Do you understand anything about mathematics? Electrical stimulation of your brain could remedy it, a team of international scientists is advancing on Tuesday whose conclusions are shedding light on the bonds between brain activity and learning processes.
While the disparities in math control are well known and contribute to the digging of social inequalities, a study published in the American journal Plos Biology highlights an average potential to correct them.
“People have different brains, and their brains control a large part of their lives,” insists with AFP King Cohen Kadosh, specialist in neurobiology and cognitive sciences at the British University of Surrey and the main author of the study.
“We think of the environment all the time. We often wonder if we go to the right school, if we have the right teacher. But it is also our biology. Some people have difficulty and if we can help their brain reach its full potential, then we will open many doors that would be otherwise closed to them, ”he abounds.
Electrical stimulation
Previous studies had shown the involvement of certain neural activities and brain areas, including dorsolateral and posterior parietal prefrontal cortex in the knowledge and learning acquisition processes.
The researchers therefore decided to study the activity of these two zones, involved in particular in problem solving and memory, in students at different levels in mathematics.
After discovering that they could predict their performance in mental calculation on this basis, they therefore sought to improve them via promising technology called transcranial stimulation by random noise (TRNS). In other words: electrodes placed around the head and emitting painless electrical stimulation.
Their experiment, in which more than 70 students took part, highlighted an improvement of 25 to 29% of performance among the worst students, explains Professor Cohen Kadosh.
“It was not possible to improve those who were really strong, but those who were in the average or above the average, so not extremely good in math, we were able to improve their capacities,” he summarizes.
Boost
Very encouraging results which he now hopes to confirm by future tests on other audiences and extend to other educational fields, such as that of learning a foreign language.
With the ultimate objective that neurostimulation devices can be offered to audiences encountering learning difficulties.
“The goal is not to create something that people have to use their whole life,” says King Cohen Kadosh. But rather to offer a boost. “And from there, they will be able to progress by themselves”.
However, it will be necessary to do this that these devices are accessible to all, under penalty of only reinforcing socio-economic inequalities, warns the researcher.
Mathematics play an important societal and economic role, and the current level of young people is not there.
According to an OECD study dating from 2016, around a quarter of adults living in developed countries like the United States, France and Germany have an equivalent or lower level of mathematics than that expected in children 6 and 7 years old. And France is a worse student on a European continent.
