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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."
I forgot what I was going to post.
I wonder whether there's a specific herb that's bad for that part of the brain, either eaten, drunk or smoked. Could be a good way to get through life's many best-forgotten moments.
Or, for those living the dream, maybe there's some herb that's good for that part of the brain.
I know I'd prefer that to going under the knife or taking a pill with some synthetic stuff no one ever tried before.
--
make install -not war
Everytime I shock myself I remember fresh why I don't like shocking myself.
I guess from now on I'll have to perform the 8 level DoD 5220.69M brain wipe instead of the plain old erase procedure :(
Being unemployed and having the sex drive of a frozen burrito.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
If you are going to insert electrodes into politicians, why waste it on their head? There are better choices available.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I find I lose more than half my memory when I load Vista.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
-- how to eat
-- how to dump
-- how to wipe
-- how to bathe
-- how to relax
-- how to drive
-- how to ride a bike
-- etc...
What is there to remember?
Maybe it's not mere repetition, but intensity of act of repetition (not (bad) counting sex, or hemorrhoids, and other unpleasant things...) that helps us remember?
But, is there any proof that Alzheimer's victims forgot how to have sex? Swear, etc? (Not talking about those with stroke-like side-effects such as total motor or vocal or sensory failure...)
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
"not (bad) counting sex, or hemorrhoids, and other unpleasant things...) "
WTF!?! Sex... Hemorrhoids....... Unplesasent things... I don't want to know...
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What? Did they forget what they were looking for in the first place?
Have gnu, will travel.
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.
This space available.
So, this is reminding me a lot of "Terminal Man" which was written back in the 80s. Basically, they put electrodes into a guy's head to stop him from having psychotic episodes, or maybe just violent epilepsy (it was a long time ago). Some of the electrodes brought back memories. Was Crichton just writing that based on theories in the field that hadn't been tested, or has this been around for a while?
Anyway, in the end, the shocks made the guy become murderous permanently, and he killed a bunch of people, so I think we should watch out for that, although if we keep on just doing it to obese 50 year olds, that might be less of a problem.
"Good news for people with Alzheimer's and those that just forgot where he left his car's key."
Also good news for those who done forgot them gramma'h rules from the schoolin' days.
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.
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstract/117902419/ABSTRACT?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0 Memory enhancement induced by hypothalamic/fornix deep brain stimulation
Clement Hamani, MD, PhD 1, Mary Pat McAndrews, PhD 2, Melanie Cohn, PhD 2, Michael Oh, MD 1, Dominik Zumsteg, MD 3, Colin M. Shapiro, MD, PhD, FRCPC 4, Richard A. Wennberg, MD, FRCPC 3, Andres M. Lozano, MD, PhD, FRCSC
Bilateral hypothalamic deep brain stimulation was performed to treat a patient with morbid obesity. We observed, quite unexpectedly, that stimulation evoked detailed autobiographical memories. Associative memory tasks conducted in a double-blinded on versus off manner demonstrated that stimulation increased recollection but not familiarity-based recognition, indicating a functional engagement of the hippocampus. Electroencephalographic source localization showed that hypothalamic deep brain stimulation drove activity in mesial temporal lobe structures. This shows that hypothalamic stimulation in this patient modulates limbic activity and improves certain memory functions. Ann Neurol 2008;63:119-123
Received: 5 July 2007; Revised: 31 August 2007; Accepted: 4 October 2007
I may be wrong about sex drive, but I think your post reveals some other side-effects.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
... who did you say it was again?
Have gnu, will travel.
What is ./ and what do you do?
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.
Over the years, he's taken quite a selection of prescribed psychoactive drugs, in varying dosages. Interestingly, my observation is that the personality distortions my friend has shown have always been more closely tied to dosage factors than which drug he's been taking. I've seen him stark, raving mad - enraged - depressed - zombied - manic (uncontrollably so); and I've seen him quite normal. Seems that once they get his dosage down pat, however, it still needs re-tweaking as his mind/body adapt to the chemical changes.
There were a couple years there where I didn't want to even hear about him. Even knowing that it was not his choice but the medications he is obliged to take, it made it hard to preserve our friendship at times.
I totally agree that a person's personality is strongly tied to their body chemistry. I have personal experience with chemotherapy, a variety of psycho-active drugs, and kidney failure. What I was amazed to discover was how much these changes to my body chemistry altered my personality. I am mostly back to my old self, but with new respect for how different I could be and how much of personality is based on chemistry.
As computer nerds we are likely to think of the brain as a Turing computer. The hardware and environment don't matter, just the programming. So we assume that someone's personality is entirely determined by the capacity of their brain computer, their experiences, and conscious decisions.
But the brain's mental state is sensitive to the chemical environment influenced by the other organs and glands. Seeing how changes in kidney function changed my mental abilities, I think maybe the Egyptians were not so silly to consider the kidney and liver to be as important as the brain for carrying a person's soul.
The experience has also made me more tolerant of other personalities. I could be those people even with my own brain but a different set of organs. I wonder if there have been any studies of personality change after liver and kidney transplants. What would happen if we could someday perform a brain transplant. Should we consider the soul and identity to transfer with the brain or with the body, or is a new combination a new person?
Speaking as someone with crap memory as a result of a head injury, I wouldn't risk it.
As someone also with crappy memory due to a head injury, I survived a Traumatic Brain Injury or TBI, I'd be willing to take part in a study to investigate whether something like this would help me.
fortunately most of the effects in my case were temporary, but I still have problems.
Unfortunately unless there's a breakthrough more than likely in my case it's permanent.
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.
I look at it the oppose to you, because of people like you people like me are being prevented from seeing possible breakthroughs in neurology, oh and cancer treatment.
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.
Not only is my life so intolerable I'd be willing to take a change, but I'd leap at such a chance. If I weren't so chickenshit I'd have ended my suffering years ago.
FalconShould there be a Law?
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.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Now you'll have to pee in a cup before SAT exams and Jeopardy tournaments. Wonder if kids fry their brains on a marathon caffeine study binge followed up with a hit of this before their exams.
Even neater is the possibility of temporarily removing memories and then bringing them back later, something like spy work or undercover jobs. Give someone valuable information, wipe it... get them to negotiate with someone and agree to remember it after payment is sent. Then they give him a shot of the stuff... whooops, been screwed, he never know it at all! Dead spy... happy rich boss. Lotta potential here.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
having the sex drive of a frozen burrito.
But a frozen burrito is stiff, hard, and meaty. And look at the shape.
These folks just sold me a fantastic Mars vacation package. I'm going to be a spy and meet a sleazy brunette.
Sincerely,
Douglas Quaid
P.S. Do you know where I can find Kuato?
You see, I've had this Sheryl Crow song stuck in my head for a week now...
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
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.
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.
-- Hail Eris