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"Study paves way for personnel such as drone operators to have electrical pulses sent into their brains to improve effectiveness in high pressure situations"
US military scientists have used electrical brain stimulators to enhance mental skills of staff, in research that aims to boost the performance of air crews, drone operators and others in the armed forces' most demanding roles.
The successful tests of the devices pave the way for servicemen and women to be wired up at critical times of duty, so that electrical pulses can be beamed into their brains to improve their effectiveness in high pressure situations.
The brain stimulation kits use five electrodes to send weak electric currents through the skull and into specific parts of the cortex. Previous studies have found evidence that by helping neurons to fire, these minor brain zaps can boost cognitive ability.
The technology is seen as a safer alternative to prescription drugs, such as modafinil and ritalin, both of which have been used off-label as performance enhancing drugs in the armed forces.
But while electrical brain stimulation appears to have no harmful side effects, some experts say its long-term safety is unknown, and raise concerns about staff being forced to use the equipment if it is approved for military operations.
Others are worried about the broader implications of the science on the general workforce because of the advance of an unregulated technology.
[...] In 2014 another Oxford scientist, Roi Cohen Kadosh, warned that while brain stimulation could improve performance at some tasks, it made people worse at others. In light of the work, Kadosh urged people not to use brain stimulators at home.
Article:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/nov/07/us-military-successfully-tests-electrical-brain-stimulation-to-enhance-staff-skills
https://web.archive.org/web/20161107205930/https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/nov/07/us-military-successfully-tests-electrical-brain-stimulation-to-enhance-staff-skills
Research Article:
http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnhum.2016.00589/abstract
https://web.archive.org/web/20161108040752/http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnhum.2016.00589/abstract
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Thursday November 10 2016, @07:03PM
On the drive home, Robert looked up "JITT." There were millions of hits, in medicine, in military affairs, in drug enforcement. He picked the Global-Security summary off the top of "respected contrarian" sources:
JITT, "just-in-time-training" (also, "just-in-time-trainee", when referring to a victim of the procedure). A treatment that combines addressin therapy and intense data exposure, capable of installing large skill sets in less than 100 hours. Most famous for its tragic use in the Sino-American Conflict, when 100,000 U.S. military recruits were trained in Mandarin, Cantonese.
and a list of specialties that Robert had never heard of. In less than ninety days the Americans had made up their military language gap. But then there were problems. Cram in such skills willy-nilly and you distort the underlying personality. A very few JITTs suffered no side effects. In rare cases, such people could undertake a second hit -- even a third -- before the damage caught up with them. The rejection process was a kind of internal war between the new viewpoints and the old, manifesting as seizures and altered mental states. Often the JITT was stuck in some diminished form of his/her new skill set. After the war, there was the legacy of the JITT-disabled veterans, and continuing abuse by foolish students everywhere.
-- Vernor Vinge, Rainbows End
Admittedly, it's science fiction, but I have to wonder if (I'm reaching here) there's a per-person safe threshold for the knowledge acquisition. On the other hand, maybe this could help the mentally retarded or otherwise impeded people acquire skills faster.