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posted by martyb on Tuesday October 24 2017, @01:16AM   Printer-friendly
from the no-more-monkeying-around dept.

HRL Laboratories (a research center owned by General Motors and Boeing) has found that transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS) can improve learning:

Done in collaboration with McGill University in Montreal and Soterix Medical in New York, the study was sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA)'s Restoring Active Memory (RAM) program. Published October 12, 2017, in the journal Current Biology, tDCS in animals showed learning accelerated by about 40% when given 2 mA noninvasively to the prefrontal cortex without increased neuronal firing. This study showed it was modulated connectivity between brain areas, not neuron firing rates, that accounted for the increased learning speed.

The behavioral task in this experiment was associative learning. The macaques had to learn arbitrary associations between a visual stimulus and a location where they would get a reward—a visual foraging task. The initial foraging trials took about 15 seconds, and once the animal learned the location of the reward, it took approximately 2 seconds to recall and find the target. Subjects in the control condition required an average of 22 trials to learn to obtain the reward right way[sic]. With tDCS they required an average of 12 trials.

"In this experiment we targeted the prefrontal cortex with individualized non-invasive stimulation montages," said Dr. Praveen Pilly, HRL's principal investigator on the study. "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. It is also the target of choice in most published behavioral enhancement studies and case studies with transcranial stimulation. We placed the tDCS electrodes on the scalp in both our control and stimulation conditions. The behavioral effect was revealed when they learned to find the reward faster."

Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation Facilitates Associative Learning and Alters Functional Connectivity in the Primate Brain (DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2017.09.020) (DX)

Previously: Cognitive Enhancement May Not be All It's Cracked Up To Be.
Zapping Your Brain may Reduce Depression, Ease Pain


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 24 2017, @09:03AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 24 2017, @09:03AM (#586782)

    If only those who fight die in war, there is too little anti-war sentiment. Killing civilians into submission was always the primary goal of all wars. Killing opponent's armed forces was just a necessary first step before civilians are reached. That's why it is laughable, yet sad, when some people comment that robotized wars will be more humane. War is killing civilians, and optionally also killing soldiers (or destroying robots), if they stand in the way and protect their civilians.

  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 24 2017, @09:57AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 24 2017, @09:57AM (#586795)

    Killing civilians into submission was always the primary goal of all wars. Killing opponent's armed forces was just a necessary first step before civilians are reached.

    Completely wrong. Why kill potential slaves and workforce? These are valuable resources.

    The Mongols and others got huge empires because they didn't kill everybody. If your city agrees to pay tribute and join the "Borg" (even supplying troops; old king same shit as the new king so might as well join the winning team) then few or even nobody dies. But if there is resistance, they torture and kill everybody in your city (maybe they leave a few alive to spread more details of what they did to other cities and towns).

    The reason why the USA's killing of civilians stuff doesn't work is because:
    1) Killing all the civilians of some random small country would make the USA lose more (trade, goodwill, etc with other countries). Nowadays the USA makes more $$$$$$ through trade than it could ever make from conquering a country. The profit from war is more from its own citizens (e.g. US taxes going to the Military Industrial Complex).

    2) If you're not able or willing to kill everybody then you have to be more careful about who you kill. Too often the USA kills enough civilians to piss off significant numbers of civilians into joining the fight against the USA. So they keep making more enemies than they kill.

    But creating messes is often part of the plan. For example the USA didn't want to destroy the ISIS, but just contain them. The ISIS was a convenient bunch to help the USA's real intention to overthrow/destroy Syria.

    • (Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday October 24 2017, @06:04PM (1 child)

      by DeathMonkey (1380) on Tuesday October 24 2017, @06:04PM (#586970) Journal

      The reason why the USA's killing of civilians stuff doesn't work is because:

      Let's not listen!

      Trump has already killed more civilians than Obama [newsweek.com]

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 24 2017, @06:38PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 24 2017, @06:38PM (#586989)

        Harry Truman had over 150,000 civilians[1] murdered in the span of 3 days in acts which top brass have said were militarily unnecessary.

        [1] ...with a third of those being children.

        In his "Untold History of the United States", Oliver Stone uses some very unkind words to describe that guy, pointing out that Truman was a war criminal and a monster. [google.com]

        -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]