Creativity boosted by zapping the brain with electricity

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Creativity boosted by zapping the brain with electricity

Posted by sciencetech-blog on Monday, April 20, 2015 Label:

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Unleashing your inner Shakespeare could be just a few jolts of electricity away.

Researchers in North Carolina claim that zapping the brain with a mild electric current can boost creativity by nearly eight per cent.

They tested their theory using a 10-Hertz current on the brain's of 20 volunteers to stimulate the brain's natural alpha wave oscillations.

Researchers in North Carolina claim that zapping the brain with a mild electric current can boost creativity by nearly eight per cent

As well as creativity, these oscillations - or the lack of them - are linked with depression.

Flavio Frohlich, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of North Carolina said: 'If we could enhance these brain activity patterns, then we could potentially help many people.'

Alpha oscillations occur within the frequency range of eight and 12 Hertz 9 (or cycles per second). They were discovered in 1929 by Hans Berger, who invented EEG.

Alpha oscillations happen most prominently when we close our eyes and shut out sensory stimuli – things we see, feel, taste, smell, and hear.

When alpha oscillations are active, your sensory inputs might be offline as you daydream, meditate, or conjure ideas.

When you come fully online, alpha oscillations disappear. Other oscillations at higher frequencies, such as gamma oscillations, take over.

An EEG of a naturally occurring alpha oscillation in a human brain. Enhancing these electric oscillations may help treat people with depression, scientists claim

They tested their theory using a 10-Hertz current run through electrodes attached to the scalp on 20 volunteers to stimulate the brain's natural alpha wave oscillations. They then recorded the results using EEG

Knowing this, other researchers began associating alpha oscillations with creativity.

Professor Frohlich set out to find evidence. His idea was simple. If he could enhance the rhythmic patterns of alpha oscillations to improve creativity.

For the study, Professor Frohlich's team enrolled 20 healthy adults. Researchers placed electrodes on each side of each participant's frontal scalp and a third electrode toward the back of the scalp.

BRAIN ZAPPING CAN DO MORE HARM THAN GOOD, SAY SCIENTISTS

An experimental technique used to boost brain performance with electrical pulses can actually cause people to perform less well in some tasks, scientists have found.

The technology, known as transcranial direct current stimulation, is already being marketed in commercial products as a way of helping computer game players and athletes improve their focus.

However, new research from the University of Oxford suggests that the benefits of this technique, which stimulates activity in the brain with an electrical current, may be limited by personality as it appears to only be helpful to people who are stressed about performing a task.

They found that while electrical stimulation helped those who lacked confidence or were anxious about performing a series of sums, it caused those who did not fear mathematics to decline.

A follow up study that examined how volunteers fared at spotting which way an arrow was pointing on a screen when confronted with distracting information showed that all those who received stimulation performed more poorly.

This way, the 10-Hertz alpha oscillation stimulation for each side of the cortex would be in unison.

Each participant underwent two sessions. During one session, researchers used a 10-Hertz sham stimulation for just five minutes.

Participants felt a tingle at the start of the five minutes. For the next 25 minutes, each participant continued to take the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking.

In one task, each participant was shown a small fraction of an illustration – sometimes just a bent line on a piece of paper.

Participants used the line to complete an illustration, and they wrote a title when they finished.

In the other session each participant underwent the same protocol, except they were stimulated at 10 Hertz for the entire 30 minutes while doing the Torrance test.

The tingling sensation only occurred at the start of the stimulation, ensuring that each participant did not know which session was the control session.

Then Frohlich's team compared each participant's creativity score, they found participants scored an average 7.4 percentage points higher than they did during the control sessions.

'That's a pretty big difference when it comes to creativity,' Frohlich said. 'Several participants showed incredible improvements in creativity. It was a very clear effect.'

'We don't know if there are long-term safety concerns,' he said. 'We did a well-controlled, one-time study and found an acute effect.'

'Also, I have strong ethical concerns about cognitive enhancement for healthy adults, just as sports fans might have concerns about athletic enhancement through the use of performance-enhancing drugs.'

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