Author: Andy Corbley / Source: Good News Network
Alzheimer’s Disease, along with anxiety disorders, Parkinson’s, clinical depression, and other neurological diseases are notoriously difficult conditions to find treat. Because the diseases are not well understood, and therefore hard to target directly, many pharmaceutical options fail.
But a relatively new field of neurological treatment is opening up in the form of things like tACS (transcranial alternating current stimulation) and other non-invasive, non-drug methods.
For example, on March 2015, Li-Huei Tsai, a neuroscientist at MIT set up a tiny disco of flashing lights for some of the mice in her laboratory that had been engineered to develop increased amounts of an Alzheimer’s related brain-plaque called amyloid-β. They were later found upon dissection to be carrying far less – sometimes even none – of the plaque than was present before the disco parties began.
The experiment baffled Tsai; and even after checking the results multiple times, she had a hard time believing them. The strobe light within the little rodent dance party, which was tuned to 40 hertz, was designed to help manipulate the rodents’ brain waves and produce a large number of biological benefits, including the elimination of the amyloid-β forming proteins – and it worked.
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“The result was so mind-boggling and so robust, it took a while for the idea to sink in, but we knew we needed to work out a way of trying out the same thing in humans,” Tsai told Nature. How can the simple repetitive flashing of lights help to suppress the development of things like Alzheimer’s disease? A brief look into brainwaves will help provide the clues.
When the neurons in your brain communicate with each other, electrical impulses, created by the flow of ions into and out of each cell can be observed on a computer as oscillating waves of electrical energy. Gamma-type brain waves…
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