I trust you are keeping well. I’ve been a bit quiet, but that’s not because I’ve lost my charge. There’s not been much research on microcurrent published in the past two months.
Firstly, something that has NOTHING to do with microcurrent. I’m throwing it in since many people buy the Elexoma Medic for their children (attention span, memory, exam stress, etc). So, here’s something for the parents of young children among us.
A paper published in The Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health states that feeding junk food to a young child (three years and younger) significantly lowers the child’s IQ. The study was conducted among 14,000 children and made provision for confounding factors (such as social status, for example). Over the age of four, the effect of junk food on IQ was less pronounced. You can read a popular summary of the study here.
But now something related to microcurrent. Most published research nowadays focuses on tDCS (transcranial Direct Current Stimulation), possibly because more exact findings are possible with precise electrode placements. But it is my clinical experience that many of the results published for tDCS can be extrapolated to CES without much ado. Anyhow, the recent week saw a flood of internet reports on a recently released study that showed how microcurrent stimulation of both brain hemispheres resulted in increased problem-solving capacity. The problem was structured in such a way that it required creative insight to solve – and microcurrent enabled the majority of study subjects to do just that. Here is one of many popular accounts of the research.
And lastly, something related to pain, but not to microcurrent. A study recently published in the journal Psychological Science showed that looking AT pain (and not AWAY from it) reduces pain perception. This is probably due, in part, to “brain pain” – the fear of the unknown makes us cringe / more responsive to stimuli, rather than facing the pain head-on and therefore de-mystifying it. You can read a popular account of this study here, and watch a video, too.
Well, I wish you an insightful, high-IQ, low-pain week.