Electric thinking cap: ‘A new era of high-voltage learning’

Scientists in Britain have created an electric “thinking” cap which they claim could herald a new era of high-voltage learning.

A team at Oxford University, led by Prof Johansen Berg, says that applying a small current through the cap to a specific part of the brain will help people learn — in fact, the method uses a current measuring one or two thousandths of an ampere, ‘The Daily Telegraph’ reported.

In a trial, 15 volunteers were taught to push a set of buttons in three different sequences, much like playing the piano. Electricity was fired into the area of their brains that governs movement — running from the front of the head to a point above their ear — for 10 minutes while they completed the task.

By running the charge in one direction, the team found they could stimulate the brain and increase the volunteers’ learning speed by 10 per cent. Sending the current the other way had the opposite effect, dulling their brain cells and making them slow down.

Prof Berg said: “If we gave a type of stimulation that increased excitability while they were playing this game, then they learnt the sequence more quickly. What that study shows is that, even in young healthy people, you can speed learning through brain simulation.”

Because it targets the movement area of the brain, the method is only designed to help with learning muscle-memory skills such as rowing a boat or playing the piano. But there is good reason to believe it could be applied to other areas of learning, or even to help increase brain function in stroke victims, Prof Berg said.

“It obviously has implications for education and training settings, for example sports training. The same kind of principles can potentially be applied to other problems that people have after stroke; problems with vision, attention or language, for example,” she said.

The effects last for about half an hour before wearing off but the scientists are confident that daily treatment for weeks at a time could lead to longer lasting benefits.

If this proves to be the case, headsets could be manufactured so that people could receive the treatment in clinics or even at home, say the scientists.