Administering a small electrical charge to the brain may help an individual improve his math skills, a study said.

Researchers say this could help in restoring numerical skills in people suffering from stroke and could also potentially improve the number skills among the general population.

The study by Roi Cohen Kadosh, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, has found that the brain's math workshop appears to be the right side of the parietal lobe.

This region sits below the crown of the head. Kadosh conducted an experiment with 15 university students and trained them to learn math symbols. Initially they had to guess the symbols but during the training they remembered their correct guesses.

Students who got 20 minutes of positive electric current to their brains per day performed best on the test, the team said in Current Biology. According to Kadosh, electrically stimulating the brain could help patients recover word recognition and motor control after strokes, besides improving numerical skills.

"It is not clear whether this effect is really specific to number learning or would generalize to any new stimuli, ... [but] this is obviously an important question for future studies, said Silke Göbel, a psychologist at the University of York in the United Kingdom.