Are electromagnetic brain pulses our future?
Do we hope that they are our future?
By coincidence, I’ve read two articles in the past 24 hours that talk about using brain pulses to:
- Stop addictions (National Geographic magazine)
- Re-synch aging brain waves during sleep to overcome forgetfulness to enable old brains to remember new memories like young brains do (NPR)
Dr. Luigi Gallimberti, an Italian psychiatrist and toxicologist, has successfully used the experimental pulses on cocaine addicts. The National Geographic says “The technique is now being tested for other types of addiction by researchers around the world.”
Meanwhile, UC Berkeley sleep expert Matt Walker, a professor of neuroscience and psychology and author of the research paper that demonstrates how older brain waves get out of synch plans to begin testing an approach to restoring the brain waves’ rhythm.
“One way to do this would be by applying electrical or magnetic pulses through the scalp. “The idea is to boost those brain waves and bring them back together,” Randolph Helfrich, a post-doc at UC Berkeley, told NPR.
“Walker already has plans to test this approach to synchronizing brain waves.
“What we’re going to try and do is act like a metronome and in doing so see if we can actually salvage aspects of learning and memory in older adults and those with dementia,” he says.”
If re-booting my brain waves helps, this (to me) is a greater advantage than driverless cars. Maybe we’ll have both, soon.