Name: The Military Discovered A Way To Boost Soldiers' Memories, And We Tried It | Future You | NPR
Uploaded: 2020-01-05T15:42:11.000Z
Duration: 9 min 50 s
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Elise Hu: So just to review, if I get it it'll turn green,

and then if I miss a human subject — a human target — then it grunts.

Jones: You have to remember to press the trigger.

We are exploring the future of the human body

and what humans will be capable of in 2050.

What will it mean when we can learn faster and remember better

simply by zapping our brains a little bit?

And what if someone can overwrite your memory and manipulate what's real?

Let's find out in this episode of Future You, with me, Elise Hu.

It is nighttime and we are in the Department of Psychology at the University of New Mexico

and I'm gonna spend the night here, in this self-enclosed space, for two nights.

One night without stimulation to my brain and then the second night with

electrodes connected to my brain. And the reason why is because we're gonna see if

my memory can be improved while I'm sleeping by zapping it.

Vince Clark heads the Psychology Neuroscience Center at the University of New Mexico.

Over the past few years he and his team have tested all sorts of ways to enhance our

In a multi-year study, funded by the U.S. military's research arm DARPA, they made this stunning discovery,

if your brain gets zapped during a certain stage of sleep it boosts your

memory of the day before. How well does this work?

The researchers are letting me give it a try.

Hu: Since this was originally designed for the military the

mental task is a VR game involving shooting photos of human targets that

At first, this is a struggle, but eventually I get the hang of it.

The only way that I can even access the outside world is through this walkie-talkie.

So good night for night one. Good night for control night.

When you close your eyes at night and drift off to sleep,

your brain begins its work on memory consolidation

helps your brain encode long-term memories.

While you're sleeping, your brain reviews what happened during the day

and it stores information that you received.

The super slow oscillations in your brainwaves coordinate all this.

Researchers found if they hook up your brain, record the slow waves,

use some advanced math to extract the data,

then program a system to stimulate your brain during slow-wave sleep,

the process of storing your memories is noticeably better.

Research subjects who got stimulated at night

have better recall of what they learned the night before.

They just woke me up with a walkie-talkie.

So after the first night, I'm tested on this task to get a base of what my memory is like.

This will get compared to my stimulated brain tomorrow.

This is gonna be really quiet without the grunts.

To pass the time before night two, we took in a little Albuquerque.

The sunsets makes for memories worth boosting.

Then back in my PJs. This time, the researchers attach

electrodes to my head so they can read my brain signals while I sleep.

One more time on the VR game before an overnight memory stimulation.

The researchers have to keep the brain bonnet nice and fitted for the night

so it can correctly read when I'm in deep sleep.

Sleeping in a lab with a bunch of wires attached to my head

is rough, but once I fell into that slow-wave sleep

they stimulated my brain cells with something called tACS

— transcranial alternating-current stimulation.

The technique figures out my brain's  frequency for memory encoding,

and then feeds that same current back into my brain to enhance my memories.

Bye bonnet. This is the key VR test. After brain stimulation,

will my performance improve? Will my brain have learned something, either

explicitly or subconsciously, to make me better at recognizing targets?

Jones: So let me orient you to the graphs first.

So the figure on the left is your performance from your first day.

Hu: Before we find out, let's put our memory expert and neuroscientist, Vince Clark,

through our scenarios for how this plays out in the year 2050.

What is going to be superhuman about us if we can accelerate our learning and our memories in this way?

Vince Clark: There will be technologies that will allow you to learn things better,

store them better, recall them better later, things like that.

They already exist today. It's just a matter of making it even more effective

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The Military Discovered A Way To Boost Soldiers' Memories, And We Tried It | Future You | NPR

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