Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

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

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (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]