Allan Snyder, director of the Centre for the Mind at the University of Sydney in Australia, hopes to develop "a thinking cap", a tDCS device that corporate executives or advertising copywriters might use to bump up their creativity before walking into a brainstorming meeting. Snyder is cagey about how far he is in product development — but his latest demonstration, published this February14, garnered plenty of attention. Snyder claims to have boosted people's flair for sudden insight by stimulating their anterior temporal lobes. People who received tDCS were two to three times more likely than those receiving sham stimulation to solve a creativity problem in which they raced against the clock to spell out maths equations with matchsticks.I've posted previously about Snyder's research. Any tech that makes humans smarter is hugely exciting to me, and doubly so when it is cheap and nearly ubiquitous. tDCS probably qualifies as low-hanging fruit, so long as efficacy and safety can be demonstrated with chronic use.
Monday, April 18, 2011
tDCS in the Press
Nature News is running a piece on transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS):
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tDCS is pretty unlikely to be safe, unfortunately. The brain works on very precise, elegant, internally directed timing. These kinds of external, gross current shocks probably work just the way electroshock works. They cause damage, but also induce heat shock proteins and other cellular repair mechanisms after the damage. Something you might use as a last line of resort, for intractable mental issues, but otherwise unlikely to be long term beneficial. The brain is designed to resist crude external stimuli like this. If I'm wrong, please correct me. I'd love to see a smartness breakthrough too :)
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