Study showing electrical stimulation can eliminate age-related working memory deficit

Courtesy of the Daily Grail - this seems quite remarkable to me. A study evaluated working memory using a "spot the difference" task in two groups of healthy adults, aged 20-29 and 60-76, and as expected found that the older participants performed worse (accuracy about 80% on average, with a range of low 70s to mid 80s, compared with about 90% average, range high 80s to nearly 100%). That was without any intervention, but also some participants received a mild electrical stimulus applied to the scalp for 25 minutes. From about 12 minutes after the start of the stimulus, the older participants performed as well as the young ones, and the effect lasted until the end of the experiment - 50 minutes after the stimulation stopped - with no sign of a decline. In other experiments, they found that worse-performing younger adults also improved after the stimulus.

The stimulus was tailored to individual participants, and targeted the prefrontal cortex and the temporal lobe. The idea is that it improves the synchronisation of activity in these regions, which is lost with age and is less pronounced for worse-performing young participants.

Only the abstract of the paper, the references and miniature versions of the figures are available online:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-019-0371-x

But here is an article from Discover Magazine summarising the work:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brie...KxRmbh7nIX
And here's a rather more detailed one from LiveScience:
https://www.livescience.com/65177-electr...emory.html