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How Flashing Lights and Pink Noise Might Banish Alzheimer’s, Improve Memory, and More

February 28, 2018

Neuroscientists are getting excited about non-invasive procedures to tune the brain’s natural oscillations

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How Flashing Lights and Pink Noise Might Banish Alzheimer’s, Improve Memory, and More

Wednesday, February 28th, 2018

In March 2015, Li-Huei Tsai set up a tiny disco for some of the mice in her laboratory. For an hour each day, she placed them in a box lit only by a flickering strobe. The mice — which had been engineered to produce plaques of the peptide amyloid-β in the brain, a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease — crawled about curiously. When Tsai later dissected them, those that had been to the mini dance parties had significantly lower levels of plaque than mice that had spent the same time in the dark¹.

Tsai, a neuroscientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, says she checked the result; then checked it again. “For the longest time, I didn’t believe it,” she says. Her team had managed to clear amyloid from part of the brain with a flickering light. The strobe was tuned to 40 hertz and was designed to manipulate the rodents’ brainwaves, triggering a host of biological effects that eliminated the plaque-forming proteins. Although promising findings in mouse models of Alzheimer’s disease have been notoriously difficult to replicate in humans, the experiment offered some tantalizing possibilities. “The result was so mind-boggling and so robust, it took a while for the idea to sink in, but we knew we needed to work out a way of trying out the same thing in humans,” Tsai says.

Image: By Phrontis – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12546976

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Nature

Science Debate: Should We Embrace an Enhanced Future?

September 11, 2017

Caffeine and smart phones might not strike most people as human enhancements, but in changing how we use our bodies and brains, they are exactly that. They improve our subjective wellbeing and facilitate our meeting day-to-day life goals

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Science Debate: Should We Embrace an Enhanced Future?

Monday, September 11th, 2017

The rather more futuristic-sounding concept of transhumanism – the idea that every human should have the right to enhance themselves beyond the so-called “norm” through science and technology – was the subject under scrutiny at a debate this week at the British Science Association Festival in Brighton.

The big question being posed: do we all have the right to enhance our bodies as technology and pharmaceuticals will allow, or is that immoral? As the probably over-used term has it, would that be “playing God”? And who gets to decide?

First we should be frank about what is a correction – a medical fix – and what is an enhancement.

Image via Flickr Some rights reserved by anieto2k

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BBCNews

Chess Study Revives Debate Over Cognition-Enhancing Drugs

August 17, 2017

A placebo-controlled study suggesting that cognition-enhancing drugs (CEs) can improve a chess player’s performance and a related survey indicating that nearly 10% of ranked German chess players have taken them during competition have thrown the spotlight once again on “smart pills,” their purported benefits, and uncharted dangers

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Chess Study Revives Debate Over Cognition-Enhancing Drugs

Thursday, August 17th, 2017

About a decade ago, reports filled the general and scientific media about the illicit use of such CEs as methylphenidate, a stimulant used to treat attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and modafinil, a wakefulness agent used to treat narcolepsy, sleep apnea, and shift work disorder, by students and others who were taking them to improve performance on examinations or in the workplace. There were stories about the risks and ethics of such behavior, countered by calls from some neuroscientists for a more open mind about the drugs and their positive side. The field of brain augmentation was even given a chic new name, cosmetic neurology.

While media attention has since waned, the underground use of CEs seemingly has not. A 2013 survey found that 19.9% of the 1105 German surgeons who responded admitted to having taken a prescription or illicit drug to enhance cognition at least once. Another study found that 61.8% of undergraduates at the University of Maryland had been offered prescription stimulants for nonmedical purposes, most of them by friends with prescriptions, and 31% had used them.

And the trend “hasn’t peaked yet,” noted Barbara Sahakian, DSc, a professor of clinical neuropsychology at the University of Cambridge who investigates the effectiveness of CEs in treating the cognitive impairment associated with certain psychiatric disorders.

Image: Von M.R.W.HH in der Wikipedia auf Deutsch – Übertragen aus de.wikipedia nach Commons., Gemeinfrei, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1918499

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JAMA

How Flashing Lights and Pink Noise Might Banish Alzheimer’s, Improve Memory, and More

How Flashing Lights and Pink Noise Might Banish Alzheimer’s, Improve Memory, and More

Science Debate: Should We Embrace an Enhanced Future?

Science Debate: Should We Embrace an Enhanced Future?

Chess Study Revives Debate Over Cognition-Enhancing Drugs

Chess Study Revives Debate Over Cognition-Enhancing Drugs

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