Slashdot Mirror
Boosting Your Brain With Batteries
Bifurcati writes "Running a tiny current acrosss your head increases your verbal skills reports Nature News. 103 nervous volunteers received 2 thousandths of an amp and showed a 20% improval in a simple verbal test, compared to a control group (same setup, just no current in the wires). Somebody better buy the politicians a couple of car batteries..."
Were these tests performed under double-blind conditions? How was it determined that the effect was from the application of a current rather than the idea? The article doesn't say.
Anyway she reports a 20% increase. Hmm, if I get my math right that mean they got 24 words in 90 seconds?
Now it all depends on how the results were calculated. It obviously had some kind of effect if EVERYONE who had the current did 20% better then those who didn't. But this is never the case. Not everyone without the current would have gotten 20. Some would have gotten 16, some 24. Same with the current applied.
The study is far to small and inprecise. We are only talking a few words more. Because the subjects who received the current knew it (they reported an icchy feeling) the test is not really blind as these test need to be. That might have inspired them to do better.
If the same can be done with more complex language tests then it could prove that something is happening here other then the placebo effect.
Anyway I am the kind of person who always gets electric/static shocks from everything, by this logic I should be a language genius. I am not.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
How many people die of brain failure? I would think that death by natural causes is predominantly other organs failing / terminal diseases.
Photos.
From the article: "And apart from an itchy sensation around the scalp electrode, subjects in the trials reported no side-effects."
If the effect is psychological, having a physically detectable (by the subject) component is likely to reinforce it.
You're not a statistical genius either. If 103 people get an average 20 words for each person in 90 seconds on the first round, that is a total of 2060 words for all of them. If you then apply current and test them and they get 2472 words, some individuals may have gotten 16, while others may have had 32, and the average increase over the sample was 20 percent. And with 103 people, that's a large enough sampling to show a real effect.
Of course, that could mean that they all just did better the second time. That's why the author of the paper split them into two groups, a zapped group and a control group. With 50 people, you're still working with a large enough sample to get useful averages as indicators, though not proof. And what did she discover? The zapped group did twenty percent better than the control group. If the control group showed NO improvement, they'd have 1000 words total, and the zapped group would have 1200 words.
Placebo effect is rather far-fetched here. Yes, the zapped people did feel an itchy feeling, but both groups had electrodes and believed they'd be zapped. The real zappees performed much much better than their counterparts.
What bothers me most about your post is that you're ripping her study apart because it's not absolute proof. Of course it isn't. It's a study. All science is looking at indicators, trends, probabilities, hypotheses... and it's totally counter-productive to wait until you've proven it outright. What you should be saying is, "Hmm... that's really interesting that she reported such a large improvement, and her results definitely indicate something curious going on. Perhaps this deserves a closer look."
If you're going to attack studies and reports, people, make sure you have the credentials and expertise to do so. Usually if somebody is publishing in or being reported on by Nature, they've got their ducks in a row, and your 2-minute armchair critique is going to fall hopelessly flat. Ask questions, offer insights, but criticism comes best from peers, which most of us are not.