With a jolt of electricity, you
might be able to enter a flow state that allows you to learn a new skill
twice as fast, solve problems that have mystified you for hours, or
even win a sharpshooting competition.
And this just scratches the
surface in terms of what we might be able to do to improve cognition as
our understanding of the brain improves. With an implanted chip, the
possibilities might be close to limitless.
Researchers think that as we
learn more about the brain, we’ll be able to use electricity to boost
focus, memory, learning, mathematical ability, and pattern recognition.
Electric stimulation may also clear away depression and stave off
cognitive decline. We’ll eventually even implant computer chips that
allow us to directly search the web for information or even download new
skills — like Neo learning Kung-fu in The Matrix.
We’re heading down a path that will allow us to supercharge the brain.
The key is decoding how the brain
works. That’s the hurdle in the way, and the one that billions of
dollars in research are going towards right now.
"I don’t think there’s any doubt
we’ll eventually understand the brain," says Gary Marcus, a professor of
psychology at New York University, and an editor of the upcoming book “The Future of the Brain: Essays by the World’s Leading Neuroscientists.”
"The big question is how long it’s going to take," he says.
Repairing And Enhancing
Most of the technologies that
could enhance our ability to think play another important role too. They
may provide the keys to stopping cognitive decline, treating mental
illness, and even restoring sight to the blind or hearing to the deaf.
Some of these techniques are already being used in that way.
Stimulating the brain with
electricity to treat ailments has a long history. The ancient Greeks and
Romans, including Pliny the Elder, shocked themselves with the Atlantic torpedo ray to
treat headaches. Treatments like transcranial direct current
stimulation (TDCS) now show promise as a means of treating depression,
epilepsy, and other drug-resistant brain disorders, according to Michael
Weisend, a neuroscientist at Wright State Research Institution.
And neural implants show
potentially far more possibilities. They already can transmit sound to
the brain to provide a type of hearing for some deaf people. When
connected to a tiny camera they can even capture shape and motion and
transmit them to the brain, providing a type of vision for certain blind
patients.
Knowing how these techniques are
used medically shows what we understand about the brain now — but what’s
really fascinating is what this research will allow us to do in the
future.
(Reuters/ Morris MacMatzen)
With a jolt of electricity, you
might be able to enter a flow state that allows you to learn a new skill
twice as fast, solve problems that have mystified you for hours, or
even win a sharpshooting competition.
And this just scratches the
surface in terms of what we might be able to do to improve cognition as
our understanding of the brain improves. With an implanted chip, the
possibilities might be close to limitless.
Researchers think that as we
learn more about the brain, we’ll be able to use electricity to boost
focus, memory, learning, mathematical ability, and pattern recognition.
Electric stimulation may also clear away depression and stave off
cognitive decline. We’ll eventually even implant computer chips that
allow us to directly search the web for information or even download new
skills — like Neo learning Kung-fu in The Matrix.
We’re heading down a path that will allow us to supercharge the brain.
The key is decoding how the brain
works. That’s the hurdle in the way, and the one that billions of
dollars in research are going towards right now.
"I don’t think there’s any doubt
we’ll eventually understand the brain," says Gary Marcus, a professor of
psychology at New York University, and an editor of the upcoming book “The Future of the Brain: Essays by the World’s Leading Neuroscientists.”
"The big question is how long it’s going to take," he says.
Repairing And Enhancing
Most of the technologies that
could enhance our ability to think play another important role too. They
may provide the keys to stopping cognitive decline, treating mental
illness, and even restoring sight to the blind or hearing to the deaf.
Some of these techniques are already being used in that way.
Stimulating the brain with
electricity to treat ailments has a long history. The ancient Greeks and
Romans, including Pliny the Elder, shocked themselves with the Atlantic torpedo ray to
treat headaches. Treatments like transcranial direct current
stimulation (TDCS) now show promise as a means of treating depression,
epilepsy, and other drug-resistant brain disorders, according to Michael
Weisend, a neuroscientist at Wright State Research Institution.
And neural implants show
potentially far more possibilities. They already can transmit sound to
the brain to provide a type of hearing for some deaf people. When
connected to a tiny camera they can even capture shape and motion and
transmit them to the brain, providing a type of vision for certain blind
patients.
Knowing how these techniques are
used medically shows what we understand about the brain now — but what’s
really fascinating is what this research will allow us to do in the
future.
(Mike Nudelman/Business Insider)
A Jolt To The Outside Of The Head
First you strap a small device to
your head, making sure that its electrodes are lined up in just the
right way, and then flip a switch. A small jolt of electricity is
delivered to your brain. All of a sudden, you feel a slight buzz that
soon fades. Fogginess and anxiety clear away — you’re suddenly able to
solve puzzles that stumped you before, you can discern patterns out of
noise, and your memory works significantly better.
According to neuroscientists and a
large community of DIY brain hackers, that’s not science fiction — its
already the reality of TDCS. Many researchers still have questions about
how effective brain stimulation will be in the long term, but there’s a
lot of promising research so far.
What this does is provide a
fairly broad but small dose of electricity to the brain, affecting
millions of cells, and enhancing performance along the way.
"TDCS is more of a shotgun
approach than a scalpel approach," says Weisend. They try to target a
region and make sure as much electricity reaches that region as
possible, but a broad beam is sent out along the way. Luckily, most
results so far have shown that in supervised lab conditions, these
techniques are safe.
So far, this technique shows the
most promise for improving memory, pattern recognition, and vigilance —
the ability to pay attention — according to Weisend. His team has tested
or demonstrated TDCS on more than 500 people, including Radiolab’s Jad Abumrad,
and among other things, they’ve shown that people learning a new skill
can learn twice as much as people who receive the same training but no
stimulation.
Other studies have shown that
electrical stimulation can provide the same energy boost as giving
someone a cup of coffee. Researchers have found that people who undergo
brain zapping sessions canenhance their mathematical abilities for up to six months. The increased focus it provides can evengive people a huge boost in U.S. military sniper training simulations. The military has also found that it can help pilots better pick out targets from radar images.
Promising results and cheap,
easy-to-build devices have made battery-powered brain stimulators a
favorite of the DIY community, especially for people interested in
boosting their own brain power and for video gamers, who can use any
boost in focus, vigilance, and the ability to see the next guy before he
sees you.
These self-experimenters give
neuroscientists like Weisend pause, however, as they may not be as
careful as research teams and also can create unrealistic expectations
for the technology.
"What we know is that changing
the way a brain functions can make it perform better," says Weisend, but
he also says that "the most interesting days for TDCS are definitely
down the road" — when we better understand how it works.
A Chip In Your Skull
There are ways to have a much
more direct impact on the brain than the broad one external electrical
stimulation applies — if you are willing to put a sort of computer chip
inside your skull.
Those same implants that are already used for vision and hearing could be used to enhance those senses far beyond normal as technology improves and as we better learn how to communicate that information to the brain.
But one of the first neural enhancements that we might see is one that improves memory, according to Marcus.
Already, the military is using
research into neural implants and electrodes implanted into the brain to
restore damaged memory in people with trauma. Marcus says we should
eventually be able to build implants that extend memory and make it more
reliable — people are trying to do it already. It’s hard to say when we’ll be able to do that — maybe not this decade, Marcus says, but perhaps the one after that.
First, we’ll have to figure out how the brain codes away and stores memory.
That’s the hurdle for a lot of this research, and it’s hard to predict when we’ll jump it. Butgovernments and research institutions around the world have set modeling and understanding the brain as one of the top scientific priorities of our time.
Once we know how the brain
changes as it stores information and implants a new skill, a brain
implant could mimic that effect, making it possible to actually download
the brain changes that would come with practice. A neuroscience and
technological challenge like that may be far away — but we’re talking
about 50 year projects, not 500 year projects, says Marcus.
What’s Next
No matter what type of technique
we talk about, experts agree that aren’t quite there yet — though we’re a
lot closer than most people think.
With regard to TDCS, Weisend
thinks it’ll be incorporated into training programs (the military could
save billions of dollars if they could cut training time
short), treatment for drug resistant brain disease, and maybe in
professional occupations that demand a lot of focus and where lives are
on the line.
Marcus is excited about the
possibilities of neural implants, but he also thinks that our
perspective on all this will be transformed as we learn more about how
the mind works. “I think that the techniques we have now are going to
look really crude in 30 years,” he says.
But it’s going to happen. And the world is going to change with it.
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