Don't Try This At Home

            Sometimes I wish that there were a way to inject chemistry knowledge directly into my brain. (Okay, maybe I wish for this all the time.) Unfortunately, science has yet to create a way to do this. However, they’ve come up with the next best thing. Well, maybe not the next best thing, but something pretty awesome.

            Scientists at the University of Oxford have found that by passing a very mild current of electricity through a person’s brain, they can improve their math skills for the next sixth months. The scientists behind these alluring findings used a method known as transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). This is a non-invasive technique that involves passing electricity through the skull to increase or decrease the activity of neurons, and it usually lasts around fifteen minutes.

            The scientists chose to stimulate the parietal lobe which is involved in number processing, a vital part of mathematics. Although math still requires practice, the subjects showed increased skills in number processing not just immediately after the stimulation but for the next six months!

            I, for one, am just about ready to buy a plane ticket to England so they can do this to me. Apparently I’m not the only one with that idea though. An enthusiastic do-it-yourself community of tDCS enthusiasts has sprung up. Machines that provide direct transcranial stimulation cost thousands of dollars and are generally only sold to researchers, but that hasn’t stopped the tDCS enthusiasts. Their online forums are filled stories of homemade experiments, some of which went wrong, and in one case left someone blind.

            To me it seems like the risk isn’t worth it. So for now I’ll stick with learning chemistry the old-fashioned way, and the only experiments I’ll be doing at home are the ones I can do with the chemistry set I got when I was eight.