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(Credit: Arkela / shutterstock)
It's not just you. As you get older, it's harder and harder to remember the numbers of a phone number or to calculate the tip to leave without resorting to an app. Our so-called "working memory" is responsible for keeping this type of information at the forefront of the mind. And it fades with age.
Researchers have found that stimulation of the brain by weak electrical currents can restore the working memory of older adults. This discovery lays the foundation for the fight against the decline of memory with age, explain the researchers.
"We can bring back the higher memory function of work than you had when you were much younger," said at a press conference Robert Reinhart, neuroscientist at Boston University. "We show that by using this type of stimulation, we can reconnect or resynchronize these defective brain circuits into the brains of the elderly, and then quickly improve their working memory function."
Whippersnappers working
The researchers recruited people aged 20, 60, and 70 to participate in the study. The participants performed a series of computer-aided working memory tests by wearing an EEG cap, a headgear made like a rugby helmet and incorporating electrodes that recorded the subject's brain activity.
Unsurprisingly, younger participants were significantly faster and more accurate than older subjects. However, analysis of the participant's brain activity showed that two types of brain waves synchronize in young adults during testing, but not in older people. The discovery implies that working memory is decreasing in the elderly because of disconnected brain circuits, Reinhart said.
Stimulate synchronization
Next, the researchers asked the older participants to repeat the working memory tests. This time, the EEG caps also had electrodes at the front and left side of the head that stimulated participants' brains by sending them very weak electrical currents for the first 25 minutes of memory tasks. Stimulation causes a tingling, itching, or tingling sensation under the electrodes, but the sensation disappears after about 30 seconds, Reinhart said. The researchers continued to monitor participants' brain activity and progress in the tasks of working memory for another 20 minutes after brain stimulation.
The stimulation not only resynchronized the brain activity of the elderly participant, Reinhart and the team's report Monday in the newspaper Nature Neuroscience, but also improves their performance on the working memory task. The accuracy of older participants on the tests is now comparable to that of the young participant. The memory stimulation lasted 50 minutes after the end of the stimulation and can last longer. The researchers ended the experiment at this time.
"These findings are important because they not only give us new insights into the brain fundamentals of the age-related decline of working memory, but they also show us that negative age-related changes do not occur. are not immutable, "said Reinhart.
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