Zap your brain for a better you
Squirt some conductive gel on your skin, place a lightweight headset on your noggin and, according to a number of companies at CES, there's barely a limit to the types of self-improvement you can achieve. You can improve your sleep or your athletic performance, or lose weight. You might relieve nausea or even aid depression. And with almost no effort on your part. Many of these gadgets use tDCS -- transcranial direct current stimulation -- to mildly stimulate or suppress neurons firing in certain areas of the brain. It's a straightforward mechanism that has been heavily studied in connection with everything from math skills to post-stroke rehabilitation. There is much we still don't know about how the brain functions, and tDCS research is not conclusive -- it merely correlates electric shocks with improvements in conditions without our understanding why. Yet when it works, it's a noninvasive, relatively cheap clinical treatment that's fairly safe, beyond potenti...