Electrical jolts to brain restored memory of elderly to that of 20-year-old | Hacker News Reader

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

arstechnica.com

108 pointsevo_925 comments

> 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

Now that's how you do mad science.

Harrison Bergeron coming soon?

Honestly wouldn't surprise me with the emergence of grievance studies. We need to wake up about the truly bad ideas and stamp them out. Equality of opportunity verses equality of outcome is a real thing.

Who wants to co-found a new 'electric coffee' product?

Simply called "Jolt!"

Huh, wow. I was expecting this to be about deep-brain stimulation, but it looks like they used a non-invasive technique. And it sounds fascinating.

It looks like they analyzed peoples' theta and gamma waves in different regions of their brain, and tried to 'nudge' them towards staying in sync.

Theta/gamma/whatever waves are defined by the frequency at which the signal occurs, sort of like radio bands, and it sounds like this study presents the brain as a bunch of analog circuits which eventually develop stuff like noise and clock drift.

>Here we show that a core feature of cognitive decline may emerge from the temporal decoupling of neural codes theorized to constitute a flexible frontotemporal circuit for the monitoring and storage of memory contents of real-world information. The work supports theories of neurocognitive aging that propose cortical disconnection underlies age related cognitive decline...

Neat. Sounds like we need thicker wires.

If there's no side effects of long-term usage, I wonder how much power this needs - could you make a hat of some sort to just constantly provide the jolts to offset the limited duration of the benefits?

Perhaps the 90s dream of "space helmets" will come to fruition.

Google “darpa tDCS”. It’s been used to improve sniper performance by the DoD.

TLDR Low levels of current introduced through the brain increases synaptic plasticity.

in my neuroscience days there were some students who literally attached wet 9 volt batteries to their heads while studying :) this was inspired by work on EBS. i cannot say if it helped.

Stimulation doesn't need a lot of power, transcranial has been a topic of research for a long time. If you do it incorrectly, however your nervous system will build up an immunity by learning to ignore the external signals.

If you do it incorrectly, however your nervous system will build up an immunity by learning to ignore the external signals.

That sounds interesting. Where can I learn more?

Sorry this is such a late reply. The best publications I've found on this topic came from St. Jude Medical Research (The private medical device manufacturer not to be confused with the Hospital Chain) and it related to their line of neuro-stimulation devices back when they were still in development. I'm having trouble finding it right now or I would link some specific papers. The jist of it is that you need to use a psuedo-random modulation or the nervous system will eventually learn to ignore the external signals. Is applied at pretty much all levels of the nervous system from pain receptors to the brain but not at the same rate of developing immunity.

The Army Human Factors group has published a lot of material specific to various types of electrical/magnetic cranial stimulation. You can find some excellent stuff on DTIC.

That messy ribbon cable in the picture suggests that signal integrity or power isn't a big concern in this experiment. How hard would it be to replicate a system like this?

Re photo: the article's photo appears to be a stock photo. https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/epileptology-u...

Damn, that is lame.

Wow, good find! I was able to find the original article and it doesn't have a photo.

Getty images are getting sued for selling public domain images. That photo could be legitimately from the researchers with Getty just doing their thing

How does one get sued for selling public domain images?

Sounds like a lobotomy experiment. Successful at the time, but 50 years later doesn't seem like such a good idea anymore.

I guess as a last resort....kinda trying whatever for cancer after the doctors send you home to die. Just as you can improve it, you can also fry it (whatever is left anyway)

Here's a company using similar tech in a commercial product: https://www.haloneuro.com

Don’t psychedelics do the same as far as increasing plasticity goes?

"You know you’ve got the brain of a four-year-old child, and I bet he was glad to get rid of it." -- Groucho Marx, Horse Feathers, 1932

So which 20-year-old's memories do they get? Can they pick one with good memories? Where do I get in line?

It mentions it in the article - working (short term) memory

The article title isn't clear - is it saying that the state of the person's memories was 'restored' to what it was when they were 20 years old? Intuitively, that's just about what I would expect "electrical jolts to the brain" to accomplish, at least in the best case!

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