Did you catch the news from MIT on March 16? Researchers demonstrated that mice induced with “Alzheimer’s disease” could be stimulated to retrieve memories that had appeared to be lost. This technique is not ready for human testing, but raises important questions about stimulating the brain to retrieve stored memories. I admit to being a bit of a neuroscience geek, and this advance in research really got me excited!
“Directly activating the cells that we believe are holding the memory gets them to retrieve it,” the researcher says. “This suggests that it is indeed an access problem to the information, not that they’re unable to learn or store this memory.” When we cue children to retrieve words we are helping them access their stored memories. There is quite a stretch from stimulating retrieval in mice and promoting word finding in children. The more we understand the activity of the brain, however, the closer we are to better promoting retrieval of words in children and adults.
If you are as intrigued as I am, here’s a link to an easily-understood explanation of the study: http://news.mit.edu/2016/retrieve-missing-memories-early-alzheimers-symptoms-0316 .