Zapping brain with precise electrical current boosts working memory in older adults, study finds

A participant taking a memory test as part of a study testing the use of alternating current to improve working memory in older people. Younger adults were used as controls. hooting electrical current into the brain for just 25 minutes reversed the decline in working memory that comes with aging, scientists reported on Monday. Although the researchers tested the effects on people for only 50 minutes, the finding offers hope for boosting a mental function that is so crucial for reasoning, everyday problem-solving, and planning that it has been called the foundation of intelligence. SBy stimulating the brain in precise regions with alternating current (AC), “we can bring back the superior working memory function you had when you were much younger,” psychology researcher Robert Reinhart of Boston University told reporters. “The negative age-related changes [in working memory] are not unchangeable.” For alternating current, delivered by electrodes embedded in a skull cap, to become a treatment for working memory deficits, however, it would have to overcome a long list of hurdles, starting with proof that it’s safe. But whether or not the findings, published in Nature Neuroscience, result in any practical applications, they provide some of the strongest evidence yet of why older adults aren’t as good at remembering a just-heard phone number or an address in a just-seen text: Brain circuits become functionally disconnected and fall out of synchrony. “This is a well-designed, rigorous study,” said neurophysiologist Michael Nitsche of Germany’s University of Göttingen, who reviewed the paper for the journal. “It adds important information about the causal relevance of alterations of [brainwaves] for age-dependent cognitive decline, and it shows that these alterations are reversible.” Working memory is the sketchpad of the mind, where information — just acquired or hauled up from long-term memory — is weighed, considered, manipulated, […]

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