Science Fiction Or Science? Electrocal shocks to pilots' brains boosted learning

Science Fiction Or Science?
By Olivier Uyttebrouck
Albuquerque Journal Staff Writer
Sun, Mar 18, 2012


The notion of placing electrodes on a person’s forehead and shocking parts of the brain to accelerate learning may sound more like science fiction than serious research.

But work by Michael Weisend and other researchers at the Mind Research Network in Albuquerque is causing a buzz in the scientific community – some positive, some skeptical – and has led the U.S. Air Force to design a pilot-training program to exploit the technology.

The Department of Defense “wants strategies to get people trained up faster,” said Weisend, a University of New Mexico psychology professor.

The weakest link in the Air Force’s unmanned aircraft program is its ability to train a sufficient number of pilots on complex skills, such as recognizing ground targets on photos and radar images taken from aircraft, he said.

“The DoD have to take a guy straight out of high school and get them ready to use some of the most sophisticated equipment on the planet,” he said.

The technique, called “transcranial direct current stimulation,” uses a device powered by a 9-volt battery to “jump start” regions of the brain that are active in people skilled at a given task, such as playing a military training video game or identifying targets from radar images.

“What we got was a twofold increase in the learning,” Weisend said. “Half the training will get them to the same level of performance.”

Transcranial stimulation is one of several techniques for applying electric currents to the brain that scientists have explored for decades, often with mixed results, according to an article published last year in the journal Nature. Researchers have also used powerful magnets and surgically implanted electrodes in search of therapies for a variety of conditions, including epilepsy and depression.

The Mind Research Network’s new work using the technique to enhance learning has the benefit of powerful new brain imaging tools that allow researchers to observe and measure the effects of electric currents on the brain.

Weisend’s work uses an electrode attached above the right temple that directs a mild electrical current – about 2 milliamps of direct current for 30 minutes – through a portion of the brain.

The research, funded by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, has involved more than 500 human subjects since 2008. Volunteers were recruited from Kirtland Air Force Base and UNM. Weisend said the grant funding runs in the millions of dollars, but he said he could not provide the specific amounts of Department of Defense grants.

The Air Force has identified funding to create a pilot-training program using transcranial stimulation at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio, Weisand said. Officials at Wright-Patterson did not respond to a request for comment.

Science journals, including Nature and Scientific American, have published commentaries about the research in recent months.

“The question for the Air Force and others interested in transcranial stimulation is whether these findings will hold up over time or will land in the dust bin of pseudoscience,” R. Douglas Fields, a National Institutes of Health neurobiologist, wrote for Scientific American in November.

The scientific community is likely to remain skeptical about the technique until other researchers have replicated the experiments and published their own results, said Dr. Robert Rubin, CEO of Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute. The Albuquerque nonprofit earlier this year became the owner of Mind Research Network.

Researchers at the Mind Research Network began last year to publish results from the work. Weisend said he expects about a dozen papers to emerge from the research.

Transcranial stimulation appears to prime the brain for a stronger reaction to sights, sounds and other sensory inputs, increasing the likelihood that the subject will remember an experience and learn from it, Weisend said.

Learning “is all about making connections between cell-group A and cell-group B,” he said. A stronger reaction in the brain in response to sensory input “has the effect of allowing you to encode more information.”

The electrical stimulation itself can cause pain if misapplied.

“Two milliamps is enough to hurt you if you are not careful, and I have the scars to prove it,” Weisend said. Specialized electrodes developed for the project largely eliminated painful sensations, he said.

People describe the sensation as itching or tingling, or even a slight burning sensation, he said.

Researchers also performed follow-up examinations with the project’s 500 volunteers but found no long-term effects. “There were no discernible effects that a board-certified radiologist is concerned about,” Weisend said.