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When Torkel Klingberg found that memory isn’t as “hard wired” as we thought, he decided to borrow ideas from computer games to treat children suffering from attention disorders.

Healthcare professionals naturally concentrate their efforts on patients and their afflictions. Few medical researchers have the lateral thinking it takes to see opportunities for their work in other applications, let alone to see those ideas through to commercialisation. Harriet Wallberg-Henriksson, president of Sweden’s Karolinska Institutet, singles out Torkel Klingberg as an exception.

Klingberg, professor of cognitive neuroscience at the Karolinska, works in a hot area of science, understanding how the brain works. He may not know it yet, but, by merging cognitive science and computers, he also surfs ahead of the wave dubbed converging technologies, the idea that many of tomorrow’s new products and services will come from the merger of previously disparate areas of science.

In particular, Klingberg’s group at the Karolinska is trying to understand the neural basis for cognitive development during childhood and early adulthood. The team uses one of the latest tools for brain research, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), to image and measure brain activity. In this way, they “read the minds” of young people with, for example, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

Working with memory

A major part of the group’s work is on the development and plasticity of working memory and attention. Plasticity is the brain’s ability to adapt, to reorganise neural pathways as we encounter new experiences. Working memory is what you would expect from the label. Like the volatile “random access memory” in a computer, working memory is a temporary store that processes information “on the fly”.

Working memory typically holds information for a few seconds. We use working memory to, for example, remember instructions, solve problems, control impulses and focus attention. Deficient working memory shows up as an array of symptoms, including inattention.

Klingberg’s group uses fMRI to study what is going on physiologically in the brain. The technique, which is revolutionising cognitive science, allows researchers to investigate how memory develops in young people and to compare this with how memory works in adults. It turns out that youngsters with ADHD, and some people born prematurely, have deficits in working memory. In the course of its research, the Karolinska group found that it is possible to train working memory. “I thought that working memory might be possible to improve, just like any other skill,” says Klingberg.

In one set of experiments, the researchers worked with healthy adults. Over five weeks, the volunteers practised various working memory tasks. The fMRI showed that this really did lead to changes in the areas of the brain associated with working memory.

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