
Scientists Develop Nasal Spray That Improves Memory - fogus
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091001091752.htm
======
clawrencewenham
"If a nasal spray can improve memory, perhaps we're on our way to giving some
folks a whiff of common sense, such as accepting the realities of evolution,"

I think the newsworthiness of the article may be overshadowed by this neutron-
bomb of a statement. Maybe it was taken out of context? :-)

~~~
tsestrich
Seriously. I thought the whole article was interesting, but then I read that
and I was like "Are you kidding me?". I love the theory of evolution and
all... but why toss it in their randomly... it made no sense whatsoever. It
definitely discredited the article and the scientists involved.

"Maybe it will help us achieve our end goal and people will realize that it's
stupid to vote Democrat!" would have been comparable...

~~~
edmccaffrey
> It definitely discredited the article and the scientists involved.

How can a statement by the editor of a journal who didn't have anything to do
with the study beyond publishing it discredit the scientists that did the
research? Guilt by association is well established as a logical fallacy.

~~~
dejb
> Guilt by association is well established as a logical fallacy.

Yes but there is a significant portion of the population that doesn't
understand this. They are indeed likely to give the both the article and the
underlying research much less credit.

> Guilt by association is well established as a logical fallacy.

It depends on your context. The underlying proposition is unaffected by its
supporters but your 'best guess' view of it based on limited information needs
to take this into consideration. Apart from unreliable sources I'm sure there
are some people who pass on information which is anti-correlated with the
truth. A biblical creationist is likely to be strongly attracted to exactly
research that an evolutionist would dismiss. Both of these two would be right
in pre-judging any research put forward by the other as have a reduced
probability of being valid according to their views of reality.

------
johnnybgoode
In the article, they give the example of students using this the night before
a test. On this subject, it's interesting to me how so many people have simply
accepted the use of drugs for improving exam performance. I can't be the only
one who thinks it's ludicrous that we are now drugging ourselves to satisfy
some arbitrary, artificial tests and that this whole situation is supposed to
be ok.

Also, I wonder what the side effects are.

------
gcheong
"...promises to give late night cram sessions a major boost, if a good night's
sleep follows."

These are mutually exclusive, at least from my experience.

~~~
Maciek416
Ah well, here's an opportunity for someone to develop a solution that will
combine both the memory spray and a time-delayed sleeping medication!

~~~
hitonagashi
Red Bull gives you Wiings..(now with added memory boost so your grades follow
you skyward)

------
markbao
So, uh, time-to-market? I needed this yesterday. ;)

It seems that you can purchase interleukin-6 from Cayman in bulk, 96 wells for
about $350.

Nootropics are an interesting legal and academic subject. The question is:
will this be fully legal and open or prescribed and scheduled only to those
with learning disorders? I can easily see this being banned from use on the
SAT, GMAT and academia in general. Similar (and often abused) nootropics
include Adderall (amphetamine salts) and Ritalin (methylphenidate) which are
DEA/FDA Schedule II, both of which are prescribed for ADHD and severe
narcolepsy, as is concentration drug Provigil (modafinil) under Schedule IV.

Either the government (and perhaps academia) will go its regular course and
prevent individuals from gaining an unfair edge by scheduling it, or there may
be a slim chance of it being OTC. I have a gut feeling it's going to get
scheduled.

~~~
GHFigs
Scheduling has vastly more to do with abuse potential than with preventing
individuals from "gaining an unfair edge".

~~~
zackattack
Can someone in the know explain how scheduling works? And whether pharma
incentives affect the process?

------
stcredzero
I thought we already had stuff we could snort to improve our memory, some of
it even legal!

[http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=...](http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=cognitive+enhancer+nasal)

~~~
clawrencewenham
Desmopressin is available over the Internet for about $25 a bottle. As a nasal
spray it can stimulate the hypothalamus and improve memory retention. It's
dangerous, though, because it interferes with normal water retention.

~~~
silentbicycle
Yeah, when I saw the subject line I thought the article was going to be about
vasopressin/desmopressin. Not only does it improve memory retention, you don't
keep having to take bathroom breaks during lectures.

Seriously, though, it's probably not a good idea to throw diuretic hormones
out of balance unless you really know what you're doing.

~~~
jamesbritt
"Seriously, though, it's probably not a good idea to throw diuretic hormones
out of balance unless you really know what you're doing."

And it really does something for you. I tried Vasopressin in the '80s, and the
effects weren't worth the trouble to acquire and use it.

------
teeja
Doing a chemical run-around of 4 billion years of brain filtering evolution
might not be the best idea. There might be a reason you're having a hard time
remembering that shit ... it might just be _shit_.

Food. Exercise. Sleep. Skip the gimmicks.

------
dimas
there was not description of how test was conducted but sample of 17 for 2
nights does not make the results very confident to me. the half that took the
spray might have randomly having better memory unless they switched them next
night.

------
tokenadult
Check the details of this reported result against these criteria for
scientific studies:

<http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html>

~~~
nirmal
Too bad you can't actually check against the full academic report unless you
pay or happen to have a university that pays for access to the publications.

<http://www.fasebj.org/cgi/content/abstract/23/10/3629>

~~~
sqs
I am lucky to have such a university. From the "Results" section, for those
who are curious:

Recall of emotional texts was clearly superior to that of neutral texts, both
at learning (45.1+/-2.4% of the emotional texts vs. 26.4+/-1.7% of the neutral
texts correctly recalled; P<0.001) and at retrieval testing (41.3+/-2.4 vs.
22.2+/-1.7%; P<0.001). With IL-6 intrana- sally administered before sleep,
subjects recalled more content words from emotional texts at retrieval testing
after sleep compared with placebo (P<0.03) (Fig. 2A), whereas the recall of
content words from neutral texts was comparable with both treatment conditions
(P>0.32; P<0.03 for the IL-6/placebo x emotional/ neutral interaction). Memory
performance on the visuospatial 2-D object-location memory task measured in
the number of correctly recalled matching card locations and procedural finger
sequence-tapping task measured in the accuracy of the sequences were not
affected by IL-6 (P>0.33 for all comparisons) (Table 1).

Plus more...email me if you're really interested.

------
radu_floricica
sciencedaily.com - no exactly HN material

------
rbanffy
Try pepper spray.

You will _never_ forget. ;-)

~~~
rbanffy
Oh my... I was aiming for funny.

But I also bet it's accurate.

~~~
astine
Yes, pain is strongly linked to memory, which is why makes such an effective
teaching a disciplinary aid. However, it is contextual and sniffing pepper
spray might make you remember the wrong thing. ;)

