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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


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0, Offtopic) by Paradise Pete on Tuesday October 24 2017, @11:00AM (3 children)

    by Paradise Pete (1806) on Tuesday October 24 2017, @11:00AM (#586798)

    Dude, please. Is there anything you can do to fix the font you use?

    He's doing that intentionally by the use of the <tt> (teletype text) tag. It's rather annoying.

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Tuesday October 24 2017, @11:16AM (2 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Tuesday October 24 2017, @11:16AM (#586800) Journal

    Change theme to VT100 (best theme) and everyone shows up as monospaced.

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    • (Score: 2) by DECbot on Tuesday October 24 2017, @02:27PM (1 child)

      by DECbot (832) on Tuesday October 24 2017, @02:27PM (#586868) Journal

      I was wondering why I didn't see what the GP post was talking about.

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      • (Score: 1) by Arik on Tuesday October 24 2017, @05:18PM

        by Arik (4543) on Tuesday October 24 2017, @05:18PM (#586950) Journal
        I also use VT-100 theme. In addition, only monospaced fonts are available in my browser. So that's what I see even when the theme engine on the server dies.

        I was originally neutral on mangled fonts (not sure why you want them but you do so sure, have fun) but I've come to see them as perverse and destructive. Text has one job; to transmit information. Reducing readability in the name of fashion is poor practice, and if you think you want it you should probably re-examine your premises.
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