prefrontal cortex

人間の頭に電極の刺激を与えると学習効率が向上するという記事です。一昔前はこのような行為は脳に悪影響を及ぼすと考えられてきましたが，研究が進むと反対の意見が出てきました。アメリカの空軍基地では実際にスクリーンを用いて人体実験を行っております。この記事で気になった単語は" prefrontal cortex"です。Weblioで調べると「前頭前野皮質」という意味がありました。SFのような話だと思いました。（Ume）

Brain stimulation: The military’s mind-zapping project

That’s why airmen are being tested today, watching for planes on a screen. The task obviously involves decision making, but it also has a physical ‘motor’ component: you must press the buttons in the correct sequence, and you must do this quickly, to get a good score. After a while, this kind of task becomes pretty automatic. “If you imagine learning to ride a bike or a manual vehicle, your process is very conscious at first because you’re thinking about all the steps. But as you do it more often, it becomes more and more unconscious,” McKinley says. “We wanted to see if we could accelerate that transition with tDCS.”

Brain imaging suggested that the best way to do this would be to stimulate the motor cortex while the volunteer was doing the task. But McKinley and his team added a twist: after the stimulation, they use tDCS in reverse to inhibit the volunteers’ prefrontal cortex, which is involved in conscious thinking. The day after the stimulation, the volunteers are brought back for re-testing. “The results we’re getting are fantastic,” McKinley says. People getting a hit of both mid-test and inhibitory stimulation did 250% better in their retests, far outperforming those who had received neither. Used in this way, it seems that tDCS can turbo-boost the time it takes for someone to go from being a novice at a task to being an expert.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140603-brain-zapping-the-future-of-war