I tried a headset that electrifies the brain to help athletes unlock new potential

As I tried to scramble my way up a few bouldering routes at my local rock climbing gym on election day, I focused as much extra attention as possible on my technique. The goal wasn't just to try and distract myself from politics - a little while before, I'd spent 20 minutes wearing a headset that was designed to deliver a small electrical current to my motor cortex.

If Halo Neuroscience, the company behind the Halo Sport headset, is right, a small dose of electrical stimulation might be enough to help athletes of all sorts unlock new levels of performance. In theory, priming that brain region could help it better "learn" skills and movements that are optimal for any kind of sport.

There's promising data and a lot of interest in the idea that brain zapping might improve cognitive - and perhaps by extension, physical - performance. But that's not the same as proof. The science behind this is still uncertain and there's no widely accepted study showing we can actually get stronger, faster, or smarter with a dose of electricity.

In my case, I know that I'm doing it wrong. Dr. Daniel Chao, co-founder and CEO of Halo, had just told me how they'd recommend someone train using the headset.

"The ask during training is very thoughtful, deliberate practice that day, with quality reps," says Chao. Not quite the same as hitting a few varied climbing routes, even if they were routes I'd been working on previously.

In theory, you should be training with a specific goal in mind, like pushing a bouldering grade up, hitting a faster 2K rowing time, or setting a new personal record on a biking route. It's hard to know how much you're improving with training if you don't have specific goals.

Also, the "neuropriming effect" that Halo theoretically provides lasts for about an hour after you use the device, according to Chao, and I didn't start climbing for 35 or 40 minutes. Plus, to really see improvement, you would need to use the device for a number of different training sessions.

"To see an effect with a pro athlete we'll need a couple of weeks," says Chao, since a professional is already likely close to their personal peak potential, making it harder for them to improve. "With someone relatively untrained we can show effects much earlier, give us a couple days."

So I knew that without the timing or the deliberate practice routine or extended use, there was probably no specific performance boost - and definitely no measurable one - that I'd get from my climbing session. But just in case there was any lingering effect, it seemed like a waste to not try to push through a few routes. And that shows the almost irresistible appeal of something that might help you improve, even if you aren't convinced that it really can.

Zapping your brain with electricity

Halo's Sport device is basically a way of delivering electricity, specifically transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), to the brain - just an easy way to get that current to a general region. The headset looks like a fairly large pair of headphones, with what look like foam positioning spikes to let it rest on your head. Really, those are the "primers," electrodes, which deliver between 1.4 and 2.1 milliamps of electricity to the brain.

The position of your motor cortex, the brain region that directs voluntary movement, made the shape of headphones a perfect delivery device, according to Chao. Positioning it on head was pretty easy. At first, the connected phone app reported a bad connection, but once I pushed the foamy "spikes" through my hair, it gave the all-clear signal.

It turns out a mild dose of electrical stimulation is not uncomfortable. There's a noticeable tingling sensation, not strong enough to be called a sting. For whatever it's worth, you definitely feel something.

There's a long history of using electricity to affect the brain. Pliny the Elder of Rome used shocks from the Atlantic torpedo ray to treat headaches. In modern times, doctors directly place electrodes into people's brains for medical purposes. Before founding Halo Neuroscience, Chao, who got both his M.D. and his master's in neuroscience at Stanford, worked at a company that makes a brain implant that uses small electric pulses to stop seizures in epilepsy patients.

Stimulation that goes through the skull is obviously far less targeted to a specific region than simulation with a brain implant, but it's also less invasive, which makes it more appealing for healthy people. If it works.

By this point in time, you've probably read something about people zapping their brains to improve them. There are several stories out there about military projects that train snipers or drone pilots while giving them electrical stimulation. "[E]lectrical as well as magnetic stimulation shows promise in the enhancement of cognitive functions," Ruairidh Battleday and Anna-Katherine Brem, Oxford scientists who research techniques and drugs that can boost brainpower, told me a few months ago. It's an idea that a lot of people are excited about.

What we know about the Halo Sport device

But does that mean the Halo Sport can help people improve?

Chao described to me the studies that the company has conducted. They've used sham stimulation (electricity, but not strong enough to penetrate the skull) to have a placebo group and compared them to the group receiving real stimulation. They've tested for things like skill acquisition, with study participants learning to play piano chords, a marker of dexterity. They've tested for strength and explosiveness with experiments on training grip strength. While working with elite athletes, they've worked on improving lower body strength. That Halo study showed that a small group of athletes receiving stimulation improved lower-body strength and explosiveness by 12% in a period of a few weeks while those receiving sham stimulation improved only 3%.

In these and other company studies, participants receiving real stimulation improved significantly more than those receiving sham brain zapping. But so far, these are all internal studies, they're not peer reviewed papers published in journals.

Chao tells Business Insider that they've submitted two papers for journal publication, but they have not yet been accepted (he hopes this could happen before the end of the year, though it could still be some time after that before they are published). Before that happens, it's hard for other experts to say whether or not the headsets work.

"The evidence is simply not there that tDCS can improve basic motor learning, let alone complex athletic learning," neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath told Kate Knibbs at The Ringer.

The unproven nature of brain stimulation makes some scientists pause when they think of healthy people applying electricity to their brains. Earlier this year, a group of researchers published an open letter in the journal Annals of Neurology cautioning D.I.Y. users about some of the risks involved, including the possibilities that users would alter brain regions they didn't intend to target, or that by boosting one ability, users could unexpectedly dampen another mental process. Many scientists have questions about how specific an effect you can see by broadly stimulating the brain. Brain stimulation "is more of a shotgun approach than a scalpel approach," Michael Weisend, a neuroscientist at Wright State Research Institution, told me in November of 2014.

Chao says that their device is designed with safeguards to protect users, unlike many devices people might build on their own at home. And he says they know they aren't stimulating just the motor cortex, but that some mild stimulation to surrounding regions may help. Again, until Halo's data is published in peer reviewed journals, the only data we have comes from the company's studies. While that data is interesting, other scientists want to see more before they are convinced.

The future for Halo

Some have already fully embraced the Halo Sport device - professional athletes especially. Most recently, the company announced that several NFL players have been using the headset.

"As a result of training with Halo Sport, my standing vertical jump has increased 6-8 inches," T.J. Carrie, a cornerback with the Oakland Raiders said in a press release. "In addition I've added over 80 pounds to my squat max."

Previously, a number of Olympic athletes announced they'd been using the device while preparing for the summer games. Several players on the Golden State Warriors team that made their way to the NBA Finals this year were also reportedly using a Halo device for brain stimulation.

The company is now selling the device to the public as well (they previously had only been taking pre-orders), currently at a price of $699, though they say that will rise to $749.

Is it worth it? We really don't know for sure - pro athletes and academics are interesting comparison points. Athletes are known for jumping on anything that might help them get an edge, it almost doesn't matter whether something works or whether it triggers the placebo effect, as long as it helps them improve (in a particularly interesting twist, some scientists have speculated that tDCS may enhance the already-powerful placebo effect). Academics, on the other hand, are known for their justifiable skepticism, not wanting to buy into or believe anything until they can see peer-reviewed data.

Chao says that eSports gamers (for whom lightning-fast reactions are essential) have shown interest and that perhaps they've seen the most interest from the US Military.

In a speech this summer, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter said the DOD had partnered with Halo so that special forces troops could test the devices. "These headsets will be used by teams from our special operations forces who will work with Halo to gauge how effective their device might be to improving marksmanship, close-quarters combat skills and overall strength training," said Carter.

For his part, Chao thinks we may see wide adoption of brain stimulating headsets. He says that in the future they may expand beyond athletics into other areas, like language learning. After all, if we do get to a point where it's widely accepted that brain stimulation enhances physical or cognitive performance, it would be a lot harder to turn down a dose of brain stimulation (hopefully we'll have good long-term safety data by then).

"Think about the things you don't even start because it takes too long to learn," says Chao. "One day you may think it's silly to try to learn anything that's difficult without neurostimulation."

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