Weird Science always runs current through its brain before speed dating

Constantine Belias

A jolt to the brain, and suddenly everyone looks pretty. Our brains are driven by electrical activity, so it's no real surprise that altering the electrical environment can alter the brain's function. In fact, just passing a small current through the right areas of the brain can greatly improve performance on some tasks (a fact that's led one company to offer to zap your brain for better performance in games). But, practically, this should really only work with areas of the brain that are close to the surface; there's just too much insulating material between your skull and the deeper bits of your grey matter.

But some scientists found a clever way to work around that limitation. Looking at the brain's wiring diagram, they realized that there are many connections between the midbrain, which ends up deep inside the skull, and the prefrontal cortex, which is right near the surface. So, a bit of current to the prefrontal cortex could potentially activate areas buried in the midbrain. And indeed it did, with a rather remarkably specific result: everyone started looking pretty. The current caused a "increases in participants’ appraisals of facial attractiveness." So, whether or not beer goggles actually exist, electric goggles certainly could.

If a jolt to your brain doesn't do it, then maybe a robotic frog will. Animal courtship displays can be an elaborate mixture of visuals, sounds, and rituals. But how important are the individual parts? To find out, researchers turned to the túngara frog, where males use a two-part vocalization performed while inflating a large vocal sac on their necks. If you play the two calls separated by too much time, females show no interest, presumably because they don't think the sounds are connected. But the vocal incompetence can be rescued with a robotic frog. If the robot inflates its vocal sac in the awkward gap between the two sounds, the females will realize they're connected and interpret them properly as a mating call.