ISTOCK, COSMIN4000Methods for manipulating brain activity are getting better by the day, it seems. From electrical and magnetic stimulation to optical and ultrasonic neural control, researchers are refining techniques to not only study the brain in animal models, but to possibly treat neurodegenerative diseases in humans as well.
“It’s the tools themselves that are really changing the face of what’s possible,” Helen Mayberg of Emory University School of Medicine said at a press conference at the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) meeting yesterday (November 14). She predicts that over the next few years, the field will see “an explosion in how to leverage these emerging technologies.”
As a demonstration of one potential application, John Walker of Northwestern University described recent work in which he and his colleagues used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to improve associative memory in healthy older adults, extending previous work showing the technique’s effectiveness in younger individuals. Walker and his colleagues used the noninvasive technique to stimulate the lateral parietal lobe, a surface-level brain region with high connectivity to the hippocampus, ...
