Brain zaps help boost memory in people over

Brain zaps help boost memory in people over

Zapping the brains of people over 60 with a light electric current can improve a form of memory - enough to make them perform like 20-year-olds - scientists say

Someday, people may visit clinics to boost that ability, which declines both in normal ageing and in dementias like Alzheimer's disease, said Robert Reinhart, researcher at Boston University in the US.

The treatment is aimed at "working memory", the ability to hold information in mind for a matter of seconds as you do a task, such as doing math in your head.

Sometimes called the workbench or scratchpad of the mind, it's important for things like taking drugs, paying bills, buying groceries or planning, Reinhart said in a statement.

The study is not the first to show

The research, published in the journalNature Neuroscience, showed success in older people, and because the memory boost was persisted for nearly an hour.

"It's a superb first step" toward displaying a way to improve mental performance, said Barry Gordon, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, who was not involved in the study.

More research is needed before it can be formally tested as a treatment, researchers said.

The electric current was administered through a tight-fitting cap that also monitored every subject's brainwaves.

For study participants, that currently feels like a little tingling, itching or poking sensation under the electrodes for about 30 seconds, Reinhart said.

The researchers' idea was to improve communication between the brain's prefrontal cortex in the front and the temporal cortex on the left side, as those two areas of activity of rhythms one another with sync without out

So the researchers applied the current to those two regions The results provided new evidence that a breakdown in that communication causes the loss of working memory with age, Reinhart said.

Part of the study included 42 participants in their 20s, plus 42 others aged 60 to 76. First they were tested on a measure of working memory.

It involved viewing an image such as a harmonica or broken egg on a computer screen, then a blank screen for three seconds, and then a second image that was either identical to the first or slightly modified.

The subjects had to judge

During a sham stimulation, the old group was less accurate than the younger participants. However, during and after 25 minutes of real brain stimulation, they did as well.

The improvement lasted for at least 50 minutes after the stimulation ended, at which point the researchers stopped testing.

Reinhart said, but the previous research suggests that stimulation stops after five hours or more for it.

Researchers got the same result with a second group of 28 subjects over age 62.