Brain stimulation could change the future of math education

People who breeze through multiplication often chalk it up to good teachers or hard study. New evidence shows that some brains start the race to learn math with stronger internal wiring.

Researchers also found that a tiny dose of brain stimulation, an electrical buzz, can narrow the gap for those born with weaker brain wiring.

For the study, a five‑day experiment was led by Roi Cohen Kadosh at the University of Surrey, working with colleagues in Oxford, Toronto, and Stanford.

The research centered on 72 right‑handed adults who trained on calculation or memorization tasks while researchers watched activity in the frontoparietal network and applied gentle current to specific sites.

Brain stimulation may boost math skills

Long before electrodes enter the picture, studies show that robust traffic between the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) and posterior parietal cortex (PPC) predicts sharper arithmetic gains in school‑age children and adults.

These front and back hubs share data with the hippocampus to shift a learner to quick fact retrieval.

People whose signals are faint across this route often stall at the procedural stage, echoing the classic Matthew effect in education, where early advantages snowball over time.

Testing brain stimulation for math education

Participants sat for baseline scans that gauged connectivity strength and local levels of the messenger chemicals GABA and glutamate, a well‑known marker pair for plasticity.

They then solved novel two‑operand problems either by learning an algorithm or by rote rehearsal. During practice, half received sham stimulation, a third received current over the left and right dlPFC, and the remainder over the PPC.

The team used transcranial random noise stimulation, a method introduced in 2008 that sprinkles high‑frequency currents over the scalp and temporarily boosts cortical excitability.

Random noise is thought to raise the signal‑to‑noise ratio for neurons that hover just below firing threshold, giving sluggish circuits a clearer pulse without overshooting in healthy tissue.

The device delivered less than a milliamp, about the tingle you feel from a nine‑volt battery on your tongue, and participants were blind to the condition.

Stimulation aids weak brain connections

Learners who started with feeble dlPFC‑PPC links but received frontal stimulation shaved reaction times on calculation problems by roughly six percent over five sessions, an edge the sham group never matched.

Those with naturally strong links showed no extra benefit and, in rare cases, slight interference when current was added.

The boost also hinged on neurochemistry. Improvement tracked with a drop in local GABA, hinting that the brain shifted into a plastic phase where change beats stability, but only when connectivity stayed modest rather than surging.

Efforts to improve math education

Drill trials, where answers were simply rehearsed, showed little or no gain from stimulation.

The authors suggest that memorization leans less on executive control and more on localized storage, so frontoparietal tuning adds limited value once the answer is locked in.

“So far, most efforts to improve education have focused on changing the environment, training teachers, redesigning curricula, while largely overlooking the learner’s neurobiology,” said Cohen Kadosh.

He added that addressing brain constraints directly could broaden access to diverse career pathways and reduce long‑term inequalities in income, health and well-being.

Brain stimulation may help math struggles

The results revive the idea that brief, well‑timed stimulation could pair with instruction to help stragglers close arithmetic gaps rather than languish under cumulative deficits.

Importantly, the benefit was selective, underscoring the need for screening tools that flag students with weak network strength before any device is applied.

Safety remains favourable at these intensities, but researchers warn against DIY use; stimulating the wrong region or at the wrong time could impair other skills or harden circuits prematurely.

Regulators are still drafting guidelines for non‑medical cognitive devices, and large‑scale school trials have yet to clear ethics boards. 

Broader implications of the research

Past work links higher math fluency in children to elevated parietal GABA, but the relation flips in adulthood, showing that the plasticity window moves with age.

This developmental switch reminds educators that interventions may need age‑specific dosing and targeting.

Animal studies and computational models further suggest that random noise can stabilize synapses once learning consolidates, offering a route to lock in gains without chronic stimulation.

Future projects will watch how long the boost lasts and whether repeated cycles can replace expensive tutoring for some learners.

The future of math education

While electrodes will never replace good teaching, they may act as scaffolds, lifting under‑connected brains so that practice sticks.

If larger trials replicate these findings and prove durable benefits, policy makers could consider targeted neuro-support alongside curriculum reform to help close the widening achievement gap that still defines math education.

The study is published in the journal PLOS Biology.

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