DARPA has unveiled a thinking cap shown to boost brain learning capacity by 40

in transhumanism •  7 years ago 

TDCS administration
By Yokoi and Sumiyoshi. 2015 [CC BY 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

In a new article we see DARPA has made a lot of progress on their neural enhancement effort. A non invasive "thinking cap" has been tested on monkeys and shown to work. This technology is known to biohackers and transhumanists as tDSC.

The device is a non-invasive cap that stimulates parts of the brain via electrical currents. It was developed by researchers at HRL Laboratories, California, McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and Soterix Medical in New York.

The findings, published in the journal Current Biology, showed that macaques in the control group took 22 trials before they had learned to get the reward straight away. It took the tDCS group just 12 trials. The tDCS device accounted for a 40 percent increase in learning speed, the authors say.

The technology behind this thinking cap known as tDSC (transcranial direct-current stimulation) is something anyone can experiment with as you can buy these devices. Putting this cap on your head effectively makes you a cyborg and is a defining function of transhumanism. It is also shown that tDSC can give some strange religious out of body experiences, highs similar to being on drugs, or the brain patterns of a psychopath. What is clear is that in this latest study for perhaps the first time they cracked the secret on how to use this technology to improve the ability to learn. A 40% increase is not only statistically significant but is a dramatic increase at that and worth many more studies. It may be worth it for programmers and intellectuals to build or buy a thinking cap just to find out if it helps.

References

  1. http://www.newsweek.com/darpa-device-boosts-learning-brain-connections-692693
  2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_direct-current_stimulation
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wow scary stuff the effects of this could be very detrimental to our health not to mention society. I am very unsure about its place in society. I sure it has been used by the military for years as this is normally the case before anything come into the mainstream, just makes you wonder where this is going. The silicone age might be upon us .... Not a nice thought

well braindead people are as good as robots, hopefully it won't be back doored usurped and used for brain control :D which coming from the military is a sound conspiracy theory :D

Hopefully the braindead will start waking up before this gets used on them then hey :)

Funny, I read about something similar athletes used for improving their results in practice, I think they stimulated the brain and then trained, kind of like taking a meditation pill :D or listening to good music before doing whatever ..

AI will never think like humans, its a binary system... logic will never equal to awareness

on top of that many people are completely clueless about what is going on in the world, so 40% increase of what... ignorance?

darpa that 5000% :D

the human brain is the most complex and the most puzzling thing that science hasnt been able to crack , we try everyday to learn more about it and how to make a replica of it, science has for a long time tried to copy and remake using AI the human brain, with tDCS they have have found a way to stimulate the brain to fire faster and learn even faster, this is great progress

well... seems nice but I was mainly referring to the origins of AI, which are from outer space... see my latest blog. Most people have no idea what they are really supporting... sighhhh

that's pretty impressive

I have to read a bit about it, good to have the links backing it, I read the same thing the other day and I've been watching a lot of ted's and such on the topic of brains and biohacking for instance, as far as I know it's good, but you can do better on your own.

I think I need that cap

I think I need that cap

The future is here, my head's reeling from a thousand ideas of what I could use this innovation for... This is real nice....

use your head, so many apps :D just learn to use the framework, learn what it does and use it.

seriously I find it daunting to see people looking for extra additions, you can do all that on your own, you can get up to 500% better, who knows, maybe more .. practice practice, but conscious practice makes perfect :)