The new Pentagon effort is described as one of the most in-depth studies of electric stimulation on healthy individuals.
Specialists call the two different techniques being studied transcranial magnetic stimulation and transcranial direct current stimulation.
The first has been more widely used in the medical community and relies on a magnetic field to pass the electrical current into the brain. The second technique passes electrical current directly into the brain. For example, in one of the tests, one milliampere is applied for 10 minutes; by comparison, the amount of electrical current needed to power a car’s instrument panel is on average about 150 milliamperes.
The Pentagon research is focused on two primary goals: increasing alertness and improving overall cognitive performance.
Monitoring intense streams of data can quickly become so repetitive — especially when there is no action — that attentiveness and recognition can deteriorate in as little as 20 minutes. And troops responsible for analyzing computer images for intelligence information — unlike some pilots or other front-line personnel — are not eligible for prescribed drugs that might help.
“Fatigue is one of the major factors our active duty military endure every day,” said Justin Nelson, one of the project’s researchers.
After undergoing the brain stimulation, however, the test subjects proved alert at the end of the test periods — some up to several hours — “just like they were at minute one,” said McKinley.
According to Lindsey McIntire, another one of the researchers, the brain stimulation demonstrated significantly better results than caffeine “and without the side effects,” such as jitters, elevated heart rates, and the propensity for a person to “crash” when the caffeine wears off.
In one scenario, the test subjects — some who received caffeine, some brain stimulation, and the rest nothing — were kept awake for a full 30 hours to see who would measure best in wakefulness and vigor.
“I wasn’t sure what to expect,” said Staff Sergeant William Raybon, one of the participants. “When I was initially hooked up to the electrodes there was a small tingling sensation.
But he said that despite being so sleep-deprived, he felt “refreshed” after undergoing the treatment.
Subjects such as Raybon who received the brain stimulation “performed about twice as well as people who got nothing,” said McKinley.
As for those who were given coffee?
“Caffeine had tanked at this point,” said McIntire.
Another aspect of the military research is whether the treatments can make troops better thinkers.
In one such test, subjects were required to follow a series of procedures to identify on screen an aircraft entering friendly airspace.
The study, which also relied on control groups that drank coffee or nothing at all, found that those who did not receive one of several types of brain stimulation “performed significantly worse than any of the stimulation groups,” according to the findings.
The Air Force Research Laboratory has conducted five separate studies, each costing about $200,000, shared by the Air Force, Army, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
“We are beyond the proof-of-concept phase,” McKinley said. “We are working on something that would be easy to apply that you could potentially field.”
But some specialists such as Killgore aren’t so sure that the science is quite there yet to use on healthy subjects regularly, especially direct currents of electricity, which he said relies on “much newer technology than the other ones.”
McKinley, too, acknowledged that there are still many questions to be answered, especially concerning any long-term effects.
“As far as using it every day, there is almost no data on that,” he said. The Ohio laboratory is “ramping up a study to do that very thing.”
