A new study says taking some electricity to the head, may help you ace that calculus final, according to CBS News.
According to the study, electrical stimulation to the brain—which did not include pain or feeling—allowed study participants to solve problems faster than those who did not receive the shocks. In addition, the effects also seemed to have a long-term effect.
"With just five days of cognitive training and noninvasive, painless brain stimulation, we were able to bring about long-lasting improvements in cognitive and brain functions," says Roi Cohen Kadosh of the University of Oxford, the study’s author, in a statement.
According to the statement, the brain boost received from the electricity lasted for about half a year.
The new method of providing the electrical pulses is called transcranial random noise stimulation or TRNS. The researchers used this method on the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain responsible for doing arithmetic. 25 students were divided into two groups. One received the TRNS and one received a “sham” stimulation.
The problems were similar to: 32-17+5 = 20.
The TRNS subjects were trained for five days and showed better speed and memory recall than the sham subjects. (The follow up study to see the durability of the improvements only included 12 of the participants, six from each group.)
"Such findings have significant implications for basic and translational neuroscience, highlighting TRNS as a viable approach to enhancing learning," the researchers wrote.
"Electrical stimulation will most likely not turn you into Albert Einstein, but if we're successful, it might be able to help some people to cope better with math," Cohen Kadosh said in 2010 when his team did a study showing that electrical stimulation could help students better remember symbols they had never previously seen.
Dr. Daniel Ansari, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, said that while the findings were interesting, "The training used here is highly contrived and does not resemble the way in which math skills are typically acquired."
Dr. Colleen Loo, a professor of psychiatry at the University of New South Wales in Australia, is not sure the technology will be used in abundance.
"If the electrodes are not correctly applied, it could cause scalp burns," Loo said. "Also, the exact placement of the positive and negative electrodes is essential, otherwise you could create quite different brain effects, including negative effects. There is still a lot more we need to know about this technology."
The study was published in Current Biology on May 16.
