Electric thinking cap promises a new era of high-voltage learning

Oxford scientists believe that applying a small current to a specific part of the brain helps people learn. Nick Collins tested their device 

I’ve got rubber pads strapped to my head and someone is about to fire an electric current through my brain.

It’s meant to make me cleverer, but this doesn’t feel too smart to me.

My palms are sticky, my fingers are trembling and it’s hard to tell if that’s sweat pouring down my temples or water from the sponge that will conduct the charge through my skin.

The pads on my head begin to heat up and there’s a strange tingling sensation, then all of a sudden — nothing at all.

“I can’t feel anything,” I tell Prof Heidi Johansen-Berg, the smiling neurologist sitting to my left.

“That’s because it’s working. You only feel it when I’m increasing the current. There’s electricity going through your brain right now.”
The reason I’m letting an Oxford academic shoot a charge through my skull is that she tells me it will make me a faster learner. It sounds like a modern version of electroshock therapy, the experimental treatment carried out on psychiatric patients in the 1940s and a staple of countless horror films.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/8767134/Electric-thinking-cap-promises-a-new-era-of-high-voltage-learning.html