Electric Thinking Cap? Flash of Fresh Insight by Electrical Brain Stimulation

Are we on the verge of being able to stimulate the brain to see the world anew -- an electric thinking cap? Research by Richard Chi and Allan Snyder from the Centre for the Mind at the University of Sydney suggests that this could be the case. They found that participants who received electrical stimulation of the anterior temporal lobes were three times as likely to reach the fresh insight necessary to solve a difficult, unfamiliar problem than those in the control group.

Source

In a new study, participants who received electrical stimulation of the anterior temporal lobes were three times as likely to reach the fresh insight necessary to solve a difficult, unfamiliar problem than those in the control group. (Credit: iStockphoto/Andrey Volodin)

Very interesting,when can I sign up?
I posted something s\along these lines a couple days ago relating to transcranial brain stimulation:abovetopsecret.com

So this stimulates the brain to make it work faster and or "mods" it temporarily?... Surely there are side effects to that? Incontinence?

reply to post by pandapowerjamie


I suppose you could be smarter and react quicker...just have a little headache
The future is now...Almost.

This is fascinating. Just a little jolt to scramble synapses for a while to solve a problem that your normal synapses could not normally come to a conclusion with.

This reminds me of the time while downloading (stuff) from file sharing and while downloading 1 file from 30 simultaneous users, my cordless mouse would interfere with the connections from the router and actually make my file download faster by scrambling connections differently that would normally occur.

It would be funny if they found the sweet spot for super intelligence for 15 seconds at a time , but the only draw-back would be 15 seconds of uncontrolled bowels.

Originally posted by wiredamerican

It would be funny if they found the sweet spot for super intelligence for 15 seconds at a time , but the only draw-back would be 15 seconds of uncontrolled bowels.

.....Men already read whilst on the toilet - this bowel thing wouldn't be so deterring as one might assume.

The story also came up here as well:

www.thesun.co.uk...

While transcranial stimulation has been around for a while now as an alternative to shock therapy treatment, it seems that these two scientists have isolated the part of the brain that can affect creativity. (or disrupt the area which may hinder creativity as the case may be)

As long as it has no long term negative effects, it could be revolutionary in helping people create, problem solve and generally have a different perspective when needed.