Think about the night before the big exam. I don’t know
about you, but I would most likely be attempting to cram everything in last
second. Now imagine if there was just some way to improve your memory. Some way
to be able to significantly increase your ability to retain all of the
information you are cramming in your head. How amazing would that be? Well
luckily there is a way to do this! All you need is access to Transcranial
Magnetic Stimulation (TMS)!
Being realistic, most people unfortunately don’t have
access to TMS. I know I don’t. But who knows, maybe someday everyone will. TMS
is essentially a noninvasive way to send electrical currents to the brain. A
study at Northwestern University has conducted TMS experiments on 16 healthy
adults and discovered that electrical stimulation in certain places of the
brain improved the participants’ memories. “We show for the first time that you
can specifically change memory functions of the brain in adults without surgery
or drugs, which have not proven effective,” said Joel Voss, the senior author
for this experiment.
The first part of the experiment lasted over a period of
7 days. For the first day, participants took memory tests without any
stimulation. The memory test was simply memorizing pictures of faces with
arbitrary words attached to them. For the next 5 days, participants were given
the electrical stimulation while taking the memory test. Significant
improvement of memory was not shown at first, but 3 days into the experiment a
30% increase in memory capability was observed. On the 7th day,
participants still showed significant memory improvement even without the
simulation! This is the first time TMS has caused a change to cognitive abilities
over a long term period.
The second part of the experiment conducted at least one
week later was basically the same as the first part in terms of the experiment’s
structure. However, participants were given a placebo stimulation, also known as
shams. As expected, it was observed that real electrical stimulation resulted
in better memory function. The people that did not show as significant of
improvements could possibly be explained by misplacement of the electrical
stimulation at the wrong spot on the head. Ideally, the goal is to stimulate
the hippocampus (the part of the brain responsible for episodic memory),
however the hippocampus is too deep in the brain to be able to stimulate it
noninvasively. So the solution to this was to stimulate certain regions in the
parietal lobe that work closely with the hippocampus. I’m sure it’s safe to
assume that placing the stimulation in such a precise spot must be pretty
difficult, which is why some participants may not have experienced dramatic
memory improvements like the others.
Think
about all the potential treatments for memory impairment diseases such as
Alzheimer’s. Maybe this is the answer scientists have been looking for all
these years. As said by Voss, "this opens up a whole new area for
treatment studies where we will try to see if we can improve function in people
who really need it." Hopefully future TMS experiments can be conducted on patients
with early-stage memory loss, which is exactly what Voss and his associates
plan on doing.
The implications of TMS are promising and the potential applications of this process are very exciting. However, I wonder if there are any long-term effects of TMS that could possibly be harmful to the brain or the rest of the body. Like you said, it is hard to indirectly target and stimulate the hippocampus successfully. But since TMS is relatively cheap, and as long as there are no major long-term health problems associated with it, multiple sessions of this could prove to be immensely helpful and revolutionary. Furthermore, while medicine is helpful, it often produces unwanted and severe mental and physical side-effects. Hopefully in the near future, with more research, TMS will be readily available to people.
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ReplyDeleteI found TMS to be one of my personal favorite techniques we have talked about in class. I think the future implications of how it can be used and what can be done with it to progress our knowledge of different areas of the brain and also treatments for people with impaired memory are very interesting. I have read that about 1 in 9 older Americans has Alzheimer’s disease and about 795,000 people suffer from strokes that can possibly affect memory. I think being able to control our ability to improve memory is an enormous discovery and I think it could have great benefits for medical treatment. But like Radha, I also wonder if there could be harmful effects. I hope that with more research TMS will be able to be used more precisely to better the quality of life for those affected by memory impairment diseases.
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