7 ms·

Flashing Light, Sound Restore Memory in Alzheimer's Mice

118 points by obeone 8y ago

melling 8y ago
There was a RadioLab special on this a few years ago: https://www.wnyc.org/story/flashing-light-therapy-alzheimers/ https://www.wnyc.org/story/flashing-light-therapy-alzheimers...
- pmoriarty 8y ago
  After hearing this intriguing RadioLab episode some months back, I started searching around youtube for 40 Hz tones and found quite a lot of videos of all kinds that use those and other tones allegedly related to various brain waves (Alpha, Beta, Gamma, etc). I listened to a whole bunch of these videos, and while I wasn't measuring my memory, I did pay close attention to how the sounds made me feel, and this one particular made me feel strangest: [1]. Unfortunately, the sound fades in and out and the effect goes with it. I wish it could have had stayed at a steady volume so that the effect could be sustained. If you watch it, just ignore the cheesy graphics and listen. Here are some other interesting ones: [2], [3], [4], [5], [6] Video [3] is actually supposedly 40 Hz. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-eTVW8VMRQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-eTVW8VMRQ [2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xG22hV-gMsY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xG22hV-gMsY [3] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGHbKWGgH_E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGHbKWGgH_E [4] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhZPMTpW-gg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhZPMTpW-gg [5] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-yz8l4Do-U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-yz8l4Do-U [6] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lN3X5qVoqQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lN3X5qVoqQ
  - louthy 8y ago
    [3] is definitely not 40hz. 40hz is in the sub-bass range, which this clearly isn't. I'm not at home in my studio right now, so I can't measure what it is, but if I was to guess it would be around 200hz. The ones that are 20hz might make you feel a bit weird because there's not much amateur audio equipment that would do anything other than distort at that low end of the frequency range. It does say binaural though, so maybe it's panning left/right at 40hz rather than playing a sound-wave at 40hz. If that's the case it's not the same as what the article states: "40 hertz tone". Here's an online tone generator [1] that will play a sine-wave at 40hz. [1] https://www.szynalski.com/tone-generator/ https://www.szynalski.com/tone-generator/
    - roywiggins 8y ago
      A lot of the binaural stuff try to set up "beats" by playing a slightly different frequency to each ear. Neither frequency is 40Hz, but the beat frequency may be. There's an absolute shedload of woo-woo stuff on the purported consciousness-enhancing benefits if you google around. That's not to say they definitely don't do funny things to your brain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beat_(acoustics)#Binaural_beats https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beat_(acoustics)#Binaural_beat...
      - duskwuff 8y ago
        > There's an absolute shedload of woo-woo stuff on the purported consciousness-enhancing benefits if you google around. Oh god, yes, and it isn't even new. Back around 2005, I ran into a web site selling audio files which they claimed would cure addictions, attract romantic partners, improve luck...
        joezydeco 8y ago
        And, twenty years before that, this group claimed that binaural "synchronization" of the hemispheres of the brain could lead to out-of-body travel. https://www.monroeinstitute.org/ https://www.monroeinstitute.org/ I think they've backed down on some of those claims over the last 30 years, but they'll be happy to take your money for a 5 day onsite retreat.
      - pmoriarty 8y ago
        "That's not to say they definitely don't do funny things to your brain." Exactly. I actually just went in to Ardour and edited down that one "20 Hz" video I mentioned made me feel weird [1] so that it played the loudest part continuously instead of fading in and out, and then listened to it again and after 5 or 10 minutes of listening to it I felt really weird again, and started to get worried about what it might be doing to me, so I stopped. It's really interesting, though, and I hope some serious research is conducted on this sort of sound's psychological effects. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-eTVW8VMRQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-eTVW8VMRQ
    - 8y ago
  - simongr3dal 8y ago
    That first video definitely is giving me a strange sensation too, it's like my ears and nose are vibrating in response to the "beats" of the audio.
trhway 8y ago
>exposed laboratory mice that genetically predisposed to Alzheimer's disease to a light flickering at 40 hertz for one hour a day. They found that this treatment reduced the levels of tau and amyloid beta in visual cortex of the brain and stimulated the activity of debris-clearing immune cells. does it mean that old CRT TVs and monitors kept our Alzheimer at bay?
- dwighttk 8y ago
  weren't fluorescent lights 40Hz?
  - ben_w 8y ago
    I’d expect them to be an integer multiple of mains frequency, so 50 or 60 Hz.
  - smaddox 8y ago
    Flourescent lights need much higher frequency. They're typically >= 22 kHz.
  - ridgeguy 8y ago
    Older fluorescent lights (those run off a magnetic current limiter, or "ballast") flickered at 120Hz if they were connected to a 60Hz power source. Every time the voltage declined below a level needed to maintain a discharge, the lamp went out. That happened twice in every full sine wave of primary power. Whether you could see the flicker depended on the phosphor luminous decay time. If the phosphors on the inside of the bulb (which glow when excited by the UV-rich plasma discharge) had a rapid luminous decay curve, you could perceive the 120Hz flicker if you scanned your eyes across a lit bulb. The afterimage on your retina was a dashed line, the dark parts being the "too little voltage" portions of the sine wave. You can use the afterimage trick to check out duty cycle dimming of car tail and brake lights. If they're chopped slower than ~1KHz, the smeared retinal afterimage will be chopped. Don't do this if you're moving in traffic.
    - vokep 8y ago
aantix 8y ago
I would love to try this at home, but would have no means of measuring whether it reduced the plaques..
outworlder 8y ago
So, was The Lawnmower Man ahead of its time?
josephby 8y ago
Mice clap don’t clap get clap Alzheimer’s. They have neural plaques, artificially, chemically induced, that are coincident with Alzheimer’s in humans.
- chris_va 8y ago
  "Alzheimer’s-Associated Pathology Mouse Models" doesn't roll off the tongue as easily.
- existencebox 8y ago
  I don't know why this is being downvoted as much as it is. Wife works in a related field of neuro-sci, and regularly laments this difference, especially how it's played up in both in reporting and in assuming consistency in treatment and response. To the best of my knowledge there's not even consensus that plaques are the "root cause" we should be focusing on, so this sort of model may be multiple steps removed from applicability. (Similar problems exist even in 'more well understood' neurological systems, e.g. early vision pipeline) It's an unfortunate but very real limitation to the current research that I think is important to understand so as to be realistic about the progress and directions of study. To be very precise, I say this as someone who, both of of scientific interest, and selfish interest (Alzheimers in my family) loves that this research is happening.
  - mattkrause 8y ago
    > plaques are the "root cause The amyloid hypothesis has been pretty popular for ~25 years, and it's pretty clear that the plaques have something to do with Alzheimers, but it's been a absolute disaster as a treatment target. It feels very much like treating a fever by slathering the patient in antiperspirant. Biogen announced this morning that they're giving up on Phase III trials of aducanumab, an antibody that was supposed to target and remove the plaques (their stock is doing...badly as a result). https://www.reuters.com/article/us-biogen-alzheimers/biogen-eisai-scrap-alzheimer-drug-trials-idUSKCN1R213G https://www.reuters.com/article/us-biogen-alzheimers/biogen-... There were two other big failures last year here too, as this nice little Nature News piece describes: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05719-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05719-4
herf 8y ago
I didn't know if treatments targeting amyloid directly would improve memory, but this tests both in one study, which is pretty great--big effects on memory and amyloid plaques. Also, I think Ruth Benca at UCI can measure amyloid levels in humans using high-resolution EEG.
pbhjpbhj 8y ago
This effect has been on here before, some people have had incredible effects with this. I've relatives who've (had) Alzheimer's, it seems worth following a "cleaning cycle" every now and again even if results aren't proven as it seems there is no evidence of harmful effects either.
jkingsman 8y ago
If you feel like bad science and poorly supported practices are up your alley, I build a Chrome extension to flash an overlay on your browser at specifiable frequencies: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gammaloid/lfmaoakhbbgeckaogljdkahbfkpkdapg?hl=en-US https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gammaloid/lfmaoakh...
- whymauri 8y ago
  You may want to justify why it is "bad science" and write a letter to the editor of Nature and Nature Protocols. Is the media interpretation of these studies misguided? Sure, but the popular science media is not doing the science. I would be peeved if people called my research "bad science" because some pop. sci. article doesn't understand it.
  - fao_ 8y ago
    Nature is hardly the top of the crust these days with regards to academic oversight. I can recall quite easily that a while back they published an article confirming ESP, and then refused to publish a replication of the same paper stating no results. Because the first one sells issues and the second one doesn't.
    - mattkrause 8y ago
      Nature does love flashy stories but the ESP stuff wasn’t them, it was JPSP. Here’s the citation: Bem, D. J. (2011). Feeling the future: Experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100(3), 407-425. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0021524 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0021524 Nature did publish a thing on “water memory” in the 1980s. To their (partial) credit, it was published with an editorial pointing out how unlikely the findings were.
      - fao_ 8y ago
        Thank you for the correction! :)
c0nducktr 8y ago
I've heard people talk about binaural beats before, but always brushed it off as pseudoscience. > The noninvasive treatment induces brain waves called gamma oscillations. Is this true? Does anyone have a link that explains these brain wave patterns in layman's terms? What exactly is happening to my brain when listening to these sounds?
sesteel 8y ago
People have already tried to reproduce results in humans, here is one such study: https://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijad/2018/6852303/ I am unaware of any successful results.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
wiggler00m 8y ago
Sonic the Hedgehog knows what's up.

118 points by obeone 8y ago

There was a RadioLab special on this a few years ago: https://www.wnyc.org/story/flashing-light-therapy-alzheimers/ https://www.wnyc.org/story/flashing-light-therapy-alzheimers...

pmoriarty 8y ago
After hearing this intriguing RadioLab episode some months back, I started searching around youtube for 40 Hz tones and found quite a lot of videos of all kinds that use those and other tones allegedly related to various brain waves (Alpha, Beta, Gamma, etc). I listened to a whole bunch of these videos, and while I wasn't measuring my memory, I did pay close attention to how the sounds made me feel, and this one particular made me feel strangest: [1]. Unfortunately, the sound fades in and out and the effect goes with it. I wish it could have had stayed at a steady volume so that the effect could be sustained. If you watch it, just ignore the cheesy graphics and listen. Here are some other interesting ones: [2], [3], [4], [5], [6] Video [3] is actually supposedly 40 Hz. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-eTVW8VMRQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-eTVW8VMRQ [2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xG22hV-gMsY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xG22hV-gMsY [3] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGHbKWGgH_E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGHbKWGgH_E [4] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhZPMTpW-gg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhZPMTpW-gg [5] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-yz8l4Do-U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-yz8l4Do-U [6] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lN3X5qVoqQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lN3X5qVoqQ
- louthy 8y ago
  [3] is definitely not 40hz. 40hz is in the sub-bass range, which this clearly isn't. I'm not at home in my studio right now, so I can't measure what it is, but if I was to guess it would be around 200hz. The ones that are 20hz might make you feel a bit weird because there's not much amateur audio equipment that would do anything other than distort at that low end of the frequency range. It does say binaural though, so maybe it's panning left/right at 40hz rather than playing a sound-wave at 40hz. If that's the case it's not the same as what the article states: "40 hertz tone". Here's an online tone generator [1] that will play a sine-wave at 40hz. [1] https://www.szynalski.com/tone-generator/ https://www.szynalski.com/tone-generator/
  - roywiggins 8y ago
    A lot of the binaural stuff try to set up "beats" by playing a slightly different frequency to each ear. Neither frequency is 40Hz, but the beat frequency may be. There's an absolute shedload of woo-woo stuff on the purported consciousness-enhancing benefits if you google around. That's not to say they definitely don't do funny things to your brain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beat_(acoustics)#Binaural_beats https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beat_(acoustics)#Binaural_beat...
    - duskwuff 8y ago
      > There's an absolute shedload of woo-woo stuff on the purported consciousness-enhancing benefits if you google around. Oh god, yes, and it isn't even new. Back around 2005, I ran into a web site selling audio files which they claimed would cure addictions, attract romantic partners, improve luck...
      - joezydeco 8y ago
        And, twenty years before that, this group claimed that binaural "synchronization" of the hemispheres of the brain could lead to out-of-body travel. https://www.monroeinstitute.org/ https://www.monroeinstitute.org/ I think they've backed down on some of those claims over the last 30 years, but they'll be happy to take your money for a 5 day onsite retreat.
    - pmoriarty 8y ago
      "That's not to say they definitely don't do funny things to your brain." Exactly. I actually just went in to Ardour and edited down that one "20 Hz" video I mentioned made me feel weird [1] so that it played the loudest part continuously instead of fading in and out, and then listened to it again and after 5 or 10 minutes of listening to it I felt really weird again, and started to get worried about what it might be doing to me, so I stopped. It's really interesting, though, and I hope some serious research is conducted on this sort of sound's psychological effects. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-eTVW8VMRQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-eTVW8VMRQ
  - 8y ago
- simongr3dal 8y ago
  That first video definitely is giving me a strange sensation too, it's like my ears and nose are vibrating in response to the "beats" of the audio.

trhway 8y ago

>exposed laboratory mice that genetically predisposed to Alzheimer's disease to a light flickering at 40 hertz for one hour a day. They found that this treatment reduced the levels of tau and amyloid beta in visual cortex of the brain and stimulated the activity of debris-clearing immune cells. does it mean that old CRT TVs and monitors kept our Alzheimer at bay?

dwighttk 8y ago
weren't fluorescent lights 40Hz?
- ben_w 8y ago
  I’d expect them to be an integer multiple of mains frequency, so 50 or 60 Hz.
- smaddox 8y ago
  Flourescent lights need much higher frequency. They're typically >= 22 kHz.
- ridgeguy 8y ago
  Older fluorescent lights (those run off a magnetic current limiter, or "ballast") flickered at 120Hz if they were connected to a 60Hz power source. Every time the voltage declined below a level needed to maintain a discharge, the lamp went out. That happened twice in every full sine wave of primary power. Whether you could see the flicker depended on the phosphor luminous decay time. If the phosphors on the inside of the bulb (which glow when excited by the UV-rich plasma discharge) had a rapid luminous decay curve, you could perceive the 120Hz flicker if you scanned your eyes across a lit bulb. The afterimage on your retina was a dashed line, the dark parts being the "too little voltage" portions of the sine wave. You can use the afterimage trick to check out duty cycle dimming of car tail and brake lights. If they're chopped slower than ~1KHz, the smeared retinal afterimage will be chopped. Don't do this if you're moving in traffic.
  - vokep 8y ago

aantix 8y ago

I would love to try this at home, but would have no means of measuring whether it reduced the plaques..

outworlder 8y ago

So, was The Lawnmower Man ahead of its time?

josephby 8y ago

Mice clap don’t clap get clap Alzheimer’s. They have neural plaques, artificially, chemically induced, that are coincident with Alzheimer’s in humans.

chris_va 8y ago
"Alzheimer’s-Associated Pathology Mouse Models" doesn't roll off the tongue as easily.
existencebox 8y ago
I don't know why this is being downvoted as much as it is. Wife works in a related field of neuro-sci, and regularly laments this difference, especially how it's played up in both in reporting and in assuming consistency in treatment and response. To the best of my knowledge there's not even consensus that plaques are the "root cause" we should be focusing on, so this sort of model may be multiple steps removed from applicability. (Similar problems exist even in 'more well understood' neurological systems, e.g. early vision pipeline) It's an unfortunate but very real limitation to the current research that I think is important to understand so as to be realistic about the progress and directions of study. To be very precise, I say this as someone who, both of of scientific interest, and selfish interest (Alzheimers in my family) loves that this research is happening.
- mattkrause 8y ago
  > plaques are the "root cause The amyloid hypothesis has been pretty popular for ~25 years, and it's pretty clear that the plaques have something to do with Alzheimers, but it's been a absolute disaster as a treatment target. It feels very much like treating a fever by slathering the patient in antiperspirant. Biogen announced this morning that they're giving up on Phase III trials of aducanumab, an antibody that was supposed to target and remove the plaques (their stock is doing...badly as a result). https://www.reuters.com/article/us-biogen-alzheimers/biogen-eisai-scrap-alzheimer-drug-trials-idUSKCN1R213G https://www.reuters.com/article/us-biogen-alzheimers/biogen-... There were two other big failures last year here too, as this nice little Nature News piece describes: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05719-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05719-4

herf 8y ago

I didn't know if treatments targeting amyloid directly would improve memory, but this tests both in one study, which is pretty great--big effects on memory and amyloid plaques. Also, I think Ruth Benca at UCI can measure amyloid levels in humans using high-resolution EEG.

pbhjpbhj 8y ago

This effect has been on here before, some people have had incredible effects with this. I've relatives who've (had) Alzheimer's, it seems worth following a "cleaning cycle" every now and again even if results aren't proven as it seems there is no evidence of harmful effects either.

jkingsman 8y ago

If you feel like bad science and poorly supported practices are up your alley, I build a Chrome extension to flash an overlay on your browser at specifiable frequencies: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gammaloid/lfmaoakhbbgeckaogljdkahbfkpkdapg?hl=en-US https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gammaloid/lfmaoakh...

whymauri 8y ago
You may want to justify why it is "bad science" and write a letter to the editor of Nature and Nature Protocols. Is the media interpretation of these studies misguided? Sure, but the popular science media is not doing the science. I would be peeved if people called my research "bad science" because some pop. sci. article doesn't understand it.
- fao_ 8y ago
  Nature is hardly the top of the crust these days with regards to academic oversight. I can recall quite easily that a while back they published an article confirming ESP, and then refused to publish a replication of the same paper stating no results. Because the first one sells issues and the second one doesn't.
  - mattkrause 8y ago
    Nature does love flashy stories but the ESP stuff wasn’t them, it was JPSP. Here’s the citation: Bem, D. J. (2011). Feeling the future: Experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100(3), 407-425. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0021524 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0021524 Nature did publish a thing on “water memory” in the 1980s. To their (partial) credit, it was published with an editorial pointing out how unlikely the findings were.
    - fao_ 8y ago
      Thank you for the correction! :)

c0nducktr 8y ago

I've heard people talk about binaural beats before, but always brushed it off as pseudoscience. > The noninvasive treatment induces brain waves called gamma oscillations. Is this true? Does anyone have a link that explains these brain wave patterns in layman's terms? What exactly is happening to my brain when listening to these sounds?

sesteel 8y ago

People have already tried to reproduce results in humans, here is one such study: https://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijad/2018/6852303/ I am unaware of any successful results.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

wiggler00m 8y ago

Sonic the Hedgehog knows what's up.