The new "thinking cap" was created by two psychologists from Vanderbilt — Robert Reinhart and assistant professor of psychology Geoffrey Woodman — and administers a low-level current to the brain to simulate learning.
 

In a report on the development, published online in The Journal of Neuroscience, the researchers explained that the brain registers an instinctive "oops" reaction — a spike of negative voltage in a region known as the medial-front cortex — when we make a mistake.
 

The new research aimed to examine what effect such mistakes have on the brain, and whether electrical stimulation could have an impact.

 

"That's what we set out to test: what is the actual function of these brainwaves?" Reinhart told CNET news. "We wanted to reach into your brain and causally control your inner critic."
 

To do so, they designed a skullcap to deliver 20 minutes of transcranial direct current stimulation (tCDS) — a technique used in some depression and Parkinson’s treatments to safely stimulate the brain — to a group of volunteers. The participants were then given a learning task with a high chance of making mistakes — and asked to learn from those mistakes and give the correct response.
 

During the tests, the researchers monitored the participants' brain activity to gauge how the brain reacted to mistakes, and then how this activity changed under the influence of the tCDS. They found that the tCDS pulses increased the negative-voltage spike by twice as much or more than normal. In addition, the participants made fewer mistakes — and learned from their mistakes more quickly — when under the influence of tCDS.
 

The effect of the 20-minute tCDS was also transferred to other tasks, and lasted about five hours, the researchers said.
 

"So when we up-regulate that process [with tCDS], we can make you more cautious, less error-prone, more adaptable to new or changing situations — which is pretty extraordinary," Reinhart said in a statement issued by the university.

This research funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.