New Solution to Stage Fright is Electrifying

Stage fright is a phenomenon that can strike anyone from a seasoned performer to a novice, but researchers now believe they’ve found a solution. According to IFLScience.com, “new research reveals that running a mild electric current through the parts of the brain that cause performance anxiety can help to eliminate…nervous errors.”

Participants in the study, which was recently published in Nature Communications, were trained to rapidly press 10 buttons in a particular order without making mistakes through memorizing two different sequences and then combining them. The researchers also shocked the participants whenever they made a mistake, which quickly led to a rapid decline in their performance. 

The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to identify an increase in activity in the region of the brain called the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) whenever mistakes occurred, which, they therefore deduced, must be responsible for performance impairment due to anxiety.  To test their theory, they used a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to apply an electrical current through the dACC before asking the participants to repeat the task. This current reduced the activity in the dACC and also reduced the number of mistakes the participants made.

Read the full study here.