Shock Therapy for Good Maths

It won’t make you an Einstein but it could help treat dyscalculia.

By applying mild electrical current to the brain, researchers have shown that they could enhance a person’s mathematical performance for up to six months without influencing other cognitive functions. The findings may lead to treatments for numerical disabilities (for example, dyscalculia) and for those who lose their skill with numbers as a result of a stroke or degenerative disease. “I am certainly not advising people to go around giving themselves electric shocks, but we are extremely excited by the potential of our findings,” says Roi Cohen Kadosh of the University of Oxford. “Electrical stimulation will most likely not turn you into Albert Einstein, but if we’re successful, it might be able to help some people to cope better with maths.”

The study participants had normal mathematical abilities but were asked to learn a series of artificial numbers—symbols that they had never seen before which they were told represented numbers—while they received non-invasive brain stimulation.

The results of the tests showed that such brain stimulation improved study participants’ ability to learn the new numbers, and that those improvements lasted six months after training.

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