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

Shooting electrical current into the brain for just 25 minutes reversed the decline in working memory that comes with aging, Boston University scientists reported 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.

By stimulating the brain in precise regions with alternating current, “we can bring back the superior working memory function you had when you were much younger,” psychology researcher Robert Reinhart of BU 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 is weighed, considered, manipulated, and fed into cognitive tasks, from following a conversation to doing mental math.

For their experiments, the BU scientists tested the working memories of 42 younger adults (aged 20 to 29) and 42 older ones (60 to 76). People saw an image of, say, an accordion, and three seconds later saw it or something else, and then were asked to indicate whether they’d seen it before.

Older adults answered correctly about 80 percent of the time, and younger ones 90 percent. While people were (presumably) trying to remember the accordion, EEGs monitored their brainwaves, finding significantly less synchronization of the oscillations in older adults than younger ones.

The younger participants then got sham stimulation with alternating current — they wore a cap with electrodes but no current — while older adults got the real deal, in each case for 25 minutes. It feels tingly, but only for 30 seconds or so, and no one could tell sham current from the real kind.

For real AC, the frequency was tuned to the individual brain, matching its natural oscillations so as to synchronize brain waves that, as people age, apparently fall out of sync. “We can tune [the stimulation] to your frequency, your sweet spot,” Reinhart said.

Almost immediately, older adults’ accuracy improved. It quickly reached their younger counterparts’ 90 percent, and maintained that level for 50 minutes after the stimulation stopped, when the scientists stopped taking measurements. EEG showed that, in the older adults, brain waves between the temporal and prefrontal cortex showed the same degree of synchrony as in younger ones.

Accuracy in the treated older adults wasn’t dipping after 50 minutes, Reinhart said: “My guess is that [the effect] lasts more than 50 minutes, and potentially a few hours.”

The idea that brain-wave synchronization underlies working memory goes back at least 20 years, with many labs finding evidence that oscillations of specific frequencies are necessary for working memory. “Populations of cells that synchronize their activity are believed to be transferring information,” Reinhart said — for working memory, from the temporal regions to the prefrontal cortex.

This is definitely a “don’t try this at home” experiment. Additional research will be needed to determine whether alternating-current stimulation can improve working memory in a durable way, how often it would have to be given, what targets and AC frequency are optimal, and whether the artificial lab task translates into real-world benefits.

Sharon Begley can be reached at sharon.begley@statnews.com. Follow her on Twitter @sxbegle. Follow Stat on Twitter: @statnews.

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