Power transmission to the brain to enhance memory

If you transmit electrical impulses that have a weak intensity to the brain of a person while you are sleeping, their ability to remember will increase when he wakes up, German scientists claim.

Researchers at Luebeck University (Germany) have recruited 13 healthy medical students. Each volunteer is given a list of words related to a topic, such as " bird " and " air " to learn at midnight. In the first few days, the number of words that each student can memorize is recorded in detail.

A volunteer is being transmitted electrical impulses while sleeping.(Photo: Newscientist)

After that, the experts put two electrodes on the forehead, two electrodes behind the ears of the students and asked them to go to sleep.

The various stages of the sleep of the volunteers were followed by an electronic brain scanner. When they entered the early stages, scientists began putting weak electrical impulses - each pulse lasted 1 second - into 4 electrodes within 30 minutes. The screen of the brain scanner shows that electrical impulses have brought students into deeper sleep stages.

The next morning, when examining the volunteer group, the researchers found that the number of words they remembered was increased by 8% compared to before the test took place.

Jan Born, the leader of the research team, believes that memory stimulation by electrical impulses is a simulation of the phenomenon of releasing bioelectric currents in the brain - often occurring naturally during deep sleep.

Strong electrical impulses during this period " burned " many nerve cells, making the center of the brain - the hippocampus - significantly increased.

Some scientists were skeptical of Born's explanation. But Felipe Fregni, an expert at the Center for Research on the Enhancement of Harvard Memory, Boston, USA, asserts that brain stimulation measures with a wake-up state also enhance memory.

Side effects

There is growing evidence that in the future, weak stimulation of the brain by electrical impulses will help improve the memory ability of people with dementia or other types of cognitive disorders, experts say. .

" That method will be very helpful in restoring memory function in people with brain damage ," said Daniel Herrera, Cornell University, New York, USA. Herrera studied the effects of electrical stimulation by electrical impulses on mice.

Healthy people can use this method to bring their memorization to the maximum. But Herrera stressed that putting electrical impulses into the brain can cause unwanted side effects.

Born also admitted not to use electrical impulses regularly to stimulate the brain while sleeping. "We do not know if this measure has a dangerous side effect, because at this time we have not discovered them yet," he said.

Viet Linh