Electro-Brain Therapy for Extra Smartness

Electricity to the brain is not just for mental illness anymore. An electric current applied to gray matter during sleep can improve memory, according to researchers in Germany. Student volunteers
who received a half hour of gentle brain stimulation during deep sleep performed 8 percent better on a word memory test than when they had no stimulation.

From New Scientist:

Jan Born at the University of Luebeck in Germany, and colleagues, recruited 13 healthy medical students for the study and gave them a list of word associations, such as “bird” and “air”, to learn late in the evening. Afterwards, researchers placed two electrodes on the forehead and one behind each ear of the volunteers and let them sleep.

The students’ various sleep stages were monitored using an electroencephalogram (EEG) machine. When the students entered a period of light sleep, Born’s team started to apply a gentle current in one-second-long pulses, every second, for about 30 minutes. The EEG readings revealed that this current had put students into a deeper state of sleep.

So does that mean the deeper you sleep, the smarter you are? Perhaps!

Born believes this memory boost was due to the pattern of the applied current mimicking that seen in naturally occurring deep sleep, where memory consolidation is thought to take place.

Strong brain currents in this stage of sleep probably cause more intense nerve firing, he says, which might enhance activity in the brain’s memory centre, the hippocampus.