Excerpt from the article in NPR:
People with a brain injury or dementia often struggle to remember simple things, like names or places. In research published Thursday in the journal Current Biology, scientists have shown it may be possible to improve this sort of memory using tiny pulses of electricity — if they're properly timed.
A typical person's ability to remember things tends to vary a lot, says Michael Kahana, who directs the computational memory lab at the University of Pennsylvania.
"Some days we're at the top of our game," he says, "and some days we're just off our game."
That's also true for people whose memory has been impaired — by a brain injury or disease. So Kahana wondered whether there might be some way to help these people perform at their peak level all the time.
"If they could just move their game up so that every day was their best day, then it would really significantly change their quality of life," Kahana says.
He and a team of researchers thought they might be able to do this by stimulating memory circuits in the brain. They tried the approach with a group of patients who had severe epilepsy.
Read the full article in NPR...
