Excerpt from the article in Quanta Magazine:
For the past two decades, neuroscientists have been treating movement and neurological disorders with deep brain stimulation, a technique in which electrodes planted in specific regions of the brain send electrical impulses through targeted neural circuitry. More recently, they’ve been trying brain stimulation to enhance memory as well — but with mixed results. In a study appearing today in Nature Communications, however, a team of researchers succeeded at enhancing memory more reliably, by stimulating an area of the brain mostly ignored in earlier studies and by applying that stimulation more strategically and selectively.
The discovery could someday have important clinical applications for treating Alzheimer’s disease and other conditions that involve memory impairment. But in the short run, it is also important for what it shows about the significance of a region on the brain’s outer surface, the left lateral temporal cortex, to memory function. “This study reinforces the wisdom that this part of the brain is very important for making the glue that consolidates learned information,” said György Buzsáki, a neuroscientist at the New York University School of Medicine who was not involved with the work.
A group led by Michael Kahana, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, and Daniel Rizzuto, Penn’s director of cognitive neuromodulation at the time, conducted the experiment in patients with epilepsy whose treatment already involved invasive neurosurgical procedures. As the patients were shown a series of words they would be asked to remember later, the researchers recorded activity in several regions of their brains. They then used a machine-learning algorithm to build a “memory model” for each individual: It could read a patient’s neural response — more specifically, changing patterns of low- and high-frequency activity throughout the memory network — when first presented with a word, and predict how likely he or she was to remember it. If the model predicted the patient had more than a 50 percent chance of forgetting, it triggered stimulation to the left lateral temporal cortex, a surface area of the brain known to be active during memory tasks, including ones related to language.
Read the rest of the article in Quanta Magazine...
