“Struggling with math little johnny?” fear no more… a quick zap and you’ll soon get the hang of E=mc2. This news release gives me the’ heeby jebbies’.
On Thursday British researchers reported :
Applying a mild electrical current to a particular part of the brain could improve mathematical abilities in people who suffer impaired skills or in patients who have suffered strokes or other neurological problems.
The weak current apparently allows neurons to fire more freely, stimulating the ability to learn, the researchers reported in the journal Current Biology. Reversing the flow of the current made it more difficult for neurons to fire, impairing learning ability.
In the new study 15 student volunteers, aged 20-21, were taught symbols that represented different numerical values, and then timed to see how quickly and accurately they could complete a series of mathematical puzzles based on those symbols. Volunteers were given either a placebo or low (1mA) electrical stimuli that ran from right to left, or vice versa, across the parietal lobe – an area of the brain that is crucial for processing mathematical problems.
Those who received stimulation from the right to the left parietal lobe reached a high level of performance in these tasks after a few sessions, whereas those with stimulation from the left to the right parietal lobes significantly underperformed, mirroring the behaviour of 6 year-old children. The placebo group’s results fell somewhere between those of the two groups receiving stimulation. Control tests showed that the effect was specific to the learned symbols and did not affect other cognitive functions.
The tests used included the Stroop test (often used with colours where red is written in green ink for example; here larger values were displayed by smaller images and vice versa) and a mapping test (where the image of a value had to be correctly positioned between two others, similar to accurately placing a 5 halfway between a 1 and a 9 on a line). These are standard tests for assessing mathematical abilities and people with numerical disabilities, or children, consistently achieve low scores on these tests.
In both tasks those given the stimulation from right to left parietal lobes performed best. This group was re-tested six months after having been trained and were found to have maintained a high level of performance.
‘This is the first study from a large scale project funded by the Wellcome Trust that aims to provide ways to improve mathematical abilities in those with learning difficulties,’ said Dr Cohen Kadosh of Oxford University’s Department of Experimental Psychology, who is leading the research. ‘We are not advising people to go around giving themselves electric shocks, but we are extremely excited by the potential of our findings and are now looking into the underlying brain changes.’
Dr Cohen Kadosh added: ‘We’ve shown before that we can induce dyscalculia, and now it seems we might be able to make someone better at maths, so we really want to see if we can help people with dyscalculia, with a possible benefit to the general public. Electrical stimulation is unlikely to turn you into the next Einstein, but if we’re lucky it might be able to help some people to cope better with maths.’
Source: Oxford University
