After four days of non-invasive electrical stimulation, trial participants were better at recalling information for up to a month.
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., 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.
“Their results look very promising,” says Ines Violante, a neuroscientist at the University of Surrey in Guildford, UK. “They really took advantage of the cumulative knowledge within the field.”Using a non-invasive method of stimulating the brain known as transcranial alternating current stimulation , 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.
Changing frequencies and brain regions , or using a ‘sham’ protocol in which the electrical currents were applied only briefly at the beginning and end of the task to mimic the sensation of brain stimulation, did not boost memory.“I was both impressed and surprised by this by this paper,” says Simon Hanslmayr, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Glasgow, UK.
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