By the middle of the next decade, soldiers will be working with technology so closely that they will seem to be a single system, says Javier Garcia, a neuroscientist at Army Research Laboratory (ARL) in Adelphi, Maryland. To achieve such seamless integration, artificial intelligence agents must understand and predict what humans are doing, then react accordingly. To enable that to happen, Garcia is shooting magnetic pulses into brains.
Those magnetic pulses target a specific part of the brain and mimic stroke damage there. By observing how the brain recovers, Garcia can learn rules that govern how it reroutes information around compromised areas. AI agents that understand those rerouting rules might be able to work around these problems as they arise.
By comparing how well the subjects did on subsequent runs of [a] tracking task, the researchers could visualize how the brain quickly learned to compensate for the simulated damage. The networks returned to normal in about 15 minutes, the team reported last year in the journal Scientific Reports.
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“This shows us the resilience of the brain,” Garcia says. “And maybe it’s something that can be harnessed to maintain or increase the performance of an individual.”
