Scientists Develop Nasal Spray That Improves Memory | Hacker News Reader

Scientists Develop Nasal Spray That Improves Memory

sciencedaily.com

39 pointsfogus26 comments

"If a nasal spray can improve memory, perhaps we're on our way to giving some folks a whiff of common sense, such as accepting the realities of evolution,"

I think the newsworthiness of the article may be overshadowed by this neutron-bomb of a statement. Maybe it was taken out of context? :-)

Seriously. I thought the whole article was interesting, but then I read that and I was like "Are you kidding me?". I love the theory of evolution and all... but why toss it in their randomly... it made no sense whatsoever. It definitely discredited the article and the scientists involved.

"Maybe it will help us achieve our end goal and people will realize that it's stupid to vote Democrat!" would have been comparable...

> It definitely discredited the article and the scientists involved.

How can a statement by the editor of a journal who didn't have anything to do with the study beyond publishing it discredit the scientists that did the research? Guilt by association is well established as a logical fallacy.

> Guilt by association is well established as a logical fallacy.

Yes but there is a significant portion of the population that doesn't understand this. They are indeed likely to give the both the article and the underlying research much less credit.

> Guilt by association is well established as a logical fallacy.

It depends on your context. The underlying proposition is unaffected by its supporters but your 'best guess' view of it based on limited information needs to take this into consideration. Apart from unreliable sources I'm sure there are some people who pass on information which is anti-correlated with the truth. A biblical creationist is likely to be strongly attracted to exactly research that an evolutionist would dismiss. Both of these two would be right in pre-judging any research put forward by the other as have a reduced probability of being valid according to their views of reality.

Yeah, when I saw that I had to check again to see if I was reading The Onion or something.

In the article, they give the example of students using this the night before a test. On this subject, it's interesting to me how so many people have simply accepted the use of drugs for improving exam performance. I can't be the only one who thinks it's ludicrous that we are now drugging ourselves to satisfy some arbitrary, artificial tests and that this whole situation is supposed to be ok.

Also, I wonder what the side effects are.

"...promises to give late night cram sessions a major boost, if a good night's sleep follows."

These are mutually exclusive, at least from my experience.

Ah well, here's an opportunity for someone to develop a solution that will combine both the memory spray and a time-delayed sleeping medication!

Red Bull gives you Wiings..(now with added memory boost so your grades follow you skyward)

Also, maybe it's a placebo aimed at getting students to sleep well before an exam?

So, uh, time-to-market? I needed this yesterday. ;)

It seems that you can purchase interleukin-6 from Cayman in bulk, 96 wells for about $350.

Nootropics are an interesting legal and academic subject. The question is: will this be fully legal and open or prescribed and scheduled only to those with learning disorders? I can easily see this being banned from use on the SAT, GMAT and academia in general. Similar (and often abused) nootropics include Adderall (amphetamine salts) and Ritalin (methylphenidate) which are DEA/FDA Schedule II, both of which are prescribed for ADHD and severe narcolepsy, as is concentration drug Provigil (modafinil) under Schedule IV.

Either the government (and perhaps academia) will go its regular course and prevent individuals from gaining an unfair edge by scheduling it, or there may be a slim chance of it being OTC. I have a gut feeling it's going to get scheduled.

Scheduling has vastly more to do with abuse potential than with preventing individuals from "gaining an unfair edge".

Can someone in the know explain how scheduling works? And whether pharma incentives affect the process?

I thought we already had stuff we could snort to improve our memory, some of it even legal!

http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=...

Desmopressin is available over the Internet for about $25 a bottle. As a nasal spray it can stimulate the hypothalamus and improve memory retention. It's dangerous, though, because it interferes with normal water retention.

Yeah, when I saw the subject line I thought the article was going to be about vasopressin/desmopressin. Not only does it improve memory retention, you don't keep having to take bathroom breaks during lectures.

Seriously, though, it's probably not a good idea to throw diuretic hormones out of balance unless you really know what you're doing.

"Seriously, though, it's probably not a good idea to throw diuretic hormones out of balance unless you really know what you're doing."

And it really does something for you. I tried Vasopressin in the '80s, and the effects weren't worth the trouble to acquire and use it.

Doing a chemical run-around of 4 billion years of brain filtering evolution might not be the best idea. There might be a reason you're having a hard time remembering that shit ... it might just be shit.

Food. Exercise. Sleep. Skip the gimmicks.

there was not description of how test was conducted but sample of 17 for 2 nights does not make the results very confident to me. the half that took the spray might have randomly having better memory unless they switched them next night.

Check the details of this reported result against these criteria for scientific studies:

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

Too bad you can't actually check against the full academic report unless you pay or happen to have a university that pays for access to the publications.

http://www.fasebj.org/cgi/content/abstract/23/10/3629

I am lucky to have such a university. From the "Results" section, for those who are curious:

Recall of emotional texts was clearly superior to that of neutral texts, both at learning (45.1+/-2.4% of the emotional texts vs. 26.4+/-1.7% of the neutral texts correctly recalled; P<0.001) and at retrieval testing (41.3+/-2.4 vs. 22.2+/-1.7%; P<0.001). With IL-6 intrana- sally administered before sleep, subjects recalled more content words from emotional texts at retrieval testing after sleep compared with placebo (P<0.03) (Fig. 2A), whereas the recall of content words from neutral texts was comparable with both treatment conditions (P>0.32; P<0.03 for the IL-6/placebo x emotional/ neutral interaction). Memory performance on the visuospatial 2-D object-location memory task measured in the number of correctly recalled matching card locations and procedural finger sequence-tapping task measured in the accuracy of the sequences were not affected by IL-6 (P>0.33 for all comparisons) (Table 1).

Plus more...email me if you're really interested.

sciencedaily.com - no exactly HN material

Try pepper spray.

You will never forget. ;-)

Oh my... I was aiming for funny.

But I also bet it's accurate.

Yes, pain is strongly linked to memory, which is why makes such an effective teaching a disciplinary aid. However, it is contextual and sniffing pepper spray might make you remember the wrong thing. ;)

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