You Can Zap Your Brain To Improve Your Language Skills: Study

To those who are struggling with language skills, there is a new technique that can help---just zapping the brain, says a study from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Transcranial direct current stimulation can enhance language processing skills by accelerating the understanding of word combinations .that are used with a certain meaningful purpose

"Integrating conceptual knowledge is one of the neural functions fundamental to human intelligence," said Amy Price, of the neuroscience department at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and first author of the current study. "For example, when we read or listen to a sentence, we need to combine, or integrate, the meaning of the words to understand the full idea of the sentence. We perform this process effortlessly on a daily basis but it is quite a complex process and little is known about the brain regions that support this ability."

With MRI and magnetoencephalography studies, experts have shown links between the left angular gyrus to semantic memory integration. Earlier, the angular gyrus was shown as linked with language, number processing and spatial cognition, memory retrieval and attention.

In the latest study, experts showed how the left angular gyrus impacted semantic memory in 18 adults. Those who were part of the experiment underwent three transcranial direct current stimulations of the left angular gyrus or the right angular gyrus, or sham stimulation.

"We sought to understand how and in what part of the brain semantic representations are integrated into more complex ideas" said Dr. Roy Hamilton, an assistant professor in the departments of Neurology and Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation of the University of Pennsylvania and senior author of the study.

The members studied word pairs that indicated some meaning, such as "plaid jacket" or non-meaningful pairs, like "fast blueberry." Next, they had to finish a letter task that worked as a control for brain stimulation effects on vision and attention. They looked at a string of letters such as "vsbsl" "vsbql" and were asked to point out the matching pairs.

Transcranial direct current stimulation led to faster comprehension of meaningful words relative to non-meaningful word pairs, when they were compared to results from control as well as right angular gyrus stimulation. The results were not replicated in the letter-string task, hence, they were not linked to lower level visual processing, attention or motor control.

"Our findings extend our knowledge about the angular gyrus as a center wherein the brain constructs higher-level meaning from individual words during semantic comprehension and plays an important role in the fluent composition of meaning in language," Hamilton said. "They are also consistent with the broader claim that the angular gyrus is a cortical semantic hub."

The findings are published in the Journal of Neuroscience.