People’s ability to remember fades with age — but one day, researchers might be able to use a simple, drug-free method to buck this trend.
In a study published on 22 August in Nature Neuroscience, Robert Reinhart, a cognitive neuroscientist at Boston University in Massachusetts, and his colleagues demonstrate that zapping the brains of adults aged over 65 with weak electrical currents repeatedly over several days led to memory improvements that persisted for up to a month.
Using a non-invasive method of stimulating the brain known as transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS), which delivers electrical currents through electrodes on the surface of the scalp, Reinhart’s team conducted a series of experiments on 150 people aged between 65 and 88.
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Low-frequency zaps to the inferior parietal lobe enhanced participants’ recall of items later in the lists, which involves working memory. Participants’ memory performance improved over the four days — and the gains persisted even a month later.
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Several questions remain. How far the benefits of the brain stimulation can be generalized to other types of memory tasks and whether memory improvements can persist for longer than a month are two key issues that the team plans to address in future studies, says co-author Shrey Grover, a cognitive neuroscientist in Reinhart’s laboratory.
