While it sounds high-tech, it’s a crude example of what’s possible with future brain-machine interaction and cybernetic implants in the decades ahead.

“DARPA is looking for ways to characterize which regions come into play for different conditions – measured from brain networks down to the single neuron level – and develop therapeutic devices that can record activity, deliver targeted stimulation, and most importantly, automatically adjust therapy as the brain itself changes,” DARPA program manager Justin Sanchez said.

SUBNETs isn’t the only military research initiative aimed at stimulating the brain with electricity. The Air Force has been studying the effects of low amounts of electricity on the brain by using a non-invasive interface (a cap that doesn’t penetrate into the skull.) The objective is to deliver a caffeine-like boost to help soldiers stay alert through long stretches of piloting or screen interaction. The current DARPA project stands out as uniquely ambitious in what it promises to reveal about the brain, in addition to stimulating it.

While neuroscientists are getting much better at using, understanding and harnessing the big electrical signals that emerge from the brain’s motor cortex, research that is rapidly contributing to much better prosthetic arms, they still don’t have a clear understanding of the way brain regions work in mood disorders associated with PTSD. We do know that anxiety ailments involve a delicate interplay of memory (in the physical form of synaptic connections) and stimuli and manifest across multiple brain areas. Furthermore, these responses and interactions can change as the very malleable brain itself adapts in unpredictable ways.

“Little is understood of how the brain’s neural circuitry relates to anxiety and other neuropsychiatric disorders. This project will seek to markedly improve that understanding by obtaining maps of the brain’s electrical activity at higher resolution than has been previously possible. The ultimate impact on the treatment of major depression, anxiety disorders, and other conditions remains to be seen, but a more clear understanding of the basis of these disorders is badly needed,” Edward Chang, a neuroscientist at the University of California at San Francisco told Defense One.

The device would record what happens when a subject transitions into a state of anxiousness or depression from a more normal frame of mind. Today, observing brain activity that fine requires a bulky brain-monitoring system like the moderately inconvenient but rather imprecise EEG cap to the much more robust magnetoencephalograph, MEG, which can take very detailed readings of magnetic brain activity millisecond by millisecond. But commonly available MEGreaders are enormous, require several gallons of liquid nitrogen to stay cool and can cost around $4 million.