Electric thinking cap promises a new era of high-voltage learning

Oxford scientists believe that applying a small current to a specific part of the brain helps people learn. Nick Collins tested their device.

I’ve got rubber pads strapped to my head and someone is about to fire an electric current through my brain.

It’s meant to make me cleverer, but this doesn’t feel too smart to me.

My palms are sticky, my fingers are trembling and it’s hard to tell if that’s sweat pouring down my temples or water from the sponge that will conduct the charge through my skin.

The pads on my head begin to heat up and there’s a strange tingling sensation, then all of a sudden — nothing at all.

“I can’t feel anything,” I tell Prof Heidi Johansen-Berg, the smiling neurologist sitting to my left.

“That’s because it’s working. You only feel it when I’m increasing the current. There’s electricity going through your brain right now.”

The reason I’m letting an Oxford academic shoot a charge through my skull is that she tells me it will make me a faster learner. It sounds like a modern version of electroshock therapy, the experimental treatment carried out on psychiatric patients in the 1940s and a staple of countless horror films.

But Prof Johansen-Berg’s method, which uses a current measuring just one or two thousandths of an amp, has been clinically tested — and it works.

In a trial published earlier this year 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, researchers 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. Speaking yesterday at the British Science Festival, Prof Johansen-Berg explained: “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 Johansen-Berg said.

“It obviously has implications for education and training settings, for example sports training,” she added.

“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.”

The effects last for about half an hour before wearing off but the researchers 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.

As she wired my head up to a battery, I turned to The Daily Telegraph’s puzzles page in the hope that it would improve my performance at Codewords and Killer Sudoku.

But I am pleased to report to her that, in fact, it had a miraculous, if slightly delayed effect. I had been so busy worrying about my mind turning to glue that I didn’t fill in a single number during the test — but once the ordeal was over my performance improved no end.


/The Telegraph/