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Electrical jolts to brain restored memory of elderly to that of 20-year-old

Bullet Club

Banned
Electrical jolts to brain restored memory of elderly to that of 20-year-old

Older adults did better on a memory test, but real-world benefits are unclear.

Gentle jolts of alternating current to the brain restored the waning working memories of older adults (aged 60 to 76 years old) to performance levels seen in younger adults (aged 20 to 29)—at least for a little under an hour.

The scalp-delivered electrical bursts appeared to resync brain waves across areas of the noggin important for high-level thinking and memory—the prefrontal and temporal cortex—which appeared to have fallen out of step over the years. The results, published Monday in Nature Neuroscience, support the idea that out-of-sync ripples of electrical activity from neurons firing in different areas of the brain may help spark gradual declines in working memory during aging, as well as memory deterioration associated with dementias, such as Alzheimer’s. Moreover, the finding generates some early buzz that such non-invasive brain stimulation may one day, in the distant future, be used as a therapy for such memory issues.

The authors of the study, Boston University researchers Robert Reinhart and John Nguyen, concluded that “by customizing electrical stimulation to individual network dynamics it may be possible to influence putative signatures of intra- and inter-regional functional connectivity, and rapidly boost working-memory function in older adults.”

In their exploratory trial, Reinhart and Nguyen had 42 older adults flex their working memories—that is, their short-term recall involved in processing and planning. The researchers used a spot-the-difference-style memory test in which subjects saw a high-quality picture of an object, texture, or color, then got a flash of a blank image for a fraction of a second, then another image, which was either identical to the first image or slightly altered.

Before the brain stimulation, older adults could spot differences with an 80-percent accuracy rate. A separate group of 42 younger people had an accuracy rate around 90 percent. The researchers then stimulated the brains of the older adults for 25 minutes, while the younger group got a sham treatment—they wore an electrode cap but received no brain-zapping current. The brain stimulation that the older adults experienced, meanwhile, was tuned specifically to their individual brains' rhythms.

After around 10 minutes of stimulation, the older group saw an improvement in accuracy rate on the test, reaching the younger group's 90-percent accuracy rate. That improvement lasted through the 50-minute memory test.

In a subsequent experiment, the researchers tried to reverse the finding: they used brain stimulation designed to desynchronize waves in young participants, which caused the subjects to do worse on the memory test.

While the authors are encouraged that zaps to sync brain waves could potentially be used as a therapy, other experts called for caution, noting that the study was small and needed to be replicated. Also, it remains unclear if such small gains on a memory game would translate to clinical or “real world” benefits for those suffering memory issues

Source: Ars Technica
 
Fascinating.

This story, and similar ones, hit me on a personal level because when I was hospitalized for severe panic and anxiety disorders one of the first thing the first doctor told me is that if medicine fails there is something called "ESD" where basically they shock me into a seizure and when I recover my brain is "reset," that's basically how he framed it. He claimed it had like 75 percent success rate for treating severe panic and anxiety.

Obviously my first reaction was "no fuckin way" and just thinking about that kind of thing didn't help my panic/anxiety as this was the first day in the ward after a really stressful night before that led me there.

It's been two months since that 8 day psychiatric hold and I am not improving at all, some days are worse, and the meds just seem to be all over the place results wise. I've thought about the electric shock treatment and maybe it is something I have to bring up to my doctor when I see him at the end of the month. Seems scary as fuck but apparently there are numerous accepted uses of electric jolts/shocks treating issues related to the brain.

I dunno man. Crazy stuff
 

Mista

Banned
by customizing electrical stimulation to individual network dynamics it may be possible to influence putative signatures of intra- and inter-regional functional connectivity, and rapidly boost working-memory function in older adults.”
Interesting. So it’s equivalent to a hard reset. What if this process makes you forget more than you remember in the long run?
 
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