Scientists Develop Nasal Spray That Improves Memory

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091001091752.htm

by fogus • 17 years ago

39 26 17 years ago

sciencedaily.com

gcheong• 17 years ago

"...promises to give late night cram sessions a major boost, if a good night's sleep follows."

These are mutually exclusive, at least from my experience.

Maciek416• 17 years ago

Ah well, here's an opportunity for someone to develop a solution that will combine both the memory spray and a time-delayed sleeping medication!

hitonagashi• 17 years ago

Red Bull gives you Wiings..(now with added memory boost so your grades follow you skyward)

ph0rque• 17 years ago

Also, maybe it's a placebo aimed at getting students to sleep well before an exam?

stcredzero• 17 years ago

I thought we already had stuff we could snort to improve our memory, some of it even legal!

http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=...

clawrencewenham2• 17 years ago

Desmopressin is available over the Internet for about $25 a bottle. As a nasal spray it can stimulate the hypothalamus and improve memory retention. It's dangerous, though, because it interferes with normal water retention.

silentbicycle• 17 years ago

Yeah, when I saw the subject line I thought the article was going to be about vasopressin/desmopressin. Not only does it improve memory retention, you don't keep having to take bathroom breaks during lectures.

Seriously, though, it's probably not a good idea to throw diuretic hormones out of balance unless you really know what you're doing.

tokenadult• 17 years ago

Check the details of this reported result against these criteria for scientific studies:

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

nirmal• 17 years ago

Too bad you can't actually check against the full academic report unless you pay or happen to have a university that pays for access to the publications.

http://www.fasebj.org/cgi/content/abstract/23/10/3629

sqs• 17 years ago

I am lucky to have such a university. From the "Results" section, for those who are curious:

Recall of emotional texts was clearly superior to that of neutral texts, both at learning (45.1+/-2.4% of the emotional texts vs. 26.4+/-1.7% of the neutral texts correctly recalled; P<0.001) and at retrieval testing (41.3+/-2.4 vs. 22.2+/-1.7%; P<0.001). With IL-6 intrana- sally administered before sleep, subjects recalled more content words from emotional texts at retrieval testing after sleep compared with placebo (P<0.03) (Fig. 2A), whereas the recall of content words from neutral texts was comparable with both treatment conditions (P>0.32; P<0.03 for the IL-6/placebo x emotional/ neutral interaction). Memory performance on the visuospatial 2-D object-location memory task measured in the number of correctly recalled matching card locations and procedural finger sequence-tapping task measured in the accuracy of the sequences were not affected by IL-6 (P>0.33 for all comparisons) (Table 1).

Plus more...email me if you're really interested.

markbao• 17 years ago

So, uh, time-to-market? I needed this yesterday. ;)

It seems that you can purchase interleukin-6 from Cayman in bulk, 96 wells for about $350.

Nootropics are an interesting legal and academic subject. The question is: will this be fully legal and open or prescribed and scheduled only to those with learning disorders? I can easily see this being banned from use on the SAT, GMAT and academia in general. Similar (and often abused) nootropics include Adderall (amphetamine salts) and Ritalin (methylphenidate) which are DEA/FDA Schedule II, both of which are prescribed for ADHD and severe narcolepsy, as is concentration drug Provigil (modafinil) under Schedule IV.

Either the government (and perhaps academia) will go its regular course and prevent individuals from gaining an unfair edge by scheduling it, or there may be a slim chance of it being OTC. I have a gut feeling it's going to get scheduled.

GHFigs• 17 years ago

Scheduling has vastly more to do with abuse potential than with preventing individuals from "gaining an unfair edge".

zackattack• 17 years ago

Can someone in the know explain how scheduling works? And whether pharma incentives affect the process?

rbanffy2• 17 years ago

Try pepper spray.

You will never forget. ;-)

rbanffy2• 17 years ago

Oh my... I was aiming for funny.

But I also bet it's accurate.

astine• 17 years ago

Yes, pain is strongly linked to memory, which is why makes such an effective teaching a disciplinary aid. However, it is contextual and sniffing pepper spray might make you remember the wrong thing. ;)

clawrencewenham2• 17 years ago

"If a nasal spray can improve memory, perhaps we're on our way to giving some folks a whiff of common sense, such as accepting the realities of evolution,"

I think the newsworthiness of the article may be overshadowed by this neutron-bomb of a statement. Maybe it was taken out of context? :-)

tsestrich• 17 years ago

Seriously. I thought the whole article was interesting, but then I read that and I was like "Are you kidding me?". I love the theory of evolution and all... but why toss it in their randomly... it made no sense whatsoever. It definitely discredited the article and the scientists involved.

"Maybe it will help us achieve our end goal and people will realize that it's stupid to vote Democrat!" would have been comparable...

edmccaffrey• 17 years ago

> It definitely discredited the article and the scientists involved.

How can a statement by the editor of a journal who didn't have anything to do with the study beyond publishing it discredit the scientists that did the research? Guilt by association is well established as a logical fallacy.

johnnybgoode2• 17 years ago

Yeah, when I saw that I had to check again to see if I was reading The Onion or something.

dimas• 17 years ago

there was not description of how test was conducted but sample of 17 for 2 nights does not make the results very confident to me. the half that took the spray might have randomly having better memory unless they switched them next night.

radu_floricica• 17 years ago

sciencedaily.com - no exactly HN material

johnnybgoode2• 17 years ago

In the article, they give the example of students using this the night before a test. On this subject, it's interesting to me how so many people have simply accepted the use of drugs for improving exam performance. I can't be the only one who thinks it's ludicrous that we are now drugging ourselves to satisfy some arbitrary, artificial tests and that this whole situation is supposed to be ok.

Also, I wonder what the side effects are.

teeja• 17 years ago

Doing a chemical run-around of 4 billion years of brain filtering evolution might not be the best idea. There might be a reason you're having a hard time remembering that shit ... it might just be shit.

Food. Exercise. Sleep. Skip the gimmicks.

Scientists Develop Nasal Spray That Improves Memory

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