Decoding SEAL Team Six’s Brain Stimulator

Imagine a device as compact as a pair of Beats headphones that could increase your ability to run, jump and pivot, all by stimulating your brain using electricity. Far from science fiction, groups as varied as the NBA’s Golden State Warriors to the government’s SEAL Team Six are adopting such technology to improve physical training.

One device at the forefront of this new wave of triggered physical enhancement, or transcranial direct current stimulation (TDCS), is called Halo Sport, developed by San Francisco’s Halo Neuroscience.

Halo Neuroscience manifested after two scientists from the medical field, Daniel Chao and Brett Wingeier, decided to take a concept they were fidgeting with—an implant that would help stop epileptic seizures by selectively stimulating parts of the brain with electricity—to the next level. Their idea was to create a device that could accelerate gains in strength, explosiveness and brain plasticity without relying on an implant.

Halo Sport, which the company sells for $749 each, rests on your head like headphones and directly on top of the brain’s primary motor cortex, which controls the planning and execution of movements. When you move almost any part of your body, the primary motor cortex is involved. Once you turn on the Sport and it warms up, soft, plastic spikes on the underside of the headband deliver slight electric charges to your skull to create a mild electrical field around your neurons. The only thing the user notices is a slight warmth.

“We wanted to make something that fits into people’s lives—that you could take out to the field, or to the gym, or take home, and people know how to use it,” says Wingeier, now the chief technology officer of Halo Neuroscience. “There are a lot of people out there who live and die by their movement performance and the quality of their training, whether its athletes or special operations teams. At its heart it’s a training tool. The benefit is your brain optimizes itself, committing things to muscle memory, whether its target shooting accuracy, motor control or even strength and explosiveness. It’s all about how your brain controls your body and fires all of these different parts and muscles at exactly the right time.”

Much like professional athletes, high-level special operations units rely on lightning-fast reactions and explosive bursts of energy.

Neuropriming isn’t magic, and isn’t as baseless as Red Bull, either. Because of how neurons are arranged in your cortex, they’re affected by electrical fields. When applied, neurons are more likely to fire. And when neurons fire together, as they do when subject to same electrical field, your brain experiences neuroplasticity. In other words, it forms new neural connections. By training during heightened states of neuroplasticity, whether it be firing a weapon or shooting a pullup jump shot, your brain can convert these movements into muscle memory quicker, making those movements, whether on a basketball court or on the battlefield, more intuitive.

According to a study Halo conducted in 2015 with the United States Ski and Snowboard Association, after four weeks of using Halo Sport, ski jumpers saw a 31 percent increase in their propulsion force and a 25 percent decrease in jump entropy, compared with a control group that didn’t use the devices. Soon enough, the effectiveness on athletes led to military interest. Much like professional athletes, high-level special operations units rely on lightning-fast reactions and explosive bursts of energy.

Enter the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental, an organization within the United States Department of Defense that focuses on adopting commercial technologies for use by the U.S. military. The organization has also been called “The Pentagon’s Innovation Experiment”. “We have Halo Sport out with multiple special ops groups across the country. They’re in the process of developing their proof points of how it works from their perspective,” says Wingeier. “They don’t want their guys to spend more time at the gym; they want them to maintain their skills more efficiently so they can spend more time working on higher-level skills: learning new languages, sleep and recovery.”

Paul Scharre, a senior fellow and director of the 20YY Future of Warfare Initiative at the Center for a New American Security, agrees there may be benefits to neuropriming. “There is clearly a demand, and the supply is lagging behind,” he says. The military benefits of such technology, according to him, fall into a few different buckets. One is increasing focus and attention during cognitive tasks. This applies not just to intel analysts, but also people operating heavy machinery like pilots, truck drivers and ship commanders.

The second is managing fatigue. When you have people operating for long periods of time with little or insufficient sleep, even a five to 10 percent improvement in combatant fatigue can allow soldiers to be more effective and give them a leg up on their opposition.

Neurological human enhancement technologies will likely soon face the same public debate anabolic steroids have encountered.

The last category of benefits is shortened training timelines. “This is a tremendous advantage in military context where obviously you’ll never have enough time for training and you’re always wanting to find ways to cram in more,” says Scharre. “If you can actually decrease training timelines—again even a modest improvement like five or 10 percent—it can be tremendously significant from a military standpoint.” As Scharre points out, even marginal advances lead to dramatic effects when the outcome equals life or death.

“We are just at the start of this. Big picture, the brain is everything,” says Wingeier. “If you are looking at learning and memory—that is all the prefrontal cortex. There is interest almost across the board for learning, memory, attention, focus. Medical applications for chronic pain and PTSD, too. This is just the tip of the iceberg.”

Even so, neuropriming and other neurological human enhancement technologies will likely soon face the same public debate anabolic steroids have encountered since emerging on the U.S. market in the 1980s to increase physical strength in sports players. (Halo Neuroscience did develop the Sport with a blessing from the Food and Drug Administration.)

“There is not really a conversation going on in the U.S. military about how to approach and use these technologies. For example, we are having a robust discussion in the defense community about the role of automation and automated weapons, but we aren’t having one about human enhancement. In the absence of that, we risk missing out on potentially significant advantages that could save soldiers lives. We also risk using this technology in ways that might not be ethical—or safe.”