The United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has launched a new program to explore using peripheral nerve stimulation to enhance learning processes in the brain.

If that doesn’t make an awful lot of sense to you, more simply put, DARPA is researching body hacking as a way to improve cognitive learning skills in the brain.

DARPA believes it may be possible to harness a body’s peripheral nerves to facilitate learning through Targeted Neuroplasticity Training (TNT), a method that seeks to advance the pace and effectiveness of cognitive skills training through the precise activation of peripheral nerves that can, in turn, promote and strengthen neuronal connections in the brain.

The TNT program will pursue development of a platform that is able to enhance learning of a wide range of cognitive skills with the ultimate goal of reducing the cost and duration of the Defense Department’s extensive training regimen, while improving outcomes; in short, they believe if the program is successful it will make training foreign language specialists, intelligence analysts, cryptographers, and other Defense Department employees easier and quicker as they will obtain advanced learning skills.

In their own words: “The program is also notable because, unlike many of DARPA’s previous neuroscience and neurotechnology endeavors, it will aim not just to restore lost function but to advance capabilities beyond normal levels.”

“Recent research has shown that stimulation of certain peripheral nerves, easily and painlessly achieved through the skin, can activate regions of the brain involved with learning,” said TNT Program Manager Doug Weber said in a statement. “This natural process of synaptic plasticity is pivotal for learning, but much is unknown about the physiological mechanisms that link peripheral nerve stimulation to improved plasticity and learning.”

“You can think of peripheral nerve stimulation as a way to reopen the so-called ‘Critical Period’ when the brain is more facile and adaptive. TNT technology will be designed to safely and precisely modulate peripheral nerves to control plasticity at optimal points in the learning process.”

The future

On the surface, the program itself sounds like the stuff of science fiction, but with advances in scientific knowledge, in part facilitated by the sharing of knowledge over the internet (which DARPA invented), the idea that a body could be hacked to enhance its ability to learn isn’t really that far-fetched.

Tools to enhance cognitive learning skills through training already exist, and are applied regularly in medicine, but DARPA’s approach is novel in that it seeks to reinforce new connections via external stimuli instead of repetition and practice, in theory quickening the brain’s ability to absorb new information; Weber says this is a way of re-opening the “critical period” of the brain, which is the time when the brain is most ready to learn.

There is no timetable on how long DARPA will be researching TNT but given its funding and previous history the research into TNT may go on for many years to come.

Image credit: hey__paul/Flickr/CC by 2.0