I'm not sure that this deserves a thread all of its own.
There's an article in this week's New Scientist: Marathon mind:
How brain training could smash world records (note that link won't show the whole artice).
It talks about various studies into how the brain controls the limits of endurance - be it a subconscious control to protect organs from damage, or a conscious link.
What's interesting is this bit, that investigates possible ways of cutting off the "stop" signals from the conscious brain.
Even so, some of the world’s leading elite endurance sports teams have begun to test a more direct way to alter perception of effort: zapping the brain with electricity.
The Red Bull High Performance team, for instance, is working with neuroscientists from Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City and Pepperdine University in Malibu, California, to see how its athletes respond to transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS), where a weak electrical current is applied to the brain. Team Sky, the all-conquering British cycling outfit, is also reported to be exploring the technique’s potential.
[...]
So can brain stimulation really help elite marathon runners shave 177 seconds off the record? Holden MacRae, a sports scientist at Pepperdine who led the Red Bull project, thinks so. “Potentially, manipulating the brain via tDCS could lead to that level of performance with the right athlete in optimal conditions and on a fast course,” he says. “Ethically, though, would tDCS be any different to performance enhancing drugs?” That is a debate for another day, even if that day might arrive sooner than you think.
Using brain manipulation to override mental safety mechanisms would seem to me to be highly unethical. Tom Simpson springs to mind.
