Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Brain Buzz, a 9 volt battery and some wires...

Here in an engaging review by Douglas Fox, of efforts to enhance learning and intelligence by transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS), which is as simple as hooking up a 9 volt battery and an appropriate resistor (remember ohm's law? I= E/R) to deliver about a 2 milliamp current to the scalp. The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has funded research showing that a video game designed to train US soldiers bound for Iraq is learned twice as quickly during the electrical stimulation. Fox discusses a number of other studies, as well as debate surrounding the technique.

2 comments:

  1. This is an interesting military application for the said simple set up. I remember doing that experiment back in high-school.

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  2. Can anyone tell me if this really works? I've always wanted to try batteries with a long life.

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