What if low-current electrical brain stimulation could be used to accelerate learning and dramatically reduce training time and costs? The Biological Technologies Office (BTO) of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded HRL Laboratories, LLC, funding for a two-year project in the RAM Replay program to develop a man-portable system to boost learning during waking and memory consolidation during sleep, thereby increasing a person’s ability to quickly integrate and accurately recall information.
According to Dr. Praveen Pilly, project leader and research staff member in HRL’s Center for Neural and Emergent Systems, the team will be the first to employ next-generation electrode-embedded head caps to apply high-definition transcranial current stimulation (HD-tCS) in order to tag specific memories and skills during learning, and to increase the probability of reactivating those neural representations during sleep for improved consolidation. “We’ll develop a first-of-its-kind cognitive model of memory replays during sleep/wake stages to predict task performance that can be personalized to control the stimulation intervention for each user,” said Pilly.
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