Syncing brain waves may fight age-related memory problems

Would this help your stroke related memory problems? Ask your doctor and not politely. When will this become a working therapy? 

Syncing brain waves may fight age-related memory problems

Published Monday 8 April 2019

By Maria Cohut

Fact checked by Gianna D'Emilio

Memory can deteriorate naturally, due to age, and even when this process is not related to neurodegenerative conditions, such as Alzheimer's, it can still affect a person's quality of life. Now, researchers from Boston University in Massachusetts are exploring ways of fighting age-related memory decline.

By resynchronizing brain waves, we could reverse some age-related memory problems.

"Working memory [...] is a fundamental building block of human cognition," explains Robert Reinhart, Ph.D., the director of the university's Visual Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory.
"It's been called, classically, the 'workbench of the mind' or the 'sketchpad of the mind.' It allows us to hold information in our minds over a period of seconds," he continues.
Essentially, this is the type of memory that allows a person to make spontaneous calculations and assessments, and navigate daily life situations.
But working memory also starts to naturally decline with age, which means that, as a person grows older, they may find it more difficult to perform some tasks, such as keeping track of their finances.

"Working memory [...] is where we think, where we problem-solve, where we reason, plan, perform mathematical calculations, make decisions. It's essentially where consciousness lives."

Robert Reinhart, Ph.D.

For this reason, Reinhart and colleagues have decided to look into why working memory begins to decline with age and to test experimental methods of reversing that decline.
"One of the major goals in the field of neurocognitive aging is to understand the brain basis for working memory decline in aging, and this is one of the goals that we tried to tackle in this [new] work," says Reinhart.
The researchers present their findings in a paper now published in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

The importance of brain wave synchronicity

The authors note that, so far, the working theory has been: This type of memory takes a hit later in life as a result of brain areas that would normally work together falling out of sync.
A key characteristic of this desynchronization, they go on to explain, is the disruption of brain waves — patterns of electrical activity that indicate brain cell activity — that would normally coordinate. Scientists call this coordination "cross-frequency coupling."
More specifically, the researchers link the maintenance of working memory with the cross-frequency coupling of two types of brainwaves, gamma and theta, in the prefrontal and temporal regions of the brain.