The Lab Rat: How to Improve Memory in 15 Minutes

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The Lab Rat: How to Improve Memory in 15 Minutes

By Cloud Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Stories about brain research can get a little boring if you just cite an endless

stream of academic papers and statistics. So welcome to Healthland's latest

feature: The Lab Rat. Here, I subject myself to the same kinds of psychological

and neurological testing that I've been writing about for two years. Then I use

that personal experience to understand more fully all the papers and statistics.

That's the idea, anyway. We start this week with a memory test.

The other day, some friendly scientists in Philadelphia attached electrodes to

my head — one just above and behind my right ear, and the other on my left

cheekbone — and ran electricity through my brain. As they did, I took a

computerized memory test. My scores on the test significantly improved from an

earlier test I took without the electricity. It turns out you can tune up

someone's brain like a car battery. I felt — and looked — a bit like a

enstein creature, but the results were impressive.

Welcome to the promising world of transcranial direct current stimulation

(tDCS), a highly refined, very safe and relatively cheap biomedical treatment

that is being studied for use not only in improving memory but treating

depression and epilepsy. The scientists who demonstrated tDCS for me — Ingrid

Olson and McCoy of Temple University's psychology department; and Dr.

Wolk, a neurologist at the University of Pennsylvania — recently

co-authored (along with two other researchers) an article for the November issue

of Neuropsychologia about the use of tDCS to improve memory. The paper shows

that just 15 minutes of tDCS can help with a common problem (especially for

those of us heading into middle age): remembering people's names. (More on

Time.com: Amnesia and a Camera: Photos as Memories)

The idea that the brain is essentially an electrical-wiring board is not new. As

soon as electricity became common in the early part of the 20th century,

neurologists began using electricity rather than harsh chemicals like metrazol

to induce convulsions in people with severe mental illness. For centuries,

inducing convulsions had been a crude but often useful way of resetting the

brain's circuitry. (Dr. Sherwin Nuland, the surgeon and writer, gave a highly

entertaining 2001 talk about this history that you can watch here.)

Today, electroshock therapy (which psychiatrists call electroconvulsive therapy)

is painless because patients are required to be put under anesthesia before they

receive it. (Jack Nicholson's character in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,

Randle Mc , did not receive that courtesy.) But scientists have also

developed far more refined ways of using electricity in the brain: now they can

stimulate certain neural regions for specific purposes without the troublesome

side effect of a grand mal seizure. One method is transcranial magnetic

stimulation — which pushes neurons around with a magnetic wand waved around your

head. (More on Time.com: Don't Choke: 5 Tips for Performing Under Pressure).

Another is the one I received, tDCS. It uses just 1.5 milliamps of electricity,

which is such a small amount that you can't really feel it. There's a little

tingling, but it's ephemeral.

The reason that the Philadelphia scientists attached one electrode just

northwest of my right ear is that my anterior temporal lobe lies behind my skull

in that spot. From brain imaging, we know that name recall originates in the

anterior temporal lobes. I have always had a terrible time remembering names,

which might mean that my ATLs were always a little weak, but you can also suffer

ATL damage if you have a stroke or another common medical condition called

“being over 40 years old.”

The electricity is thought to enhance neural firing in the ATL. After I got to

the lab in Philadelphia, the scientists attached the electrodes to me and then

had me take two memory tests. The tests asked me to recall the names of famous

(and semi-famous) people whose photos appeared for 7 sec. on a screen in front

of me. There's Mandela — easy. Reagan — easy. But then a picture

of Chuck Yeager, who has a strong historical presence but who is difficult to

recognize by face if you were born after 1965 or so. And then there's a photo of

Lou Retton back in her Olympic days. Remember that face? It took me the

full 7 sec. to do so. (More on Time.com: Psychology vs. Psychiatry: What's the

Difference, and Which Is Better?)

Your brain spins when you see photos of someone like Retton. You know that you

know the face, but her name just sits on the tip of your tongue. What tDCS does

is fire your ATL in a way that pushes the name from the tip of your tongue out

of your mouth. I showed a small improvement during the tDCS session with people

names — and a huge (more than double) improvement in my recall of names of

landmarks like the World War II Memorial, Stonehenge, and Mount Kilimanjaro. In

the first session, I often gave up on landmark names; in the second, tDCS seemed

to give me a little push.

So is all this just a placebo response? In other words, did I do better because

I expected to do better? That could be it, but it's difficult for participants

to tell which session is real and which one is fake because you have all that

enstein stuff on your head during both. There is that slight tingling

during the tDCS session, but not everyone recognizes it, according to Olson, the

Temple University psychologist and co-author of the paper. (More on Time.com:

How Not to Feel Lonely in a Crowd)

Unfortunately, there aren't immediate consumer applications for tDCS: the

machine itself, which is manufactured by a U.K. company called Magstim , costs

roughly $10,000. (Also, you wouldn't want to walk around with those electrodes

on your head.) But as a short-term treatment for those whose memories have been

impaired by stroke or another medical condition, tDCS could be a vital way of

helping them to turn a tip-of-the-tongue response into a confident answer.

If you are a researcher or know about interesting psychology or brain research

that I could participate in (no lobotomies, please), email me:

john_cloud@....

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