Cognitive enhancement : toward the integration of theory and practice

Cognitive enhancement reflects the use of any (legitimate) means such as for example food supplements to reach one’s personal best, and has gained great interest over the past years. The increasing costs of the welfare offer one explanation, the second is that both Eastern and Western societies are continuously driven towards more individualism pushing the idea that an individual is the director of his or her own life. In this dissertation, I attempted to explain how and why enhancement techniques such as brain stimulation, videogaming, and food supplements (e.g. tyrosine and tryptophan) are promising and inexpensive ways to enhance cognition. That is, clear ideas about the underlying mechanisms of these effects are needed before these techniques can be applied outside the field of science. Our findings have important societal and economic implications and go hand-in-hand with the ideological individualistic trend in society. More research is needed in order to gain better insights into the underlying mechanisms and the role of individual differences in modulating the observed effects. However, the discussed techniques do have promising potential, not only in possibly delaying cognitive decline in elderly, but also enhancing (social) cognitive functioning and mental well-being in healthy humans.NWOAction Contro

"Unfocus" on foc.us: Commercial tDCS headset impairs working memory

In this study, we tested whether the commercial transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) headset foc.us improves cognitive performance, as advertised in the media. A single-blind, sham-controlled, within-subject design was used to assess the effect of online and off-line foc.us tDCS—applied over the prefrontal cortex in healthy young volunteers (n = 24) on working memory (WM) updating and monitoring. WM updating and monitoring, as assessed by means of the N-back task, is a cognitive-control process that has been shown to benefit from interventions with CE-certified tDCS devices. For both online and off-line stimulation protocols, results showed that active stimulation with foc.us, compared to sham stimulation, significantly decreased accuracy performance in a well-established task tapping WM updating and monitoring. These results provide evidence for the important role of the scientific community in validating and testing far-reaching claims made by the brain training industry