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.
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.