Learning Faster through Electric Shock?

A report in the Huffington Post revealed that ” Air Force researchers recently learned that they could cut training time in half by delivering a mild electrical current (two milliamperes of direct current for 30 minutes) to pilot’s brains during training sessions on video simulators.”

Ok, so it’s not a big shock but, still learning through electrical stimulation of the brain is an interesting but scary proposition. Something like this reminds me of the Matrix when Trinity needed to learn new information and it was downloaded into her brain.

The article indicates:

I don’t know of anything that would be comparable,” McKinley said, contrasting the cognitive boost of transcranial direct current stimulation (TDCS) with, for example, caffeine or other stimulants that have been tested as enhancements to learning. TDCS not only accelerated learning, pilot accuracy was sustained in trials lasting up to 40 minutes. Typically accuracy in identifying threats declines steadily after 20 minutes. Beyond accelerating pilot training, TDCS could have many medical applications in the military and beyond by accelerating retraining and recovery after brain injury or disease

Interesting but in the pursuit of accelerated learning, is this technique a little too far. Or is the future of learning plugging in our brain to a library and downloading all the information we need?

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2 Comments

  1. Neil Warren December 5, 2011

    Thats good, your blog is cool, i like it. Thanks for the efforts my friend.

  2. Bartłomiej Polakowski December 2, 2011

    Brain programming is comming next:)

Karl Kapp
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