US’ government’s Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) has demonstrated how a non-invasive method which could massively boost learning speed.
Their study, working with scientists from the HRL Laboratories in California, McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and Soterix Medical in New York, shows through a transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) – using magnets to stimulate a small area of the brain – device to stimulate the prefrontal cortex of the brain, learning speed was increased by 40 per cent.
The researchers tested their method on macaques and then prompted them to perform tasks in order to earn a reward.
The monkeys that wore the device mastered the tasks to earn their reward in 12 trials, but those without took 21 trials, according to the research published in Current Biology.
Lead HRL researcher Praveen Pilly said: “In this experiment, we targeted the prefrontal cortex with individualised non-invasive stimulation montages.
“That is the region that controls many executive functions, including decision-making, cognitive control, and contextual memory retrieval.
“It is connected to almost all the other cortical areas of the brain, and stimulating it has widespread effects.”
The study read: “These results are consistent with the idea that tDCS leads to widespread changes in brain activity and suggest that it may be a valuable method for cheaply and non-invasively altering functional connectivity in humans.”
DARPA is working on a host of impressive projects which could lead to super-human abilities.
One of the projects on the horizon is to create software which could be uploaded directly to the brain to give their soldiers heightened senses while also attempting to cure ailments such as blindness, paralysis and speech disorders creating an army of Captain Americas.
DARPA will plough £50million into researching the role neural networks play in operating the brains in order to decipher how it processes sensory input.
They will then hopefully create technologies and algorithms which can interpret and generate signals in the brain.
Another project boffins at DARPA are working on is the ability to give super-human sight to its soldiers.
The Soldier Centric Imaging via Computational Cameras (SCENICC) program is attempting to create a small contact lens which would improve fighters vision tenfold.
Research began on this project in 2011, and DARPA hopes to “develop novel computational imaging capabilities and explore joint design of hardware and software to give war fighters access to systems that greatly enhance their awareness, security and survivability.”