Direct brain stimulation for self improvement coming?

If this story does not end up in Jason Soon's twitter feed, I'll eat my hat.

A fascinating article in the New York Times (Jumper Cables for the Mind) indicates that there has been a lot of study on how mild (very mild) brain stimulation can help improve brain performance.

I have briefly noted such claims before, but I had no idea that it had been the subject of a lot of study.  I thought it was just the odd (possibly crankish) scientist here and there who said it seemed to work well.  But read this:

Fregni and his collaborators at Harvard have published more than 200 papers on tDCS. In 2005, he co-wrote a paper showing that stimulating the left prefrontal cortex while you are doing a particular task can enhance working memory, the ability to track and mentally manipulate multiple objects of attention. He has since tested its effects on migraine, chronic pain, post-stroke paralysis, Parkinson’s disease, depression, tinnitus, fibromyalgia, marijuana craving and, strangely enough, the tendency to lie (or, as the paper more delicately put it, “the modulation of untruthful responses”). 

The evidence, he said, is strongest for depression. Earlier this year he published a study in JAMA Psychiatry involving 120 people suffering from major depression. They received either 2 milligrams per day of the antidepressant Zoloft, 2 milliamps of tDCS, both or a placebo. After six weeks, the mood of those treated with either Zoloft or tDCS alone improved about equally well compared with those in the placebo group. “By itself, tDCS was exactly the same as Zoloft at relieving depression. But when you combine the two, you have a synergistic effect, larger than either alone. That’s how I see the effects of tDCS, enhancing something else.” 

One of the most striking examples of cognitive enhancement comes from research supported by the U.S. Air Force, showing that tDCS improves pilots’ vigilance and target detection. “The military has been looking at how to improve vigilance for the past 50 or 60 years,” said Andy McKinley, a civilian biomedical engineer who has been studying tDCS at the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. “At minimum we get a twofold improvement in how long a person can maintain performance. We’ve never seen that with anything else.”

Why isn't this better known?