So what exactly is the TRNS doing to the brain to account for these improvements?

FORBES: Electrical Stimulation Might Improve The Brain's Capacity For Math

When students were called back to the lab six months later, they TRNS group was still 28% faster at solving the problems.

FORBES: Electrical Stimulation Might Improve The Brain's Capacity For Math

Future research will have to assess whether any costs come along with TRNS, as well as how long the beneficial effects really last.

FORBES: Electrical Stimulation Might Improve The Brain's Capacity For Math

The authors were interested in illustrating just this, so they tracked various measures of brain metabolism in the TRNS group and the controls.

FORBES: Electrical Stimulation Might Improve The Brain's Capacity For Math

Only one group received TRNS while performing the tasks each day.

BBC: Brain stimulation promises 'long-lasting' maths boost

But the new study uses a different form of stimulation, known as transcranial random noise stimulation (TRNS), which applies randomly fluctuating currents (within certain parameters) to the head.

FORBES: Electrical Stimulation Might Improve The Brain's Capacity For Math

There were no significant differences in performance between the groups at the start of the study yet TRNS was found to improve the speed of learning for both calculation and rote learning tasks.

BBC: Brain stimulation promises 'long-lasting' maths boost