Is Electricity the New Smart Drug?
Right now Adderall is in short supply, which, according to some reports, is making it harder for pharmacists to fill prescriptions, driving up black-market prices on campuses, and perhaps forcing some students to rely on their native brainpower to write essays on religious symbolism in Billy Budd.
But take heart, unjuiced undergrads—there may be a solution on the way, albeit one that sounds dubious, even dangerous, at first. It’s called transcranial direct current stimulation (or tDCS), and it involves running a weak electrical current through your brain. While tDCS has been around for decades, in the last couple of years it’s been getting a lot of attention, thanks to research suggesting that it speeds up learning for certain kinds of tasks.
Talk about a bright idea.
