Remarkable experiment in PLOS Bio last week: targeted transcranial stimulation produces ~1/3 stddev memory performance gain in a word list recall task.
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Interesting motivation: prior experiments observed that electrically stimulating the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex inhibits memory performance… so what if we inhibit it instead, which rTMS can do non-invasively?
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I'll be excited when it replicates. Remember the minor tDC stimulation craze that supposedly showed vast improvement in learning speed?
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Yes, fair. At least this study includes two separate experiments demonstrating the effect! (first between-subjects, then within-) But yes, excited to see what comes of it…
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There seems to be growing evidence that targeting the hippocampal-cortical network with theta-bursts using transcranial magnetic stimulation is an effective way of supporting encoding and recall for memory tasks.
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I personally worry about the longer-term health risks of this type of brain stimulation, otherwise I would be more enthusiastic, it seems quite effective.