A new Northwestern Medicine® study suggests that using non-invasive delivery of electrical current to stimulate a specific region in the brain improves memory. The magnetic pulses are referred to as Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation.

The new discovery is paving the way for new possibilities for treating memory impairment that results from conditions including stroke, early-stage Alzheimer’s disease, cardiac arrest, traumatic brain injury, and aging-related memory problems.

The study’s senior author, Joel Voss, assistant professor of medical social sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, said in a statement, “We show for the first time that you can specifically change memory functions of the brain in adults without surgery or drugs, which have not proven effective.” He continued, “This noninvasive stimulation improves the ability to learn new things. It has tremendous potential for treating memory disorders.”

The study will be published today in Science.

The study is the first to show that remembering events calls upon a variety of regions in the brain to work together with the hippocampus, a critical memory structure. This approach may also help to treat mental disorders such as schizophrenia, where the regions in the brain and the hippocampus do not work together, which affects memory and cognition.

According to the Mayo Clinic, memory loss is one of the first notable symptoms of dementia. In addition to memory, dementia often leads to impairment in reasoning, judgment, various thinking skills, and language.