Researchers Develop Memory-Boosting Nasal Spray

Tuesday, October 06, 2009


This article I found on Fox News is another attempt on my part to find something interesting And enlightening as well as to vary my response to the content of which it speaks. The article is short, but contains two sources that originally reported this story. Click here to read the study in the FASEB. Click here to read more on this story at the Daily Mail. As reported, researchers have developed a “memory-boosting nasal spray”. Instructions indicate “A short spray of the inhaler – taken at bedtime – will help the brain to hold in memories acquired during the day.” The researchers are suggesting that it could possibly be used for those students who are cramming for tests that if they take this nasal spray at bedtime it would help them remember what they had studied when they are awake the next morning.


I was excited to hopefully read some comments to the study and find this actual article credible, but instead as I read on it contained very little information and it also was not a credible study. I could probably take a group of individuals myself, have them read something before they go to bed, give them all a saline nasal spray and have some that would remember better the next day than others.


If it sounds too good to be true it probably is not, as this article did not pan out to include anything newsworthy. I find Fox News credible so the source does not disturb me, after all they do have a slogan that says “We report, you decide”. The other two sources listed for reading were interesting in that one was informative and the other raised a reaction from me that kind of disgusted me as it referred to the study written about in the journal of the “Federation of the American Societies for Experimental Biology” in which a statement sarcastically made a reference to using the spray "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," said Gerald Weissmann, M.D., Editor-in-Chief of The FASEB Journal”. I pretty much take offense to that statement because I don’t believe in evolution or his condescending language. You also don’t have to be a genius to see the study is pretty much bogus as they only used 17 individuals to test the spray on before they announced the results in the journal. For a study to be relevant you need to have at least one hundred individuals participating. The other thing they discovered is the spray only works if you get a good night's sleep as evidence by REM sleep. Even though they used two groups (only men) and had a placebo (control group) I don’t see why this was reported as “Researchers have developed a memory-boosting nasal spray, London’s Daily Mail reported” I think the Fox news story should have responsibly titled theirs may have instead of “Researchers Develop Memory-Boosting Nasal Spray”.


The only thing I thought was interesting about this article is it mentioned the test took place at the “University of Lubeck in Germany” and “the spray was made using a molecule in the body’s immune system known as interleukin 6”. Since this article was first reported in the journal of Experimental Biology it makes me wonder if Fox is keeping an eye on German science. History was possibly not so fond of some of the things German scientists did in the past. Who knows?