The brain without self-doubt
U.S. military researchers have had great success using "transcranial direct current stimulation" in which they hook you up to what's essentially a 9-volt battery and let the current flow through your brain. After a few years of lab testing, they've found that [this technology] can more than double the rate at which people learn a wide range of tasks, such as object recognition, math skills, and marksmanship.
To make you understand, I am going to tell you how it felt. The experience wasn't simply about the easy pleasure of undeserved expertise. For me, it was a near-spiritual experience.
[First I did] accelerated marksmanship training, using a training simulation that the military uses. I spent a few hours learning how to shoot a modified assault rifle. It’s the very simulation that trains US troops to take their first steps with a rifle, and everything about it has been engineered to feel like an overpowering assault.
I’m close to tears behind my thin cover of sandbags as 20 screaming, masked men run towards me at full speed, strapped into suicide bomb vests and clutching rifles. For every one I manage to shoot dead, three new assailants pop up from nowhere. I’m clearly not shooting fast enough, and panic and incompetence are making me continually jam my rifle.
I was terrible, and when you're terrible at something, all you can do is obsess about how terrible you are. And how much you want to stop doing the thing you are terrible at. In fact, I’m so demoralised that I’m tempted to put down the rifle and leave.
[Then] a nice neuroscientist named Michael put the electrodes on me.
…What defined the experience was not feeling smarter or learning faster: The thing that made the earth drop out from under my feet was that for the first time in my life, everything in my head finally shut up.
My brain without self-doubt was a revelation. There was suddenly this incredible silence in my head. With the electrodes on, my constant self-criticism virtually disappeared, I hit every one of the targets.
I hope you can sympathize with me when I tell you that the thing I wanted most acutely for the weeks following my experience was to go back and strap on those electrodes.
I also started to have a lot of questions.
An invisible narrative informs all my waking decisions in ways I can't even keep track of. Who was I apart from the angry bitter gnomes that populate my mind and drive me to failure because I'm too scared to try? And where did those voices come from? Some of them are personal history… Some of them are societal …
What role do doubt and fear play in our lives if their eradication actually causes so many improvements? Do we make more ethical decisions when we listen to our inner voices of self-doubt or when we're freed from them?