from the zapping-the-elderly-for-science dept.
Zapping Elderly Brains with Electricity Improves Short-term Memory—for Almost an Hour
despite its critical role, working memory is a fragile cognitive resource that declines with age, Reinhart says. Previous studies had suggested that reduced working-memory performance in the elderly is linked to uncoupled activity in different brain areas. So Reinhart and his team set out to test whether recoupling brain waves in older adults could boost the brain's ability to temporarily store information.
To do so, the researchers used jolts of weak electrical current to synchronize waves in the prefrontal and temporal cortex—two brain areas critical for cognition—and applied the current to the scalps of 42 healthy people in their 60s and 70s who showed no signs of decline in mental ability. Before their brains were zapped, participants looked at a series of images: an everyday object, followed briefly by a blank screen, and then either an identical or a modified version of the same object. The goal was to spot whether the two images were different.
Then the participants took the test again, while their brains were stimulated with a current. After about 25 minutes of applying electricity, participants were on average more accurate at identifying changes in the images than they were before the stimulation. Following stimulation, their performance in the test was indistinguishable from that of a group of 42 people in their 20s.
tl;dr;: electrocute grandpa, then ask him where he hid his will.
Transcranial Brain Stimulation Could Improve Working Memory
Scientists Test Whether Brain Stimulation Could Help Sharpen Aging Memory
One leading hypothesis contends that working memory works by far-flung brain areas firing synchronously. When two areas are on the same brain wavelength, communication is tight, and working memory functions seamlessly.
But as we age, these brain areas start falling out of step, and these once tightly linked brain areas are no longer on the same page. A study published Monday in [DOI: 10.1038/s41593-019-0371-x] [DX] Nature Neuroscience demonstrates a link between these mismatched brain rhythms and declines in working memory in older adults and shows that a precise form of electrical stimulation applied to the scalp can coax these brain areas back into sync.
Applied to the brain via a skullcap studded with electrodes, an experimental form of transcranial brain stimulation delivers alternating current to a small group of neurons to nudge them to a specific wavelength. Imagine two giant pendulums swinging at different rates. The brain stimulation nudges each pendulum with a pair of electrical hands pushing at the same frequency, causing them to sync up and swing synchronously.
Also at The Guardian.
Related: Memory Enhancement Using Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS)
Transcranial Direct-Current Stimulation Could Speed Learning by 40%
Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation Could Reduce People's Intentions to Commit Violence
Scientists Connect 3 Actual Human Brains (Then Make Them Play Tetris)
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Using a 30-year-old brain stimulation technique, scientists have successfully boosted memory performance in healthy adults by zapping a specific bunch of neurons. While it’s unclear at this stage whether the effects will be long-lasting, the researchers are hopeful it could one day be used to treat patients with conditions that affect memory, such as Alzheimer’s. The study has been published in Science.
Brain zapping might sound horrifying, but transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a non-invasive procedure that’s been studied as a potential treatment for various disorders since the 1990s. TMS involves using magnets that are carefully positioned on the scalp to induce weak electric fields; these transient fields then stimulate nearby neurons in the outer layer of the brain called the cortex. Although researchers aren’t exactly sure why it works, it does appear to have positive effects on some patients with depression. The possibility that this technique could affect neuronal circuits involved in memory, however, had not been previously investigated.
Here is a link to the original Northwestern University release.
HRL Laboratories (a research center owned by General Motors and Boeing) has found that transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS) can improve learning:
Done in collaboration with McGill University in Montreal and Soterix Medical in New York, the study was sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA)'s Restoring Active Memory (RAM) program. Published October 12, 2017, in the journal Current Biology, tDCS in animals showed learning accelerated by about 40% when given 2 mA noninvasively to the prefrontal cortex without increased neuronal firing. This study showed it was modulated connectivity between brain areas, not neuron firing rates, that accounted for the increased learning speed.
The behavioral task in this experiment was associative learning. The macaques had to learn arbitrary associations between a visual stimulus and a location where they would get a reward—a visual foraging task. The initial foraging trials took about 15 seconds, and once the animal learned the location of the reward, it took approximately 2 seconds to recall and find the target. Subjects in the control condition required an average of 22 trials to learn to obtain the reward right way[sic]. With tDCS they required an average of 12 trials.
"In this experiment we targeted the prefrontal cortex with individualized non-invasive stimulation montages," said Dr. Praveen Pilly, HRL's principal investigator on the study. "That is the region that controls many executive functions including decision-making, cognitive control, and contextual memory retrieval. It is connected to almost all the other cortical areas of the brain, and stimulating it has widespread effects. It is also the target of choice in most published behavioral enhancement studies and case studies with transcranial stimulation. We placed the tDCS electrodes on the scalp in both our control and stimulation conditions. The behavioral effect was revealed when they learned to find the reward faster."
Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation Facilitates Associative Learning and Alters Functional Connectivity in the Primate Brain (DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2017.09.020) (DX)
Previously: Cognitive Enhancement May Not be All It's Cracked Up To Be.
Zapping Your Brain may Reduce Depression, Ease Pain
Electrical brain stimulation may help reduce violent crime in future – study
It could be a shocking way to treat future criminals. Scientists have found that a session of electrical brain stimulation can reduce people's intentions to commit assaults, and raise their moral awareness.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore explored the potential for brain stimulation to combat crime after noting that impairment in a part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex has been linked to violent acts.
They recruited 86 healthy adults and gave half of them 20 minutes of brain stimulation before asking the whole group to read two hypothetical scenarios, one describing a physical assault, the other a sexual assault. Immediately afterwards, the participants were asked to rate the likelihood that they might behave as the protagonist had in the stories.
For those who had their brains zapped, the expressed likelihood of carrying out the physical and sexual assaults was 47% and 70% lower respectively than those who did not have brain stimulation. In the first scenario, Chris smashes a bottle over Joe's head for chatting up his girlfriend, and in the second, a night of intimate foreplay leads to date rape.
[...] Using a procedure called transcranial direct current stimulation, or tDCS, [Prof. Olivia] Choy and her colleagues Adrian Raine and Roy Hamilton at the University of Pennsylvania, delivered a 2 milliAmp current to the prefrontal cortex of volunteers to boost the region's activity.
Stimulation of the Prefrontal Cortex Reduces Intentions to Commit Aggression: A Randomized, Double-Blind, Placebo-Controlled, Stratified, Parallel-Group Trial (DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3317-17.2018) (DX)
Related: How Brain Implants (and Other Technology) Could Make the Death Penalty Obsolete
Study Uses Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation to Improve Piloting Abilities
Transcranial Direct-Current Stimulation Could Speed Learning by 40%
Stanford Scientists Use Electric Jolts to Prevent Impulsive Behavior
Washington State Fusion Center Accidentally Releases Records on Remote Mind Control
Neuroscientists behind the project called it "BrainNet", a "multi-person non-invasive direct brain-to-brain interface for collaborative problem solving".
In layman's terms, researchers from the University of Washington and Carnegie Mellon University figured out a way to connect three brains (still attached to their human hosts!) and have the owners of said brains make collective choices together without speaking.
And they tested it by playing Tetris. Because of course they did.
The team used "electroencephalograms" (EEGs) to record electric impulses from two human brains and "transcranial magnetic stimulation" (TMS) to deliver information to a third brain. The end result: an interface that allowed three human subjects to collaborate and solve Tetris problems using brain-to-brain communication.
The article doesn't say how much calibration they had to perform for each group of test subjects, to make sure they were isolating the correct signal from the senders' brains.
(Score: 4, Touché) by black6host on Wednesday April 10 2019, @02:18PM (1 child)
You vill remember the images or ve vill shock you again!
(Score: 2) by arslan on Thursday April 11 2019, @01:44AM
YOU wa SHOCK! ai de sora ga ochite kuru!
YOU wa SHOCK! ore no mune ni ochite kuru!
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Wednesday April 10 2019, @02:36PM (1 child)
Read this a while back about using it to treat Alzheimer's and dementia.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5992378/ [nih.gov]
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 10 2019, @10:10PM
I have worked on a similar box purported to treat depression.
What it was really used for, though, was a conduit to route insurance monies to investment groups.
About 90% of its code had to do with accounting for its use. The actual stimulation signal was provided by a gated counter output; highly patented. But remember, proving something actually does something is not required to get a patent.
I consider it the modern day equivalent of the witch doctor, aka faith healer.
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Wednesday April 10 2019, @02:48PM (3 children)
I'm curious what affect this might have when one has been drinking....
We could have a massive sample on a Friday night ;-)
(Score: 3, Funny) by RS3 on Wednesday April 10 2019, @04:46PM (2 children)
Well, alcohol is flammable, and electricity can be an igniter, so maybe stand back a bit while observing this experiment, wear goggles, Nomex suit, gloves...
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 10 2019, @07:43PM (1 child)
So maybe keep them away from high school baseball fields? [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday April 10 2019, @08:48PM
That all depends on your goal.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ikanreed on Wednesday April 10 2019, @03:31PM (2 children)
Nature Neuroscience is pretty good about not taking papers that fail to adequately control. Most of the replication crisis lives in smaller psych journals.
They did several clever things to prove specifically their hypothesis.
1. A sham stimulation group that showed no improvement
2. Younger sham group to establish a "target" performance level in their older experimental group, because experimental group performance different from that target would also disprove their hypothesis that their TCS specifically reversed age-related effects.
3. They ran a second experiment where they did similar stimulation but targeted at a different region of the brain, finding no improvement.
4. They ran a stimulation to desynchonize younger participants, and found their performance fell to the older adult levels.
It's good experimental science.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday April 10 2019, @05:33PM (1 child)
I see what you're doing with the science inb4's and I like it.
(at least, I think that's been you)
(Score: 3, Funny) by ikanreed on Wednesday April 10 2019, @05:48PM
Everytime someone reads the methodology section, an angel gets its wings.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday April 10 2019, @04:48PM (2 children)
I am reminded of some Future Poll ideas [soylentnews.org] which I have suggested, along the lines of . . . which glows brightest.
What doesn't kill me makes me weaker for next time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 10 2019, @04:56PM (1 child)
Do I attach the jumper cables to the ears?
(Score: 2, Offtopic) by aristarchus on Wednesday April 10 2019, @07:30PM
A bit lower, . . .
http://pontus.mentalfloss.com/sites/default/files/electric_belt.jpg [mentalfloss.com]
1902 technology! Oh, you said "transcranial", not "transscrotal"? My mistake.
Could we have more aristarchus submissions? Or more about Homeopathy? I love the smell of science in the morning.