Fascinating, if not slightly unsettling, piece on BBC Radio 4 Today on Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation, a new brain stimulation technique being pioneered at Oxford University that could make us all much smarter. According to the research, the electrical stimulation of the brain using this new technique helps to improve cognitive ability and, in particular, the ability to learn. This could have important implications on the learning of languages and could literally take the current vogue for 'brain training' to a whole new level. However, as the report points out, while these experiments have been done in the laboratory, the long-term wider health and ethical implications have yet to be fully considered.

Back