Improving Memory with Nasal Spray?

This may sound like a sales pitch, but it’s not. If you’re having problems with your memory, or you want to improve it, then you might want to closely follow the research from this German team  of scientists. Published in the journal for experimental biology (FASEB Journal), German scientists discovered that administering a nasal spay containing interleukin-6 improved the memory of it subjects!

According to the paper, Interleukin-6 exerts “neuromodulating influences on the brain, with promoting influences on sleep”. The researchers hypothesized that IL-6 could help consolidate our memories better during sleep, so they administered a nasal spray of IL-6 to test subjects after they read several short stories before bed. The control and test subjects slept and, the next morning, were asked to recall as much of what they had read the night before. And what do you know? The test subjects remembered more!

I’m not sure exactly how IL-6 affects our memory; I only know it has functions on the immune system, but the study is pretty interesting, isn’t it? The Scientist Community wants to know if you would care to try a memory-enhancing nasal spray were it to make its way onto the market? Would you?

Image: sxc