FAKE?! Misleading maybe... (Score 1)

With regards to the "fake" tag, let's reference the originating article, shall we: http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080129/full/news.2008.538.html Deep brain stimulation has actually been used since 1993 in patients with Parkinson's disease to stop tremors and allow them to use their muscles again. The next step taken was in psychiatric disorders; there was a case where they helped stop the obsessive thoughts in an OCD patient, and there was work being done looking at the effects of stimulating certain areas of the brain of people with clinical depression. Most of that is in a related Nature article you need a subscription to read, from July of 2005. It's linked in the article I linked to, if you have access to a subscription to Nature. So this sort of "deep brain stimulation" has been going on for a long time. The novelty here is that they're looking at the effects of stimulating different areas to target different brain functions. In the article regarding memory, they accidentally stimulated the fornix, which is a fiber bundle that leads to the hippocampus, and has been closely linked with memory since the case of HM back in the 1950s, who had surgery to remove the hippocampus in order to relieve his epilepsy. The seizures, which had been originating in the hippocampus, stopped, but he lost the ability to form new memories, much like the guy in Memento. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HM_(patient) Deep brain stimulation has even been used to treat epilepsy, because the regularity of the stimulation helps to calm the erratic firing characteristic of a seizure. The point is, the idea of stimulating selected areas of the brain to get a desired effect isn't new. Neither is the idea that a small area of the brain is involved in formation and recall of memories. The interesting thing here is that stimulating that area can lead to recall. However, there's still a long way to go before we can say it's a "cure" for Alzheimers, if that's even possible.