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Zapping the brains of people over 60 with a mild electrical current in a form of memory that they performed in their 20s, a new study found.
Someday, people might visit clinics to boost that ability, which declines both in normal aging and in dementia like Alzheimer's disease, said researcher Robert Reinhart of Boston University.
The treatment is aiming at "working memory," the ability to hold information in mind for a matter of seconds as you perform a task, such as doing math in your head. Sometimes called the workbench or scratchpad of the mind, it's crucial for things like taking medications, paying bills, buying groceries or planning, Reinhart said.
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"It's where your consciousness lives … where you're working on information," he said.
The new study is not the first to show that stimulating the brain can boost working memory. But Reinhart, who reported the work Monday in the journal Nature Neuroscience, said it was notable for showing success in older people and the memory boosted persistence for almost an hour minimum after the brain stimulation ended.
One scientist who has reported electrical stimulation with electrical stimulation noted that the decline in this ability is normal. But "they removed the effects of these people," said Dr. Barry Gordon, a professor of neurology and cognitive science at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore.
"It's a superb first step" towards demonstrating a way to improve mental performance, said Gordon, who was not involved in the new study.
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Reinhart agreed that this research is needed before it can be formally tested as a treatment.
The electrical current is routed through a tight-fitting cap that also follows each subject's brainwaves. For study participants, that felt like a slight tingling, itching or poking sensation under the electrodes for about 30 seconds, Reinhart said. After that, the skin has been imperceptible.
The researchers' idea was to improve communication between the brain and the pre-frontal cortex in the front and the temporal cortex on the left side, because the rhythms of activity in those two regions had fallen out of sync with each other.
So the researchers applied to the two regions to nudge the activity cycles back into a matching pattern. The results provided in a new report that causes a breakdown in this communication, Reinhart said.
Part of the study included 42 participants in their 20s, plus 42 others aged 60 to 76. First they were tested on a measure of working memory. It involves viewing a picture, or a blank screen for a second screen, then a blank screen for a second picture, and a second picture that is slightly different. The subjects had to judge the same image or not.
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During a sham stimulation, the older group was less accurate than the younger participants. But during and after 25 minutes of real brain stimulation, they did well. The improvement lasted for at least another 50 minutes after the stimulation ended, at which point the researchers stopped testing. It is not clear how long it is, Reinhart said, but previous research suggests it might be more important for stimulation stops.
Researchers got the same result with a second group of 28 subjects over age 62.
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