Electrical Brain Stimulation may Not Help You be a Genius

Electrical stimulation of the brain's cells while solving challenging tasks can lead to mental overload far from making you smarter, warn researchers.

The researchers wanted to test whether a treatment that sends a very weak electrical current through the skull to the outer layers of the brain, so-called transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), can actually make us smarter.

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‘Mild current stimulation (tDCS) had completely overloaded a brain region crucial to performing the task, as though it crashed it.’

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The tasks for the participants were divided into three levels -- simple, medium and difficult.

The researchers found no effect of stimulation when participants performed the simple and medium tasks, yet they found a large negative effect on the most difficult tasks.

"tDCS had a disruptive effect only on the most difficult tasks that demanded a lot of concentration," said one of the lead researchers, James Roe from the University of Oslo in Norway.

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"We saw that participants experienced severe problems concentrating when the task was most difficult and the brain was being stimulated," Roe noted.

"It was as though tDCS had completely overloaded a brain region crucial to performing the task, as though it crashed it," Roe explained in a paper published in the journal Neuropsychologia.

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In recent times neuroscientists have been showing increased interest for tDCS. Many claim that the device can, among other things, help improve memory, increase self-control and make us more creative.

tDCS is already implemented in the rehabilitation of a range of psychiatric and neurological conditions, such as depression, stroke, Alzheimer's disease, fibromyalgia and tinnitus.

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While the researchers acknowledged that tDCS can indeed have a positive impact, they said the study shed light on the effects of tDCS when we solve tasks of varying difficulty.

Source-IANS