Math Skills Improve with New Brain Stimulation

It's math made easier, via electric therapy.

New research carried out by a scientific team at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom suggests math skills and other cognitive functions may be improved by stimulating the brain with an electrical impulse.

The new technique uses a form of stimulation known as transcranial random noise stimulation, which applies randomly fluctuating electrical currents to the head, according to a report published by Forbes

According to the study's primary researcher, Roi Cohen Kadosh, who focused the research on a numbers-oriented area of the brain called the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, it's not expected a patient would feel any of the brain-stimulating action.

In previous research, Cohen Kadosh and colleagues had found that a form of brain stimulation called transcranial direct current stimulation, which places electrodes on the skull, helped people learn and remember a novel set of numbers.

However, while it improved math calculations, that first form of stimulation was always pleasant for the subject to receive and, in fact, sometime caused some adverse effects.

As they received the new TRNS stimulation, 25 Oxford students completed numbers tasks involving a variety of labor-intensive calculations.

A control group received pseudo-stimulation while working through the same kinds of math formulas.

At the end of the five-day training period, the participants who'd received TRNS were significantly faster at doing calculations than the control group - and that difference appeared to persist over time.

"With just five days of cognitive training and noninvasive, painless brain stimulation, we were able to bring about long-lasting improvements in cognitive and brain functions," Cohen Kadosh was quoted saying by Forbes. And when students were called back to the lab six for follow-up testing six months later, the stimulation group was still 28 percent faster at solving the problems.

Cohen Kadosh and the other study authors tracked various measures of brain metabolism in the TRNS and control groups and found blood flow in the studied area of the brain area was actually reduced in the TRNS group, though oxygen consumption was not --- which seemed to show the stimulated brain cells were working more efficiently, firing more, with greater synchronization.

Cohen Kadosh explained the results of this study might prove far-reaching, especially for the 5-7 percent of the population who suffer from the numbers form of dyslexia and the estimated 20 percent of school-age children have significant learning problems in math.

"Math is a highly complex cognitive faculty that is based on a myriad of different abilities," Cohen Kadosh said. "If we can enhance mathematics, therefore, there is a good chance that we will be able to enhance simpler cognitive functions."