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The Pentagon is looking to better train its troops — by scanning their minds as they play video games. Adaptive, mind-reading computer systems have been a work-in-progress among military agencies for at least a decade. In 2000, far-out research agency Darpa launched “Augmented Cognition,” a program that sought to develop computers that used EEG scans to adjust how they displayed information — visually, orally, or otherwise — to avoid overtaxing one realm of a troop’s cognition. The Air Force also took up the idea, by trying to use EEGs to “assess the operator’s actual cognitive state”  and “avoid cognitive bottlenecks before they occur.”

Now, the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) is soliciting small business proposals for an even more immersive trainer, one that includes voice-recognition technology, and picks up on vocal tone and facial gestures. The game would then react and adapt to a war-fighter’s every action. For example, if a player’s gesture “insults the local tribal leader,” the trainee would “find that future interactions with the population are more difficult and more hostile.” And, most importantly, the new programs would react to the warrior’s own physiological and neurological cues. They’d be monitored using an EEG, eye tracking, heart and respiration rate, and other physiological markers. Based on the metrics, the game would adapt in difficulty and “keep trainees in an optimal state of learning.”

The OSD isn’t ready to use neuro-based systems in the war zone, but the agency does want to capitalize on advances in neuroscience that have assigned meaningful value to intuitive decision-making. As the OSD solicitation points out, troops often need to make fast-paced decisions in high-stress environments, with limited information and context. Well-reasoned, analytic decisions are rarely possible

Do you wonder why people don’t understand the idea you’re trying to get across in a meeting? Are you mentoring another developer and struggling to understand why the still don’t get it? Do you run training courses and wonder why the attendees only learn 10% of the material? We are all teachers whether as informal mentors, coaches, trainers or parents. Yet only professional educators receive training in this area. Nearly two years ago I started reading neuroscience (Norman Doidge’s “The Brain that Changes Itself”), for fun. Along the way I acquired an interest in neuroscience and wondered how its lessons could be applied to Agile Software Development and beyond.

Varying the types of skills you work on in practice sessions engages a different part of the brain than the one you use when focusing on a single task, researchers say. The finding explains why variable practice improves the brain's memory of most skills better than working on just one type of task, according to the research team from the University of Southern California and the University of California, Los Angeles.In their study, published online recently in Nature Neuroscience, the investigators divided 59 volunteers into different groups. Some were asked to practice a challenging arm movement, while others did the arm movement and related tasks in a variable practice structure.The participants in the variable practice group learned the arm movement better than those who practiced only the arm movement, the study authors found.Among those in the variable practice group, the process of consolidating memory of the skill engaged a part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex, which is associated with higher level planning. Among those who practiced only the arm movement, the engaged part of the brain was the primary motor cortex, which is associated with simple motor learning, the authors explained."In the variable practice structure condition, you're basically solving the motor problem anew each time. If I'm just repeating the same thing over and over again as in the constant practice condition, I don't have to process it very deeply," study senior author Carolee Winstein, a professor of biokinesiology and physical therapy at the University of Southern California, said in a university news release.

A new study published on August 26 in the journal Science explains the old adage that two heads are better than one is not always true. Professors Chris Frith of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at the University College London (UCL) and Niels Bohr at the University of Aarhus in Denmark and colleagues discovered that two heads work best when they are equals and can speak freely with one another.Bahador Bahrami, MD, researcher at UCL's Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and lead author of the study, explained, "When we are trying to solve problems, we usually put our heads together in teams, calling on each other's opinions. "For our study, we wanted to see if two people could combine information from each other in a difficult judgement task and how much this would improve their performance."Frith noted, "When two people working together can discuss their disagreements, two heads can be better than one. But, when one person is working with flawed information - or perhaps is less able at their job - then this can have a very negative effect on the outcome.

In fact, the latest findings in decision neuroscience suggest that our judgments are initiated by the unconscious weighing of emotional tags associated with our memories rather than by the conscious weighing of rational pros and cons: we start to feel something—often even before we are conscious of having thought anything. As a highly cerebral academic colleague recently commented, “I can’t see a logical flaw in what you are saying, but it gives me a queasy feeling in my stomach.”