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Robert Reinhart<\/span><\/a> suspected that his <\/span>latest research<\/span><\/a>, published in a leading journal in August, would receive some attention. Sure enough, headlines in <\/span>USA Today<\/span><\/i><\/a>, <\/span>Nature<\/span><\/i><\/a>, <\/span>The Boston Globe<\/span><\/i><\/a>, among others, touted his discovery that electrical stimulation to the brain can improve memory. But it was the messages that filled Reinart\u2019s email inbox and voicemail that really blew him away.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cA lot of them are these really personal, tragic, heartfelt stories. That just makes your heart melt\u2014and you want to get back to everyone and you want to help them,\u201d he says. \u201cWe had to have an emergency lab meeting the other day, just to prepare and plan to respond to so many people.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Reinhart, an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences and the director of the <\/span>Cognitive & Clinical Neuroscience Laboratory<\/span><\/a>, studies human cognition with the goal of developing drug-free therapeutics for people suffering from brain disorders. He was recently honored for his work, receiving the <\/span>2022 <\/span>Science<\/span><\/i> and PINS Prize for Neuromodulation<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n For his latest research, published in <\/span>Nature Neuroscience<\/span><\/i> on August 22, 2022, Reinhart and the members of his lab focused on adults aged 65 and older. Utilizing a soft cap covered in electrodes, they administered both low- and high-frequency electrical stimulation for 20 minutes on 4 consecutive days, while reading subjects a list of 20 words. They then tested those subjects\u2019 immediate recall of the words as well as their memory of them one month later. The results showed improvements in both short- and long-term memory.<\/span><\/p>\n arts&sciences<\/span><\/i> spoke with Reinhart shortly after his paper came out about his findings and what comes next for his research.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n arts&sciences<\/i><\/b>: What\u2019s been the response to your paper so far?<\/b><\/p>\n Robert Reinhart:<\/b> It\u2019s been a strong positive response from scientists around the country, around the world, and from the public, who\u2019ve flooded my inbox. I love interacting with the public and I feel like it\u2019s our responsibility as scientists to communicate what the public has bankrolled\u2014the cost and risk is socialized for much of research. It\u2019s a wonderful way to disseminate research.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n How do you see your research helping people? What are the clinical implications?<\/b><\/p>\n There are lots of problems with drugs and with current procedures\u2014surgical procedures, behavioral and cognitive behavioral therapy\u2014with people not responding to treatments or having side effects and persistence of symptoms. This is what our work speaks to: drug-free, novel therapeutics to help people with a wide variety of different disease states and clinical symptoms. I think there\u2019s a real appetite for alternative drug-free approaches without the side effects.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n How far out are we from having these kinds of tools appear in a doctor\u2019s office? There\u2019s precedent for these types of tools, but we need bigger studies for them to be replicated and to ensure that it\u2019s efficacious and safe.<\/span><\/p>\n Does the stimulation that you\u2019re introducing to the brain mimic natural brain activity?<\/b><\/p>\n The brain communicates via nerve impulses. There\u2019s rhythmic activity in the brain. We\u2019re targeting those rhythms and causally augmenting them with the stimulation to put them into a different mode of functioning. So, for example, in schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease, there\u2019s an asynchronous, rhythmic pattern. And the general idea is that we’re trying to resynchronize these patterns of activity that have been implicated in memory processing. Time is a crucial parameter in how the brain communicates with itself, and we\u2019re going in and trying to have an effect on that dimension of brain activity.<\/span><\/p>\n How closely might eventual real-word use of this technology mirror your research?<\/b><\/p>\n We\u2019re figuring out what parameters are the ones that we need to hone in on to maximize the benefit from the stimulation\u2014like how intense is the stimulation within acceptable safety limits, the duration of each stimulation dose, interval spacing, optimal spacing between the sessions. We have a number of grants that we\u2019re proposing now.<\/span><\/p>\n One thing we determined was that the frequency parameter is important. We\u2019re manipulating the timing of brain activities and how they communicate. There’s processes that rise and fall in the brain at blindingly fast speed, and we can directly augment those rhythms that coordinate information flow and the timing of information to exploit the natural plasticity of the brain. We’ve known for a long time that certain pieces of brain tissue have specific functions\u2014but the timing and the frequency of the brain activities in those regions can also be discovered and then exploited for translation. That was an important discovery with this latest work.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Who might benefit most from your research?<\/b><\/p>\n Our research is geared toward people who are not responding well to drugs or first line treatments and standard care\u2014they need something else.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Are you beginning to understand how this might impact people with different conditions differently?<\/b><\/p>\n That\u2019s a question for the future. We\u2019re very interested in people who don\u2019t respond to treatment and their individual differences. But condition by condition, we don\u2019t have that much experience yet. I should say, one of the latest views in psychiatry is a dimensional approach, RDoc [Research Domain Criteria], where you view symptoms of various brain disorders along a spectrum of wellness. So, there might not be as clear of a line between what is considered \u201ctypical\u201d versus \u201cpathological\u201d\u2014there\u2019s actually dimensions in which they overlap. And we target certain components of executive functioning which are likely to have implications across a wide variety of cognitive brain disorders and at different points along the wellness spectrum<\/span><\/p>\n Are there any lessons to be learned from this work with regard to preventing memory loss in the first place?<\/b><\/p>\n I haven’t thought of what we\u2019re developing in the realm of prevention. When I think of prevention, with respect to Alzheimer\u2019s, I think of radical diet and lifestyle changes. I think of whole grain, plant-based, vegan diets, low on salt, sugar, and oil, as well as adequate sleep and exercise, and stress reduction. These kinds of long-term, preventive measures are critical. But when you get to the place where you have the disease, that\u2019s where we need pills and procedures, including drug-free procedures like the kind we\u2019re developing.<\/span><\/p>\n What\u2019s next for your lab?<\/b><\/p>\n We have three research threads we\u2019re most excited about, and we\u2019re developing a fourth. One is helping people with schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder with cognitive deficits. Schizophrenia is the most disabling health state in the world. Number two is Alzheimer’s disease and memory, following up on this work that shows we can enhance memory for at least a month. So, we\u2019re going to run a clinical trial\u2014we\u2019re submitting a grant for that now. The third is with respect to anxiety. Schizophrenia is the most disabling health state in the world, but anxiety and depression are the most prevalent. So, we\u2019re focusing on generalized anxiety disorder as well as obsessive compulsive disorder. And then a fourth research stream\u2014this one is really new\u2014is in the realm of conscious and nonconscious experience. I think this is going to be really exciting and I\u2019m eager to talk about what we\u2019re finding, but the work is still under review.<\/span><\/p>\n And finally, you said your inbox filled up when this paper was published. Why do you think your work resonates with so many people?<\/b><\/p>\n I think our research is part of a larger scientific effort to open up an entirely new realm of treatment options for a wide variety of patients. And I think there are other factors that contribute to the appeal of not just our work, but novel pills and procedures, novel approaches to address diseases. And that might be, I\u2019m sorry to say, because the healthcare system is not optimal in this country. If you look at the <\/span>OECD countries<\/span><\/a>\u2014the most industrialized, technologically advanced countries in the world\u2014the US ranks very low in terms of cost of healthcare and in terms of outcomes. We\u2019re paying the most and we’re getting the worst outcomes. And so, when you have something that can potentially help people who are suffering, you get this kind of response.<\/span><\/p>\n This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" arts&sciences spoke with Reinhart shortly after his paper came out about his findings and what comes next for his research.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21329,"featured_media":62645,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[195],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63522"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21329"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63522"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63522\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":64229,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63522\/revisions\/64229"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/62645"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63522"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63522"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63522"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}