How Do We Help An Aging Memory?

My product is a Cognitive Test designed for lab rats. It consists of a developmental stage where five groups of rats are raised in different conditions for several weeks before all being put through the bi-color spatial test. In this test, each rat will be given free will to press either of the two buttons with their snouts, the red side’s button or the blue side’s. If they press the button on the blue side, a sugar pellet will be dispensed to them. If they press the button on the red side, no reward will be given. After a few weeks of daily testing in this environment, the rats’ success rates will be measured to track how well they memorized which side is “good” vs. not. They will then have a “memory retention” period where all groups of rats are put into a sedentary lifestyle. Then, after that period, the rats will all be tested again in the bi-color room to see how well their brains can remember the conditions of the spatial test.

 

The goal of my experiment is to test how different lifestyles affect the quality of a rat’s (or a person’s) cognitive abilities. It has been observed in many previous experiments that a being who lives a completely sedentary lifestyle will have a far worse memory (along with other cognitive factors) than someone who has lived, for example, with good exercise and/or a healthy social life. These factors, as well as having a stimulating environment, are things that can make or break a person’s neural health as they grow older and become elderly. Imagine a person who does nothing but sit on the couch all day, doing nothing but eating and watching television for their whole life. Now imagine someone who exercises, has good friends who they see often enough, and is involved in the world around them. The first person is so scarily likely to develop Dementia and/or Alzheimer’s. As for the second person, they are, unfortunately, also bound to have some amount of cognitive decline, but they are far less likely to develop the same magnitude of problems as the former.

 

My mentor, Dr. Etan Markus, has been working in this area of study for a very long time. He was the one who introduced me to cognitive neuroscience and the research being done with rats. My experiment is inspired by Dr. Markus’s current research project at UConn, with similar button-press-based methods and social learning. My design was also heavily influenced by the lifestyle study of Professor Ashok Kumar at the University of Florida, in addition to The Lancet Commissions that noted the importance of social health in neural development.

 

Rodent experimentation is a growingly popular method of studying the human brain; our minds and those of rats are quite similar. It also helps that a rat’s lifespan is so much shorter than a human’s, allowing scientists to research an “aging mind” without needing to spend an entire lifetime of their own in the process. In my experiment, I can simulate a given lifestyle and, using the gathered data, predict the health of a person’s cognition once they reach a mature age. The data from my theoretical experiments, as well as the data from decades worth of other cognitive neuroscientists, can improve our understanding of how the human memory works. With a better understanding of our minds, and with a large help from our lab rats, someday healthcare workers might finally be able to cure memory diseases like Dementia and Parkinson’s. Science and healthcare have come such a long way together, and all I want from my test design is to contribute a little something more to those communities. I want to help people age without so much fear and uncertainty.