“brain fitness training program” that sailors can use to sharpen their cognitive skills. It’s got to work on an “ultramobile platform” like an iPhone or a netbook. According to a solicitation released yesterday, the Navy wants it to produce measurable improvements in “working memory, attention, language processing, and decision making,” not just in “new recruits” but aging captains, admirals and senior enlisteds. Think of it like a souped-up adult education app. With something of a twist.

Any business that wants the Navy’s cash must demonstrate that its learning program will actually change sailors’ brains.. Among other criteria, pilot programs have to actually “quantify brain tissue growth.” Not to be overly literal, but some recent neuroscientific studies posit that adult brain cells expand and contract in response to stimuli, a process known as neuroplasticity. What “growth” in this context actually means is a faster brain, where synapses fire electrical impulses more rapidly in response to stimuli. That’s what the Navy wants to witness.

But it’s far from clear how it would work. Presumably, the Navy wouldn’t perform biopsies on its sailors to see study expanded brain functions. The solicitation just says generically that the “cognitive gym” should “remotely monitor” sailors’ progress. Sure, brain scans, like functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, can “empirically quantify brain growth,” but until there’s an app for that, maybe the Navy will be stuck with good old-fashioned quiz results.

Helping troops recover from traumatic brain injury, the signature wound of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, is only one application of the envisioned program. In fact, the solicitation treats it as an afterthought, tucked away in a parenthetical aside. What the Navy really wants is sharper sailors.

And if anything, the Navy’s late to the mind-manipulation party. In 2008, the Air Force flirted with hooking up airmen’s brains to pilotless drones. Earlier this year, the Pentagon put out a bid for a training program that monitored troops’ brain and heart rates to see how they instantly reacted to wartime stresses like inadvertently offending a tribal leader. And the futurists at Darpa fund a project to manipulate troops’ brains remotely through microscopic devices placed in their helmets. Someday, there’ll even be brain prostheses to help troops’ heal from head trauma.

Image: Wikimedia

See Also:

• Pentagon Turns to Brain Implants to Repair Damaged Minds
• Darpa: Freeze Soldiers to Save Injured Brains
• Darpa: Heat + Energy = Brains. Now Make Us Some.
• Darpa Wants Remote Controls to Master Troop Minds

Authors: Spencer Ackerman

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