Väldigt intressant.
Instead of the high pitched scream of ultrasound, Tsui used a much lower droning noise of just 40 Hertz, a sound only just high enough for humans to hear.
Exposing their mouse subjects to just one hour of this monotonous buzz every day for a week led to a significant drop in the amount of amyloid build up in the auditory regions, while also stimulating those microglial cells and blood vessels.
"What we have demonstrated here is that we can use a totally different sensory modality to induce gamma oscillations in the brain," says Tsai.
As an added bonus, it also helped clear the nearby hippocampus – an important section associated with memory.
The effects weren't just evident in the test subjects' brain chemistry. Functionally, mice exposed to the treatment performed better in a range of cognitive tasks.
Adding the light therapy from the previous study saw an even more dramatic effect, clearing plaques in a number of areas across the brain, including in the prefrontal cortex. Those trash-clearing microglia also went to town.
Ljuspulserna är kanske svårare att stå ut med. Men att ha en 40 hz ton igång just på gränsen till hörbarhet är ju lättare.
Ljudterapin verkar ju ge mer också
In that study, the improvements generated by flickering light were limited to the visual cortex. In their new study, the researchers set out to explore whether they could reach other brain regions, such as those needed for learning and memory, using sound stimuli. They found that exposure to one hour of 40-hertz tones per day, for seven days, dramatically reduced the amount of beta amyloid in the auditory cortex (which processes sound) as well as the hippocampus, a key memory site that is located near the auditory cortex.
https://news.mit.edu/2019/brain-wave-st ... imers-0314