flashing lights and pink noise

 28 FEBRUARY 2018

How flashing lights and pink noise might banish Alzheimer’s, improve memory and more

Neuroscientists are getting excited about non-invasive procedures to tune the brain’s natural oscillations.

Helen Thomson

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Illustration by Paweł Jońca

In March 2015, Li-Huei Tsai set up a tiny disco for some of the mice in her laboratory. For an hour each day, she placed them in a box lit only by a flickering strobe. The mice — which had been engineered to produce plaques of the peptide amyloid-β in the brain, a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease — crawled about curiously. When Tsai later dissected them, those that had been to the mini dance parties had significantly lower levels of plaque than mice that had spent the same time in the dark1./.../