Strap on This Electrode Cap and Master a New Skill
Imagine being able to more quickly acquire new skills through neurostimulation of your brain. The team at HRL Laboratories in Malibu, California, are working on it, and PC Magazine stopped by for a visit.
HRL started out as Hughes Research Laboratories in 1948, when Howard Hughes, the U.S. business tycoon and aerospace pioneer, wanted a place to push the frontiers of science. By 1960, the lab had delivered the world’s first laser, among other things, and in 1984, its Artificial Intelligence Center created software for DARPA’s autonomous navigation systems, the precursor of today’s self-driving vehicles.
Now known as HRL Laboratories and co-owned by Boeing and GM, the R&D lab holds over 1,000 patents, does work for governments and major corporations, and is a leader in many fields including intelligent systems, object detection, applied electromagnetics, sensors and materials, information and systems sciences, and microelectronics.
It’s a world away from Silicon Valley or the academic labs of Ivy League universities. It also looks like something out of a 1960s James Bond movie — positioned high above the Pacific Ocean, seemingly carved out of the canyon itself, all vast windows, lush green plants, and elegant leather chairs grouped around smoked glass tables — with the smart PhDs who work there as modern-day Q types.
Which brings us to Dr. Matthew Phillips, who came to HRL from Yale as a postdoctoral research scientist four years ago to work on transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS)—the ability to improve the acquisition and retention of new skills. How? Flight simulators, to start.
Expert pilots don’t have to think about the task at hand. It’s become ingrained through years and years of practice, so those pathways and connections in the brain are automated and well-established. In a study, Phillips compared expert and novice pilots, both of whom performed the same flight maneuvers in the simulator, including a hair-raising steep glide slope indicator.
“The theory behind neurostimulation is that when it is applied you’re increasing a process called neuroplasticity, which is the mechanism by which new connections can form and change as you learn new motor and cognitive programs,” Phillips explained.
As the expert test subjects flew the virtual craft, their brain waves were recorded, observed, and analyzed via six electrodes on a cap, so an “ideal” (known as a montage) could be modeled. That was then applied to novices via electrical impulses (the tDCS) as they learned to do the same flight maneuvers so they might acquire the skills more swiftly and with deep lasting effect.
Specifically, Phillips focused on “the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is involved in reasoning, and the motor cortex involved in making complex motor sequences” in the expert pilots.
Why did he choose pilots as a test case for his research?
“We wanted to push the limits of the idea that brain stimulation could facilitate learning of complex skills in real-world environments,” he explained. “The sort which would take an individual months, if not years, to perfect. Pilot training was something that appealed to us because we could set it up and control it in a laboratory environment, it was measurable, and we could quantify the results, and it has real-world application.”
The first part of Phillips’s research was released in February, and the next set will be released this summer, when HRL publishes 3D imagery of the expert brain patterns and compares them to those of the novices, examining the effects and results of neurostimulation on both sets and charting improvements in performance over time.
Future applications could include further personalization, looking at an individual’s specific alpha and theta brainwaves, which indicate how hard a subject is focusing on the task at hand.
“We could then use that data as predictive of certain learning behaviors,” said Phillips, “and start to target neurostimulation that will be most effective for that specific person, based on their individual brain oscillations. For example, with people who show elite physical or cognitive performance, what would it take to improve them by just 1 percent? That would be huge in someone who already possesses highly advanced skills.”
HRL, for now, is staying mum on commercial applications. “There’s a lot of interest from governmental organizations and external companies in how our research could translate to other sectors,” confirmed Phillips. “But we don’t have any names that we could mention right now.”
But you can already imagine its applications for elite training in military and espionage skills acquisition. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, will be preceded by putting on an electrode-studded cap studded and having your brain scanned.
It was the opportunity to create real-world applications of the neuroscience he’d studied that brought Phillips to HRL. “In graduate school, I studied with Professor Gordon Shepherd, who is a real sage in this field. He wrote the important book, The Synaptic Organization of the Brain, which blew my mind, in terms of what was known and, at the time, what was still unknown in the arena of neuroscience. I decided to do a rotation in his lab and worked on computational models, optical imaging, behavior and genetics, a real range of projects, to get the repertoire of the modern neuroscientist.”
Ultimately, however, Phillips “wanted to manifest the research into projects that directly impact people’s lives,” which is how he ended up at HRL.
Read more: “This Is Your Brain(waves) on Technology”
This story originally appeared on PCMag.com.
