Half an hour of brain stimulation on sleep-deprived military staff improved their performance twice as much as caffeine
Researchers in the US have used electrical brain stimulation to boost the vigilance of sleep-deprived military personnel working on an airforce base.
Experiments on 18 to 42-year old men and women on active duty found that half an hour of electrical brain stimulation improved their performance twice as much as caffeine, and the effect lasted three times as long.
Scientists at the Air Force Research Laboratory in New Carlisle, Ohio, are exploring the potential of brain stimulation to help analysts who spend hours poring over images to identify military targets.
“In the air force we do a lot of intelligence missions and we have a lot of analysts on the back end who are looking for targets, which can be vehicles, buildings or whatever,” said Andy McKinley, who led the research with Lindsey McIntire, a psychologist at Infoscitex, a technology company in Dayton.
“This type of image analysis task is not well suited to automation. There’s no computer algorithm that can go in and autoselect targets for you, it’s a human endeavour. If we can help people pay attention for long periods of times, that‘s really important,” he added.