Scientists Discover Way To Reverse Memory Loss

electricbern writes "Scientists have accidentally discovered how to reverse memory loss by stimulating a specific part of the hypothalamus. Good news for people with Alzheimer's and those who just forgot where they left the car keys."

Comments

apply the whatcouldpossiblygowrong tag please

[Jafafa Hots]

Speaking as someone with crap memory as a result of a head injury, I wouldn't risk it. Yes, I have had severe amnesia. Ever see the movie Memento? I was like that, but fortunately most of the effects in my case were temporary, but I still have problems.

However, I also have PTSD, which is at least in part an overstimulation of the amygdala. And I've dealt with the unpleasant effects of psych meds which doctors hand out like candy without really seeming to understand their full effects.

When tinkering with the brain, unintended consequences can be severe, and nobody seems to really give a crap about those unintended consequences except for the person who has to deal with them.

Leave well enough alone is usually the best motto when it comes to the noggin, unless your life and disability is too intolerable so you're willing to take any chance.

Re:apply the whatcouldpossiblygowrong tag please

[Jafafa Hots]

Possibly alzheimers, yes. And despite your obnoxiously rude and dismissive attitude, I'll try to explain further.

The mind is the essence of who we are. People who have not gone through these experiences like to think that their personality, their very being is an innate feature of themselves, unchangeable.

It's not. Who you are is merely chemistry. Fuck around with that chemistry, and you become a different person. I've experienced that. Most doctors haven't.

People look at things simplistically, they focus on ONE aspect of the brain's function. Memory. Depression. Hand you a pill that they know raises the levels of mood-enhancing chemicals, and there's your depression cure. Anything that happens that's unrelated to your depression is simply labelled a "side-effect," and unless it seems to be immediately life-threatening, no further attention is paid to it.

But the person experiencing it can come to regret their choice. The immediate effects can be subtle, and the perception of the person can be altered so that they don't realize the change themselves, much the way stroke victims often don't realize the extent of their disability.

You can end up a wholly different person. And even if others around you don't make the connection, you may find some day years later that you've lost yourself as a person.

I don't expect most of you to understand that. But what I'm saying here is that when it comes to the brain, you may like the initial results, and that's all the docs will care about - your memory is better. For some people that will be fine. For others, they may find that with their newly refurbished memory comes severe depression, stress, or a change in personality that years down the road they find intolerable.

In my case, doctors tinkering with my brain caused personality changes that initially seemed exhilarating. It was only years later that I recognized that I was behaving like a sex-crazed manic depressive. The initial problems I had were minor and temporary compared with the results of their "cure."

Re:apply the whatcouldpossiblygowrong tag please

[Jafafa Hots]

I agree, its promising research, I just think we have to be careful that we're treating the patient, not the patient's family, or the doctor's. I CAN think of worse things that not being able to remember, not having much self-awareness. Not saying this would always be the case, or even often, but its possible that the patient may have damage to areas of their brain other than those involved with memory that their lack of cognitive function mercifully makes them "not experience."

That's just one possible scenario. Another is that the patient may recover just enough cognitive ability to be able to recognize what a miserable state they're in. Wonderful for the family, Mom can now recognize them again. Horrible for Mom - instead of happily staring at the TV or eating pudding, she now knows that she soils herself several times a day and is stuck in a crappy place.

Just sayin'.

Re:apply the whatcouldpossiblygowrong tag please

[Temujin_12]

Hi again!

I totally agree with your point that treating the human brain can have many unintended consequences. IANABS (I am not a brain surgeon), but having studied back propagation neural networks as an undergrad taught me that the human brain is MUCH MUCH more complex than we would like it to be. The perceptron model (and variations on it) are an oversimplification of the workings on the brain. Even if you modeled all of the synapses in the brain, you still have to deal with the fact that the brain itself is sits in a chemical bath of fluids and hormones which affect the way the synapses fire and communicate. This as well as many other biological differences makes completely understanding the human brain a very daunting task.

Me lose brain? Uh-oh

[weighn]

while not wanting to bring the mood down, innit funny how much R&D goes into "curing" Western maladies like erectile dysfunction and pickled brain cells while millions die each year from neglected diseases ... just my whine for the day folks. Carry on.

Re:Me lose brain? Uh-oh

[TrekkieGod]

while not wanting to bring the mood down, innit funny how much R&D goes into "curing" Western maladies like erectile dysfunction and pickled brain cells while millions die each year from neglected diseases

What's wrong with that? The third world diseases you linked to are an economic problem, and no R&D is required to solve them. That's why those diseases are virtually non-existent in wealthy nations.

You might argue that we need to shift resources in order to help those people, but you can't argue that the direction of R&D research needs to shift. That wouldn't help, they'd still need the funds to deploy whatever cure they come up with.

Re:Me lose brain? Uh-oh

[TrekkieGod]

I'm not anti-science, just bewildered at the trends and drivers for growth (even on campus) that come from the pursuit for the research dollar.

I think you misunderstood my argument. I didn't think you were anti-science. Your comment led me to believe you're a well-meaning guy who is concerned about the welfare of people who are less fortunate than you. I think you set your sights on the wrong problem though.

The reason so much R&D money is being spent in things like anti-aging and anti-obesity is because these are unsolved problems. The diseases listed in your wikipedia link are solved problems. If the economy in the third world countries catch up, they disappear. Dengue Fever, for example, is transmitted by mosquitoes. If you have the resources to invest in mosquito control, the problem disappears (such as the mosquito eradication program in the united states back in the 1960's, which is why we don't have a dengue problem here--the antiviral drug isn't necessary to end the disease). Most of those other diseases, such as parasites, also go away once people start living in more sanitary conditions. If you want examples of a disease that isn't as vain as "limp dicks" that gets plenty of R&D, just look at cancer. That problem can't be solved with by simply improving the economy, so there's a lot of R&D investment.

So the question is, why do those diseases still exist? Lack of resources. And if the R&D resources get shifted to solve those problems, the resources to pay for the newly found medicine will still be non-existent, and the "solution" won't get deployed. Case in point, AIDS medication. People with AIDS in the US can lead relatively normal lives with the available medication (ok, they still have their share of problems, but their life expectancy is significantly higher than it would be without the medication). In Africa, they can't afford it, because the patents make those medicines way too expensive to buy from the first-world pharmaceutical companies, and they can't produce it cheaply in those countries without paying the royalties to those same pharm companies. Your study, coming from the "Commission on Intellectual Property Rights" was a biased study designed to fight this particular criticism in favor of maximizing the amount of cash the pharmaceuticals get to squeeze out of their patents. The obvious flaw is that the same countries that DO respect patents, are those that can't afford the already existing drugs.

However, even those AIDS drugs aren't the solution to the problem. Again, that's another disease that mostly goes away with an improved economy and education. If you understand how AIDS is transmitted, you can completely avoid it (assuming the hospitals in your country check their donated blood and organs for diseases, as well as having the resources to keep their surgical instruments sterilized). That's why the united states has a significantly lower incidence of the disease even though people with it can live longer and therefore would be able to transmit it to more people over a longer period of time. Since the vast majority of people here understand how the disease is transmitted, and has access to condoms, the problem doesn't spread out of control.

Sad but...

[crovira]

the ability to form short-term memories is far more important to day to day living that the ability to retrieve stuff from long term storage.

My mother had a series of small strokes (watch your blood pressure folks, and that's the extent of my preaching,) that left her unable to form short term memories.

It has completely devastated the woman she was and left the shell that's left unable to live day to day because she can't keep a memory intact long enough to not repeat herself.

Its painful and its even worse than Alzheimer's because she's perfectly healthy otherwise and not suffering the other debilitations of age.

Re:Original research abstract

[SocraTease]

Fyi, here's a link to the full text (HTML, actually) TFA... http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/117902419/HTMLSTART?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0/. IANANS (I am not a neuro scientist) but some of my friends are. While some information about brain activity and function can be gleaned from techniques such as deep brain stimulation, the technique can also be likened to tossing a screwdriver into the back of a television and trying to discern how TV broadcasts work by observing what functions of the set are "enhanced", or not. Although it's impressive to see the extent to which the subjects were tested pre- and post-operatively, it seems a little early to jump to conclusions about enhancing memory function even in the short term.

Re:Wait...

[bdp]

We can remember it for you wholesale!

Bluescreening

[MillionthMonkey]

I have problems with memory, because I have intractable epilepsy with a cluster of seizures every few weeks. Nobody knows what causes them; it's not an aneurysm or anything like that, because MRI, PET, and CAT images all look normal. My neurologist said I was apparently born with a "wiring abnormality", which actually sounds kind of cool. So I get a chance every few weeks to experience recovery from severe brain trauma, of varying degrees, with no permanent physical injury. It severely impairs memory and recall, but after you go through it a couple hundred times you remember enough to get a pretty good perspective of what recovery from brain trauma is like. And you can pick up a couple of insights about how brains work and what you experience when your brain has to reconstruct its state from scratch after a hard reset.

First of all, one thing I've realized about being stupid is that it's hard to recognize your own stupidity. (Which you might guess.) A seizure can trigger an IQ drop of 80-90 points and it takes a good part of a week for it to drift back up to 160 or 170 or whatever it is. I sometimes think it's over and that I have all my wits back, but then three days later I have to rewrite all the shitty code I've been writing for the past few days. It's generally well formed, looks OK, and is easy to read, but it somehow lacks direction and it turns out to do nothing useful.

Short term memory is consolidated into long term memory through some pipeline that involves several days of processing. If it gets disrupted by an episode of brain trauma, the result is retrograde amnesia: memories formed during the previous few days are damaged and dim. Stuff learned then will usually have to be relearned. There is no hard edge to it; there are memories right up to the point of failure- but they get dimmer and dimmer up to the day of the seizure, which is just a fog of blurry memories. I can actually teach people things that just a few days later they'll have to teach back to me.

The most terrifying times are when short term memory doesn't work at all, when things go in one ear and out the other. That always produces mind-numbing terror that never stops; you're perpetually surprised by it. I can tolerate it once in a while, since it's brief and not permanent, but if I ever get diagnosed with Alzheimers or a degenerative dementia I'll make sure there's a gun in the house. My grandmother is like this now and she is always scared whenever I see her. She doesn't recognize any of us anymore. This was a really proud woman most of her life, a little snooty even, and now she doesn't even know where the toilet is in her house.

Occasionally a seizure can produce a fugue, where you wander around in a daze, totally incoherent. This happened to an epileptic friend of mine just last month- she was walking around Salt Lake City in a fugue, underdressed in 7 degree weather at 3 AM when the cops found her. When this happens, it's not always obvious what's wrong. I usually just think I'm looking for something. What, I can't remember, but it doesn't occur to me to think about it. It's easy to get lost, and I've found myself in some pretty weird places. One time (back when I had a car) I got lost driving home from work in a fugue. I didn't hit anybody or run any lights, just like my code looks OK and compiles, but the longer it takes to do something, the more likely it is to get screwed up.

What are keys?

[mrsalty]

My wife used to work with alzheimer patients and described it like this:
Alzheimer's is not forgetting where your keys are, that is being ascent minded.
Alzheimer's is forgetting what you keys are and what they do.