An electric current applied to the brain could improve
math skills (Image: Diego Silvestre via
Flickr)
If you’re one of the many people, yours truly included, who
always found math class a bit on the difficult side then maybe
all you needed was a jolt of electricity. Electroconvulsive
therapy (ECT) has been used as a psychiatric treatment since the
1930s and is still used today, most commonly as a treatment for
severe depression. Now researchers are reporting that applying
an electrical current to the brain could enhance a person’s
mathematical performance for up to six months without impacting
their other cognitive functions.
The researchers from the University of Oxford aren’t
suggesting electric shocks for anyone about to sit their math
exams but say the findings could lead to treatments for the
estimated 20 percent of people with moderate to severe numerical
disabilities. This includes sufferers of
dyscalculia, or those who lose their number skills as a
result of stroke or degenerative disease.
"We've shown before that we can temporarily induce
dyscalculia [with another method of brain stimulation], and now
it seems we might also be able to make someone better at math.
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 maths," said
Roi Cohen Kadosh, Wellcome Research Career Development
Fellow at Oxford’s Department of Experimental Psychology.
Using a noninvasive method of brain stimulation known as
transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), whereby a weak
current is applied to the brain constantly over time to enhance
or reduce neuron activity, the researchers targeted the parietal
lobe – a region of the brain crucial for numerical
understanding.
The study participants, who had normal mathematical
abilities, were asked to learn a series of artificial numbers –
symbols they had never seen before that they were told
represented numbers. The researchers then used standard testing
methods for numerical competence to test the participants’
ability to automatically process the relationship of those
artificial numbers to one another and to map them correctly in
space.
The results showed that the TDSC treatment improved the
participants’ ability to learn the new numbers, with the
improvements lasting six months after the treatment.
Now they’ve shown that the TDSC treatment can improve the
number processing abilities of people with normal mathematical
ability, the researchers plan to test it on people with severe
numerical disabilities.
While we may not see students strapping on electrodes as part
of their math course, the research could have important
consequences for people who, according to Cohen Kadosh, often
cannot manage basic tasks like understanding food labels or
counting change in a supermarket. Poor numerical ability has
also been linked to unemployment and low income, depression, low
self-esteem, and other problems, he said.
The University
of Oxford team’s research is detailed online in the journal
Current Biology.
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