Can current stimulate smarts? | news @ Northeastern

But that skep­ti­cism has only inspired Pavel and his col­leagues, including asso­ciate pro­fessor of 
elec­trical and com­puter engi­neering Deniz Erdogmus, to work even harder on a project aimed
 at exploring their inno­v­a­tive research. They recently received a con­tract to study the
 phe­nom­enon from the Strength­ening Human Adap­tive Rea­soning and Problem-​​solving Pro­gram, known as SHARP. The pro­gram is spon­sored by the Intel­li­gence Advanced Research Projects
 Activity, a gov­ern­ment agency that invests in high-​​risk, high-​​payoff research.

Researchers at Oxford Uni­ver­sity, who are part of the same SHARP team as Erdogmus and 
Pavel, pre­vi­ously demon­strated that applying tran­scra­nial cur­rent stim­u­la­tion helps chil­dren 
per­form better on math­e­matics prob­lems. “The ques­tion is how well does this method work for 
improving fluid intel­li­gence,” said Pavel, who holds joint appoint­ments in the Col­lege of 
Com­puter and Infor­ma­tion Sci­ence and the Bouvé Col­lege of Health Sci­ence.

via Can current stimulate smarts? | news @ Northeastern.

One thought on “Can current stimulate smarts? | news @ Northeastern

  1. I’m getting mixed results trying to find the proper montage for cognitive enhancement, just yesterday I tried doing the montage similar to the one used by the Foc.us headset except actually at the side of my head (I think that is stimulating the DLPFC’s, to be specific). Before I started I wanted to double check which electrode should be the anode and vice versa, I couldn’t just go by memory. Anyhow I tried to quickly look online to be sure, but {quickly} turned out to be rather difficult, with so many different montages, I remembered how it becomes rather irritating to find out. I finally figured out the cathode goes on my left, and anode on my right. But I just found a page on diytdcs.com that implies that anybody who has done any research knows that it should be the other way around. Now I’m not sure I even have the right name for what part of the brain I was stimulating.

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