40Hz Audio and Visual Stimuli and Alzheimer’s

March 2nd, 2018

Via: Nature:

In March 2015, Li-Huei Tsai set up a tiny disco for some of the mice in her laboratory. For an hour each day, she placed them in a box lit only by a flickering strobe. The mice — which had been engineered to produce plaques of the peptide amyloid-? in the brain, a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease — crawled about curiously. When Tsai later dissected them, those that had been to the mini dance parties had significantly lower levels of plaque than mice that had spent the same time in the dark1.

Tsai, a neuroscientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, says she checked the result; then checked it again. “For the longest time, I didn’t believe it,” she says. Her team had managed to clear amyloid from part of the brain with a flickering light. The strobe was tuned to 40 hertz and was designed to manipulate the rodents’ brainwaves, triggering a host of biological effects that eliminated the plaque-forming proteins. Although promising findings in mouse models of Alzheimer’s disease have been notoriously difficult to replicate in humans, the experiment offered some tantalizing possibilities. “The result was so mind-boggling and so robust, it took a while for the idea to sink in, but we knew we needed to work out a way of trying out the same thing in humans,” Tsai says.

Related: Does Listening to a 40 Hz Tone Reverse the Progress of Alzheimer’s?

4 Responses to “40Hz Audio and Visual Stimuli and Alzheimer’s”

  1. Dennis says:

    What 40 Hz sounds like:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPuSGHKSlBU

    Also: http://www.szynalski.com/tone-generator/

    (You may need to listen on good quality earphones or speakers, as this is too low for some computer speakers to reproduce.)

    If this is shown to be effective on human beings, and the 2nd article suggests it can be, I wonder if imagining/remembering the tone could also have benefits.

  2. Kevin says:

    My old and discontinued midrange Audio Technica M50 cans are able to play 40hz very clearly.

    I used the szynalski.com tone generator.

  3. pookie says:

    When I go to szynalski.com, I get a website for English-Polish translation. har.

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.