Brain Stimulation Could Be Helpful in Sharpening Aging Memory

It is a sad part of our life that our memory becomes weak as we age. The aging brains usually struggle a lot with working memory. Working memory is the memory that lets us store useful bits of info for some time i.e. seconds and use this info for solving problems, planning things, making decisions, etc. Now, researchers are trying to know in depth about the reasons why memory fades with age and are making efforts to see if this could be reversed or at least slowed down.

As we start aging, the brain areas start to fall out of the step and then these tightly linked brain areas won’t be in the healthy condition again. One of the leading hypotheses on this subject says that memory works by the far-flung brain areas that synchronously fire. Communication is tight when the two areas are on the same wavelength of the brain and then the working memory works smoothly.

As per a study in Nature Neuroscience, an accurate form of electrical stimulation when applied to the scalp can arrange these brain areas synchronously again. For this experiment, transcranial brain stimulation is applied to the brain through a skullcap. This stimulation provides an alternating current to some neurons bring them to a particular wavelength. When these electrical hands synchronize with the mismatched brain areas, it has been observed in some cases that the memory of the older adults was improving like that of the younger adults. The effect of the stimulation lasted for about 50 minutes.

A neuroscientist from Boston University, named Robert Reinhart said that this experiment made the brain of an older adult of age 70 years look like that of the 20-year-old. He added that transcranial stimulation is successful in bringing the brain areas back into synchronization. A neuroscientist at the University of Melbourne named Jared Cooney Horvath said that he finds this study quite compelling. He added that he wanted to dislike the papers of this study, but then found it interesting.