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Saturday, March 19, 2011

Brain Games: Is 'Limitless' a Glimpse of Our Future?

"Everything I ever read, heard, or seen was just organized and available," Eddie Mora narrates. "I knew exactly what I needed to do and how to do it."

Mora just took a new, unapproved memory-enhancing drug. Within minutes, everything around him becomes clear as the drug ramps up his brainpower and memory. He can not only access memories long thought lost, he can also make new memories quickly and easily.

In his first month on the drug, he teaches himself to play piano in three days, writes a book and learns several languages, and turns $12,000 into $2.3 million as a day trader.

Sadly for college students everywhere, this drug isn't real, yet. Eddie Mora's life on a drug called NZT is the plot of the new movie "Limitless," in theaters tomorrow (March 18). Though it's a fantasy world, some researchers say such memory-enhancing drugs might not be far off. Advances in knowledge of long-term memory and the processes that guide and shape it are leading the way to memory-enhancing therapies.

"It's really amazing; I think we are on the verge of having the essential building blocks of how memories are made in the hippocampus," Alcino Silva, a memory researcher at UCLA, told LiveScience. (The hippocampus is buried deep within the forebrain and is involved in the formation and storing of memories.)

Read full article here

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