Don't Get Too Excited...Yet

In her article, “Brain stimulation in children spurs hope – and concern” for Nature, Linda Geddes reports on an experiment that took place in a small school in London to see if some of its students, who suffer from a variety of learning disabilities, could benefit from electrical brain stimulation.

            Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), one type of electrical brain stimulation that has already been part of many different research efforts and even approved in the United States as a means of treating adults who suffer from severe migraines and depression, has already been used on 10,000 adults (Geddes 436). It works via an eddy current from a wand that can be applied to certain areas in the brain that cause a sudden neuronal excitation, either causing an excitatory or inhibitory response depending on the neural network (Gazzaniga 146).
What this may mean is that TMS could be responsible for directly causing an increase in performance or a deficit in the ability to perform depending on the area being studied, respectively.

Taken from: http://www.neurocognitionlab.com/participate.html

            At Fairley House in London, two groups of students were selected to participate in the experiment in which one group would receive several rounds of electrical brain stimulation via transcranial random-noise stimulation, a similar device to TMS, while the control group would wear the cap, but receive no stimulation. Both groups would be observed while performing a task, a video game that got increasingly more difficult with each level; the groups’ performances on the video game as well as a math test would then be measured and compared to see if there were significant differences. 
The hypothesis was that applying electrical brain stimulation would improve performance for the experimental group compared to the control group, with both groups suffering from learning disabilities involving math.

Citing Roi Cohen Kadosh, the researcher who led the experiment and analyzed the results, Geddes stated, “The children who received stimulation showed greater progress in performance than did the controls — reaching level 17 on average, compared with level 14 — as well as significant improvements in general mathematics test scores” (437).

            The results are fairly straightforward, but Geddes is appropriate with the title of the article, in that this kind of experiment can certainly give parents and children hope for the future for treating learning disabilities, but it is important to keep in mind the constraints of science and our own understanding. More research is critical for examining the long-term effects of electrical brain stimulation and how sustained exposure might affect neuronal networks and how they fire. In addition, the vast majority of research has only focused on adults whose brains, though still plastic and fully capable of changing to adapt to the needs and demands of the individual, are certainly not undergoing the same developmental processes and changes that children’s brains are experiencing.

            Cognitive impairments can affect a wide range of mental processes from object recognition, memory, thinking, learning, making decisions, etc. Many individuals who suffer from such cognitive impairments, whether it be from aging, a stroke, a head injury, or just some difference in the neuronal connections and how they fire, may have a lower quality of life as a result. This type of research has the potential for both understanding these cognitive impairments and their underlying processes, but it is still experimental and studies in the future must be cautionary in their procedures, taking into consideration, for example, the differences across adults and children, and to not be marveled as a miracle just yet before we truly understand the changes we are making to the brain and therefore to the mind.

Works Cited:

Gazzaniga, Michael S. Cognitive Neuroscience. 3^rd ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009. Print.

http://www.nature.com/polopoly_fs/1.18405!/menu/main/topColumns/topLeftColumn/pdf/525436a.pdf