Brain Stimulation for Early Alzheimer's Disease

In This Episode You Will Learn:

Where are you in your career right now? 

Neuroscience research is fascinating. Dr. Ted is most interested in attention, perception, and memory. These three things work together harmoniously because you can’t remember something you ignore, and it’s difficult to notice something if you don’t perceive it in the beginning. 

Dr. Ted studied how the brain encodes beats. He uses music perception to enable people to pay attention, listen, and remember information. He worked with Adam Gaza and researched aging's attention, memory, and perception. Their research indicated that some memory issues stem from attentional issues, inhibiting irrelevant information. How does this process change as we grow? 

It’s not a problem with memory capacity; it’s more on the intentional filtering issue. When you add distraction (in a lab setting), adults will show deficient memory performance compared to young adults when you test them on the content they were told to remember. But if you test them on the content they were supposed to ignore, older adults remember the better. 

The research now is more on assessing the different potential therapeutics to help people focus their attention and improve their memory performance. There are two ways: musical training to facilitate attention to memory performance and noninvasive neurostimulation using a magnetic field of electrical currents to retrain neuro oscillation that underlies attention to memory processes and rescues the brain’s cognitive abilities to mediate age-related problems. 

What aspects of perception do you focus on? 

Dr. Theodore focuses on perceiving or experiencing things such as the sound of one’s voice or picture. Dr ted is focused chiefly on vision and audition. That’s humans’ ability to see and ability to hear. The brain has a region dedicated to visual processing and another region for auditory processing. These regions are highly connected. 

The brain can ramp out or tune out noises. Like a radio equalizer, the brain controls the volume to either ramp up a particular sound to hear more or tune out from other background noise. You can focus on one person’s voice even in a noisy crowd. 

Why is brain oscillation significant? 

Brain oscillation means the frequencies at which the brain and neurons are firing. They become active at different frequencies. When you sleep, you get these slow bursts of activities. We call these delta waves. 

The neurons can burst in a range of thousand hertz. The brain oscillates at lower frequencies, but the other neurons pick up the slack. If you record a large group of neurons, you will get high frequencies. 

Dr. Ted uses EEG or fMRI to look at large swabs of the cortex. It includes hundreds of thousands of neurons in one group. When you get that number of neurons synchronously firing together, you get temporal resolution and can detect oscillations. While you can’t get the resolution you need for an individual neuron, you can get a lot of exciting information from 70 Herts and below. 

What would the program look like?

The research is mainly on assessing how attention, memory, and perception. We are looking at the interaction of these things across the