Electric headgear enables faster learning
Researchers at the American Vanderbilt University have been able to increase the learning capacity of test subjects by means of small electrical voltages. After 20 minutes of exposure to electrical stimuli, subjects performed better for 5 hours.
Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee publishes the findings on its official website and in the science journal The Journal of Neuroscience. Cognitive scientists Robert Reinhart and Geoffrey Woodman already knew that milliseconds after a person makes a mistake, a small negative charge passes through the brain from the medial prefrontal cortex. The purpose of this has not yet been demonstrated, but the hypothesis of the two gentlemen is that this charge improves the reaction to errors and that this charge can also be supplied from outside.
The subjects were attached to an elastic headband with two electrodes; one on the crown and one on the cheek. Subjects were exposed to a mild tension through the headband for twenty minutes. The tension was so low that subjects said they experienced a tingling, itching sensation for only a few seconds at the beginning, which then disappeared. According to Reinhart, it is “one of the safest ways to stimulate the brain from the outside.”
After the twenty minutes, the subjects were given the task of carrying out an assignment by trial and error. They were given a gamepad and had to figure out which button on the gamepad corresponds to colors on a screen. To make it more difficult, the subjects were occasionally instructed not to respond to the tasks on the screen. In addition, participants had less than a second to give the correct input, which gave them plenty of opportunity to make mistakes. During the test, the researchers measured the participants’ brain activity using an EEG cap.
Reinhart and Woodman observed a clear difference in brain activity. On average, the electrical pulse from the medial prefrontal cortex in subjects was twice as large as normal after a mistake. In practice, this resulted in fewer mistakes and faster learning from the remaining mistakes. When the direction of the voltage was reversed, a reverse effect was also observed; participants made more mistakes and learned less quickly from performing the task. The results were not noticeable for the subjects, but the effects were easy to see on the EEG. “The amount of success we have with this is much greater than with pharmaceutical or other forms of psychological therapy. If we increase this process, we can make people more careful, more precise and more adaptable to changing situations,” the researchers say. In addition, it offers potential for treating schizophrenia and ADHD.
Update, 15:58: Studies and experiments have been done with electrical stimuli to the brain for hundreds of years, but the aim of this research was to improve performance in test subjects, about which much less has been published.