Sally, a science and tech writer, had a spiritual revelation at the oddest of places… a sniper training facility.

Stepping into a battlefield simulator, her heart raced as she found herself being attacked by 20 masked men armed with suicide vests and rifles. Every time she took out one of them, three more appeared out of nowhere.

Overwhelmed by the pressure, she struggled to eliminate them quickly enough. Panic and a sense of incompetence grew as her rifle jammed several times during the exercise. Disappointed with her performance, she yearned for another chance to prove herself.

Then everything changed in the next run of the simulator.

This time around, she was hooked to a transcranial helmet.

The helmet featured electrodes that made contact with her scalp, generating weak electromagnetic impulses that targeted specific areas of her brain. These impulses could either stimulate or inhibit cerebral activity in those designated regions.

Once she was hooked, the simulation ran again.

As the scenario unfolded, she felt only a slight tingling sensation and a metallic taste in her mouth.

Time seemed to slip away fastly. Sally barely noticed its passing and expected more terrorists to emerge. But the simulation was over and the lights came on.

The electrodes were carefully removed, and Sally, disappointed, wondered if someone had tampered with the clocks. But the truth was that she spent the same 20 minutes in both training sessions.

“How many did I get”, she asked.

“All of them”, said the training assistant.

In the following days, she realized that she had gone through an almost spiritual experience. This was the first time in her life that her mental state was completely silent. The lack of insecurity inside of her was an eye-opening revelation. She yearned in the following weeks to go back and feel those electrodes over her head. But she also started questioning who she really was, apart from those voices pushing her to fail because she was too scared to try.

And where do those voices come from anyway?

Some of those voices reflect societal biases and others are part of our personal history.

All these mold our decisions in ways we don’t understand fully (thus, psychologists will keep their jobs for a long while).

What if we could silence our internal monologues or change them entirely?

Transcranial stimulators are still in their infancy and it’s unsure if those skills are just enhanced momentarily or if these experiences like Sally’s are just rare occurrences.

But if we start seeing consistently promising results and we do get to change the electrical patterns of the brain, how will this change society?

Let’s say you want to get proficient at violin playing but every time practice time comes, you get distracted by the TV or a videogame. Don’t worry! Just put on the transcranial helmet, select the appropriate stimulation program, and we’ll get instantly excited to start our practice session.

How many times do we get distracted by both internal and external distractions and we end up doing nothing of what we intended in the first place? With the right equipment, we could silence them and focus on what we really want to achieve.

It’s crucial to ask ourselves if we are just a singular self or more than just one unified voice.

When we say “I”, there might not be a singular and clearly defined self

The undivided self is as real as Santa Claus.

This apparent internal unity is rather a group of voices in conflict, neither of which are my true self.

Let’s look at the brain.

We have two hemispheres connected between them by a thick neural cable. Every hemisphere controls the opposite side of the body. The left eye is processed and controlled in the right eye, and vice versa.

When people have injuries on one side of the brain, we see that they tend to neglect the other side of their body. So if there’s a right hemisphere injury, which controls the left side of the body, they would just brush the hair on their right side or eat from the right side of the plate (since they disregard anything in the left field of sight).

There are also emotional and mental differences between hemispheres. Usually, the left hemisphere is in charge of logical reasoning and speech, while the right hemisphere is more dominant in spatial awareness.

So when epileptic patients had their central band of fibers cut off, to avoid spreading these seizures from one side to the other, their brains got pretty wild.

A series of case studies conducted by Sperry and Gazzaniga on these patients revealed that we might have at least two consciousness inside of us. For instance, when an adolescent patient was asked what would he like to be when he grew up, he would say (left hemisphere) that he would like to be a cartoonist but his left hand (controlled by the right hemisphere) would write down car racer.

And it gets weirder.

In another series of experiments, Gazzaniga asked the patients to perform tasks using their hands or verbally respond to specific questions related to visual stimuli. For example, he might present a picture of a chicken to the patient’s right visual field and a snow scene to the left visual field. The patient would then be asked to verbally describe what they saw.

In some instances, the patient’s left hand (controlled by the right hemisphere) would perform an action that was inconsistent with the verbal response given by the patient (controlled by the left hemisphere). For instance, if the patient said they saw a chicken, their left hand might select a picture of a snow shovel. When asked why they chose the snow shovel, the patient would come up with an explanation, such as “I picked the shovel because you need it to clean the chicken coop.”

Thus the left hemisphere, responsible for language processing, not only controlled speech functions but also tried to make sense of actions and experiences that might be inconsistent or disconnected due to the split-brain condition.

Gazzaniga referred to this tendency as the left hemisphere acting as an “interpreter” to create a coherent narrative or explanation for the actions of the whole brain, including the right hemisphere.

We are at least two people inside of one.

The stories we tell ourselves

People remember and assess their experiences based on two distinctive moments: the most salient and the final part of an experience.

Daniel Kahneman and Donald Redelmeier explored this idea in the colonoscopy experiment in the mid-1990s.

In the experiment, patients undergoing colonoscopies were asked to rate their pain levels at various intervals during the procedure. These pain ratings were recorded and analyzed to understand how participants perceived and remembered their overall experience.

The researchers discovered that participants’ evaluations of the colonoscopy experience were not determined by the total pain experienced throughout the procedure. Instead, they were heavily influenced by the most intense moment of pain and the pain experienced towards the end.

Do you remember your vacations like this as well?

The takeaway

While current studies on transcranial stimulation are still in their early stages, the development of this tech could pave the way for practical applications that go beyond momentary enhancements.

Changing our brain waves can unlock the ability to silence distractions, boost focus, and achieve desired outcomes.

We could target brain regions associated with skill acquisition and motor learning and accelerate the process of acquiring new skills, whether it’s playing a musical instrument, learning a new sport, or mastering a particular craft.

Or we could enhance our memory abilities by stimulating brain areas linked to memory formation and consolidation. Students would love to get some time with such a device.

The remarkable advancements in brain stimulation techniques make us question whether we are witnessing the convergence of science and magic, blurring the line between what was once considered science fiction and the reality of our ever-evolving scientific capabilities.

As Arthur C.Clarke would say,