Slight electrical shock improves memory; Research

brainResearchers have found that small electrical shocks positively affect the memory.

This research has been done by researchers from University of California at Los Angeles and published online in February 9 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine.

Researchers have worked on the seven patients of epilepsy and found that slight electrical shock to the brain just before learning the new task could help them in strengthening the memory. They implanted the pacemaker devices referred to as deep brain stimulators, made by Medtronic and St. Jude Medical, under the skin in the chest area with wires going up the neck and connected to tiny electrodes implanted deep in the brain that can produce electrical impulses.

Researchers focused on the part of the brain called as entorhinal cortex that helps in formation and storage of memories. According to scientists, memories pass through this point before their storage in the hippocampus, which is the brain’s chief memory center.

“When we stimulated the hippocampus itself, there was not an effect. It was really stimulation in the gateway to the hippocampus – the entorhinal cortex – where we got the beneficial effect in terms of memory,” Dr. Itzhak Fried, professor of neurosurgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, who worked on the study, said.

Researchers have written,

An important aspect of the memory-enhancing stimulation in this study was its application during the learning phase. This suggests that with the use of neuroprosthetic devices aimed at cognitive enhancement, stimulation may not need to be applied continuously but only when patients are attempting to learn important information.

Researchers have suggested that these types of light shocks could help the patients of Alzheimer’s disease.

Reference:

Nanthia Suthana, Ph.D., Zulfi Haneef, M.D., John Stern, M.D., Roy Mukamel, Ph.D., Eric Behnke, B.S., Barbara Knowlton, Ph.D., and Itzhak Fried, M.D., Ph.D., (2012). Memory Enhancement and Deep-Brain Stimulation of the Entorhinal Area. The New England Journal of Medicine, 366:502-510.

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