Good news! What else can be boosted?
I wish I had that treatment when I was in high school! I think, I suffered from the Matthew effect! 😊
"A shocking method for boosting math skills
Why do some kids seem to effortlessly pick up math skills, while others struggle no matter how hard they try? A growing body of research suggests that differences in neurobiology—the way a person’s brain is wired—may play a bigger role than external factors like socioeconomic status.
To explore this idea, scientists recruited 72 university students aged 18-30 to take part in a five-day math training program. Two-thirds of participants received a treatment known as transcranial random noise stimulation (tRNS), which delivers painless, non-invasive electrical currents to different parts of the brain; the rest were given a placebo.
Some students, scans revealed, started out with comparatively weak connections between the prefrontal and parietal regions of the brain. While these individuals initially had a harder time calculating solutions to math problems than peers with stronger natural connectivity, those who received tRNS over the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex—an area critical for learning and memory, focus, and problem-solving—showed significant improvements. ..."
"A painless, non-invasive brain stimulation technique can significantly improve how young adults learn maths, my colleagues and I found in a recent study. In a paper in PLOS Biology, we describe how this might be most helpful for those who are likely to struggle with mathematical learning because of how their brain areas involved in this skill communicate with each other. ...
Education often widens rather than closes the gap between high and low achievers, a phenomenon known as the Matthew effect. Those who start with an advantage, such as being able to read more words when starting school, tend to pull further ahead. Stronger educational achievement has been also associated with socioeconomic status, higher motivation and greater engagement with material learned during a class. ..."
From the abstract:
"Effortful learning and practice are integral to academic attainment in areas like reading, language, and mathematics, shaping future career prospects, socioeconomic status, and health outcomes. However, academic learning outcomes often exhibit disparities, with initial cognitive advantages leading to further advantages (the Matthew effect). One of the areas in which learners frequently exhibit difficulties is mathematical learning.
Neurobiological research has underscored the involvement of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), the posterior parietal cortex (PPC), and the hippocampus in mathematical learning. However, their causal contributions remain unclear. Moreover, recent findings have highlighted the potential role of excitation/inhibition (E/I) balance in neuroplasticity and learning.
To deepen our understanding of the mechanisms driving mathematical learning, we employed a novel approach integrating double-blind excitatory neurostimulation—high-frequency transcranial random noise stimulation (tRNS)—and examined its effect at the behavioral, functional, and neurochemical levels.
During a 5-day mathematical learning paradigm (n = 72) active tRNS was applied over the dlPFC or the PPC, and we compared the effects versus sham tRNS. Individuals exhibiting stronger positive baseline frontoparietal connectivity demonstrated greater improvement in calculation learning. Subsequently, utilizing tRNS to modulate frontoparietal connectivity,
we found that participants with weaker positive baseline frontoparietal connectivity, typically associated with poorer learning performance, experienced enhanced learning outcomes following dlPFC-tRNS only.
Further analyses revealed that dlPFC-tRNS improved learning outcomes for participants who showed reductions in dlPFC GABA when it was accompanied by a reduced positive frontoparietal connectivity, but this effect was reversed for participants who showed increased positive frontoparietal connectivity.
Our multimodal approach elucidates the causal role of the dlPFC and frontoparietal network in a critical academic learning skill, shedding light on the interplay between functional connectivity and GABAergic modulation in the efficacy of brain-based interventions to augment learning outcomes, particularly benefiting individuals who would learn less optimally based on their neurobiological profile."
Could electric brain stimulation lead to better maths skills? (written by one of the authors of the study)
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