14 DAY TRIAL // Mathematics isn't exactly people friendly, which is why the news that zapping the brain might help a person understand it better and faster is bound to make some heads turn.
Cognitive neuroscientist Roi Cohen Kadosh of the University of Oxford, UK and his fellow researchers have recently carried out a series of experiments aimed at testing the effect of electrical stimulation on an individual's mathematical abilities.
The electrical stimulation used to boost the math abilities of the people who agreed to take part in this research is known as transcranial random noise stimulation (TRNS, for short).
Nature explains that this technique basically comes down to the researchers' zapping the brains of the volunteers in random pulses, thus activating neurons located in multiple areas of the brain.
The volunteers who were exposed to such random pulses for five consecutive days displayed a significant improvement in their mathematical cognition.
More precisely, it appears that they learned roughly 2-5 times faster than those whose brains had not been stimulated in this manner.
As well as this, the researchers say that, six months after their being zapped, they still showed signs of being better at math than they normally would have been.
“Five consecutive days of TRNS-accompanied cognitive training enhanced the speed of both calculation- and memory-recall-based arithmetic learning,” the researchers write in their paper.
“Testing 6 months after training revealed long-lasting behavioral and physiological modifications in the stimulated group relative to sham controls for trained and nontrained calculation material,” they further detail.
Following their carrying out this series of experiments, the researchers concluded that TRNS could prove an efficient means of boosting both cognitive and brain functions.
As they put it, “These results demonstrate that, depending on the learning regime, TRNS can induce long-term enhancement of cognitive and brain functions.”
A detailed account of this research and its findings is made available to the public in the scientific journal Current Biology.