Is a little electricity good for the brain?
Certainly, research is emerging to suggest that gentle shocks to the brain positively affect everything from math skills to giving Alzheimer's Disease pause to making people seem more attractive.
Then there is the emerging field of transcranial electrical stimulation, also known as TES.
The National Post tells the tale of Canadian David Siever, who claims to have markedly improved his musical abilities after jolting his brain's auditory cortex with electricity.
“Now I tune everything and I practice my singing over and over and over again, because I’m more sensitive to it,” he told the newspaper.
Siever appears to be the poster-boy for the surging trend of do-it-yourself brain stimulation.
No doctors. No major expenses -- machines come as cheap as $250, with instructions on the interwebs.
If electrifying your brain without professional supervision isn't obviously downright dangerous, the home kits on the market seem "to have been built by undergraduates," notes Christopher Mims in MIT Technological Review.
Mims seemed even less impressed with the production values of the promo for GoFlow, a cheap home TES kit.
Or, as Laval University professor Shirley Fecteau told the National Post, “It’s a nine-volt battery with two electrodes; a kid can do it."
That's not to say professionally administered electricity can't be effective at overclocking the brain.
Researchers at Oxford University recently studied the effects of TES, for example, and saw a promising bump in math skills.
"Recent evidence from normal and clinical adult populations suggests that transcranial electrical stimulation (TES), a portable, painless, inexpensive, and relatively safe neuroenhancement tool, applied in conjunction with cognitive training can enhance cognitive intervention outcomes," lead researcher Roi Cohen Kadosh noted in the study's abstract.
Indeed, on the surface, it would seem the brain might be rather receptive to the occasional volt or two.
Tom Stafford of the University of Sheffield's cognitive sciences department notes in the academic journal, The Conversation notes, "The brain is an electrochemical machine, so there’s every reason to think that electrical stimulation should affect its function. The part of the brain the researchers stimulated – the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex – is known to be involved in complex tasks like learning, decision making and calculation."
Dorothy Bishop, a professor of developmental neuropsychology at the University of Oxord, takes issue with the media's use of words like 'shock' and jolt' when describing the practice.
"In fact, the method uses stimulation that is not at all unpleasant and is often undetectable, she writes in a Storify blog.
Of course, psychiatric conditions have long been treated with electricity. There's the much-maligned 'shock therapy' method, which has been effective in cases of severe depression and psychosis.
Deep-brain stimulation is a much more recent treatment, developed by Dr. Helen Mayberg of Emory University chiefly to battle depression.
Her method zeroes in on the brain region known as area 25, applying gentle electrical currents -- and reportedly finding considerable success in chronically depressed patients.
The Most Bizarre Scientific Experiments
Caffeine For Imprisoned Twins(01 of05)
Open Image ModalIn the late 18th century, King Gustavus III of Sweden was rumored to have carried out a strange experiment to determine the harmful health effects of coffee. Two identical twins who had been condemned to death had their sentences commuted to life in prison on the condition that one would drink three pots of coffee per day, and the other three pots of tea, for the rest of their lives. The only problem was that the doctors assigned to monitor the cases died before either of the patients did, their observations lost--as the story goes, the tea drinker died first, and there's no record of the coffee-drinker's death. The experiment proved nothing, suffering from a lack of rigor (to say the least).Source: Uppsala University, "Coffee - rat poison or miracle medicine?"
Simulated Anthrax On The Subway(02 of05)
Open Image ModalIn June 1966, the U.S. Army's Special Operations Division secretly dispersed harmless bacteria in the New York Subway system to model the effects of an outbreak of more harmful germs. According to Army reports, "Test results show that a large portion of the working population of New York City would be exposed to disease if one or more pathogenic agents were disseminated covertly in several subway lines at a period of peak traffic."Source: Deadly Cultures: Biological Warfare Since 1945. Wheelis, Rózsa, and Dando. Harvard University Press, 2006. (credit:Billy Hathorn / Wikimedia Commons)
Weaponized Fleas In The Desert(03 of05)
Open Image ModalOperation Big Itch, 1954, was an attempt to discover the potential of weaponized fleas. The operation, part of the Cold War-era United States biological weapons program, took place at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah.According to "Using the flea as weapon," an article in the Army Chemical Review, "In the United States, the plague flea concept was competing against the use of mosquitoes, flies, ticks, and lice. Of these concepts, the United States put most of its energies behind weaponizing yellow fever in combination with the Aedes aegypti mosquito."
Food Through A Hole In The Stomach(04 of05)
Open Image ModalU.S. Army Surgeon William Beaumont (above) found an extraordinary patient in Alexis St. Martin, a Canadian trapper who was injured in a hunting accident and left with a hole in his belly that led directly into his stomach. Beaumont attached a string to various foods, including oysters and rare roast beef, and introduced them into the wound to observe the rates of digestion. Despite the unorthodox techniques, this research would later lead to the discovery of the importance of stomach acid in digestion, earning Beaumont the epithet "father of gastric physiology." Source: Experiments and observations on the gastric juice, and the physiology of digestion. Beaumont, Martin and Combe. Maclachlan & Stewart, 1838
Candy For Mental Patients(05 of05)
Open Image ModalIn 1945, Sweden's new National Dental Service commissioned research, now known as the Vipeholm experiments, in which researchers gave subjects large amounts of sticky sugary candy in order to study the development of cavities. This might not have been so controversial, except that the subjects couldn't give consent to their participation:"The use of mentally handicapped subjects was criticized in the Swedish press and all studies on mentally handicapped individuals were stopped in 1954," according to Topics In Dental Biochemistry by Mark Levine (Springer, 2010). (credit:Gila Brand / Wikimedia Commons)