neural stimulation

Highly Effective Seasickness Treatment On The Horizon, Imperial College London Study

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Highly Effective Seasickness Treatment On The Horizon

The misery of motion sickness could be ended within five to ten years thanks to a new treatment being developed by scientists.

The cause of motion sickness is still a mystery but a popular theory among scientists says it is to do with confusing messages received by our brains from both our ears and eyes, when we are moving.

It is a very common complaint and has the potential to affect all of us, meaning we get a bit queasy on boats or rollercoasters. However, around three in ten people experience hard-to-bear motion sickness symptoms, such as dizziness, severe nausea, cold sweats, and more.

Research from Imperial College London, published today (4 September) in the journal Neurology, shows that a mild electrical current applied to the scalp can dampen responses in an area of the brain that is responsible for processing motion signals. Doing this helps the brain reduce the impact of the confusing inputs it is receiving and so prevents the problem that causes the symptoms of motion sickness.

 

Link to article on BioSpace

Electrical brain stimulation beats caffeine – and the effect lasts longer

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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.

 

Full story at The Guardian