Don't try this at home

Here’s something straight out of a sub-Frankenstein story. By passing a mild electrical current through the brain, you can improve memory, at least for words.

Scientists have discovered a surprising way of improving memory: passing electricity through the brain while you are asleep. They have found that mild electrical stimulation at the right frequency improved people's ability to remember words on waking up.

Jan Born, a neuroscientist at the University of Lübeck in Germany who led the research, said the electrical current, applied via electrodes stuck to the scalp, seemed to enhance a part of the sleep cycle linked to consolidating word memory. Dr Born had 13 medical students learn a list of words and tested how many they remembered after a set time. He had them repeat the exercise after a nap.

The results, published today in Nature, show that without electrical current the volunteers remembered, on average, 37.42 words before sleep and 39.5 words when they woke. It confirmed research that sleep is important for consolidating learned information. After electrical stimulation the number of words volunteers remembered rose to 41.27 after sleep.

The researchers think their electrical stimulation enhanced the early part of the volunteers' sleep cycle called "slow wave sleep". During slow wave sleep there are regular electrical fluctuations in the prefrontal neocortex, which is linked to conscious thought and spatial reasoning.

In his experiment Dr Born's electrical current was tuned to match these natural fluctuations. When current was applied at a different frequency or during a different part of the sleep cycle there was no memory boost. How the electrical fluctuations in the brain lead to consolidation of memory is unclear.

One plausible theory, according to Dr Born, is that electrical currents of a particular frequency can make brain cells resonate. This strengthens connections between networks of cells, which are the physical representations of memories in the brain.

Guardian story here. An interesting note Dr Born made in the Nature paper: “This improvement in retention following stimulation is striking considering that most subjects were medical students, who were highly trained in memorising facts and already performed well in the sham condition.”

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That difficult second post

I thought that the second post, like second albums, might be terrifyingly difficult. Fortunately, I seem to be on a (mini) roll. So here's something for you to listen to.

The Guardian produces a weekly science podcast, which I sometimes present. We discuss that week's science news, interview scientists about their work (and sometimes about other people's too) and try to have as much fun as possible in the process. We figured that if we're having fun making it, it might make it more fun to listen to. That's the theory anyway.

When we started doing the shows back in April, we were making things up as we went along to some extent. But we did have one thing clear - to try and reflect some of the relationship that the science and technology correspondents on the Guardian (that's me, James Randerson, Bobbie Johnson and Ian Sample) have in the way we decide what goes in the daily science page and in the other bits of the paper. We might all be interested in science (two of my colleagues have PhDs and I did physics a long time ago) but we never assume anyone else is. And, anyway, quite often we don't 'get' the stories at first ourselves. We'll sometimes grope around to find the story or the top line in a densely-written paper. In the podcast, our intention was to reflect some of that process, to ask the questions that an intelligent observer might have about a topic that seems, at first, alien to them.

Anyway, here's the September 11, 2006 podcast. Presented by Ian Sample, there's an interview with the neuroscientist Adrian Owen of Cambridge University, who has demonstrated, for the first time ever, a way of communicating with a woman in a persistent vegetative state. His work was published in Science last week. Sarah Franklin at the London School of Economics debates whether women should donate eggs for research. And there's also a report from James Randerson and myself on the British Association festival of science in Norwich.

All the past science podcasts are still available in our archives, so do listen away and send me or the Guardian podcast blog your thoughts. You can also listen to all the other Guardian podcasts here, including news, politics, arts, media and books.

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