the 1980s, for example, it became clear that applying mild electrical currents to the brain could help patients with severe depression for whom the drugs did nothing.
Yet it wasn’t until the 2000s that neuroscientists realised tDCS could change the brain functioning of healthy people – a discovery that got the military interested.
“We began noticing a lot of the medical literature suggesting that cognitive functioning could be enhanced,” says Andy McKinley, the US military’s principal in-house tDCS researcher, who is now conducting trials. “We began thinking: if it could help with those healthy participants, it could potentially be an intervention tool we could use here in the military to help advance cognitive function.”
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That’s why airmen are being tested today, watching for planes on a screen. The task obviously involves decision making, but it also has a physical ‘motor’ component: you must press the buttons in the correct sequence, and you must do this quickly, to get a good score. After a while, this kind of task becomes pretty automatic. “If you imagine learning to ride a bike or a manual vehicle, your process is very conscious at first because you’re thinking about all the steps. But as you do it more often, it becomes more and more unconscious,” McKinley says. “We wanted to see if we could accelerate that transition with tDCS.”
Brain imaging suggested that the best way to do this would be to stimulate the motor cortex while the volunteer was doing the task. But McKinley and his team added a twist: after the stimulation, they use tDCS in reverse to inhibit the volunteers’ prefrontal cortex, which is involved in conscious thinking. The day after the stimulation, the volunteers are brought back for re-testing. “The results we’re getting are fantastic,” McKinley says. People getting a hit of both mid-test and inhibitory stimulation did 250% better in their retests, far outperforming those who had received neither. Used in this way, it seems that tDCS can turbo-boost the time it takes for someone to go from being a novice at a task to being an expert.
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In other studies, McKinley’s team have also used tDCS to supercharge attention, which could help the image analysts too. Volunteers were asked to engage in a rudimentary simulation of air-traffic monitoring. Performance at this type of task usually declines over time. “It’s a pretty linear decrement,” McKinley says. But when they stimulated the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex of volunteers’ brains, an area they had found to be crucial for attention, they found absolutely no reduction in performance for the entire 40-minute duration of the test. “That had never been shown before,” he says enthusiastically. “We’ve never been able to find anything else that creates that kind of preservation of performance.”