New work from the NCM Lab shows that adding noise to the brain can enhance sensory perception
Onno Van der Groen and Prof. Nici Wenderoth's work demonstrating that adding noise directly to the brain via transcranial random noise stimulation can enhance sensory perception has been published in the Journal of Neuroscience.
Noise is usually considered a bad thing. But did you know that adding small amounts of noise to a weak stimulus can actually help you to perceive the stimulus better? This phenomenon is known as stochastic resonance. In our new external pagepaper published in the Journal of Neuroscience we demonstrated that instead of adding noise to the stimulus, you can also add noise to the brain directly with tRNS (transcranial random noise stimulation) to enhance detection performance. This finding opens up new ways of using tRNS to investigate brain function. Moreover, our results suggest we might be able to enhance behavior in healthy individuals and patients with tRNS.