Someday, people might visit clinics to boost that ability, which declines both in normal aging and in dementias like Alzheimer’s disease, said researcher Robert Reinhart of Boston University.

The treatment is aimed at “working memory,” the ability to hold information in mind for a matter of seconds as you perform a task, such as doing math in your head. Sometimes called the workbench or scratchpad of the mind, it’s crucial for things like taking medications, paying bills, buying groceries or planning, Reinhart said, Medical Xpress reported.

“It’s where your consciousness lives … where you’re working on information,” he said.

The new study is not the first to show that stimulating the brain can boost working memory. But Reinhart, who reported the work Monday in the journal Nature Neuroscience, said it’s notable for showing success in older people and because the memory boost persisted for nearly an hour minimum after the brain stimulation ended.

One scientist who has previously reported boosting working memory with electrical stimulation noted that the decline in this ability with normal aging is not huge. But “they removed the effects of age from these people,” said Dr. Barry Gordon, a professor of neurology and cognitive science at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore.

“It’s a superb first step” toward demonstrating a way to improve mental performance, said Gordon, who was not involved in the new study.

Reinhart agreed that more research is needed before it can be formally tested as a treatment.

The electrical current was administered through a tight-fitting cap that also monitored each subject’s brainwaves. For study participants, that current felt like a slight tingling, itching or poking sensation under the electrodes for about 30 seconds, Reinhart said. After that, the skin got used to the current and it was imperceptible.

The researchers’ idea was to improve communication between the brain’s prefrontal cortex in the front and the temporal cortex on the left side, because the rhythms of activity in those two regions had fallen out of sync with each other.

So the researchers applied the current to those two regions to nudge the activity cycles back into a matching pattern. The results provided new evidence that a breakdown in that communication causes the loss of working memory with age, Reinhart said.

Part of the study included 42 participants in their 20s, plus 42 others aged 60 to 76. First they were tested on a measure of working memory. It involved viewing an image such as a harmonica or broken egg on a computer screen, then a blank screen for three seconds, and then a second image that was either identical to the first or slightly modified. The subjects had to judge whether it was the same image or not.

During a sham stimulation, the older group was less accurate than the younger participants. But during and after 25 minutes of real brain stimulation, they did as well. The improvement lasted for at least another 50 minutes after the stimulation ended, at which point the researchers stopped testing. It’s not clear how long the benefit reached beyond that, Reinhart said, but previous research suggests it might go for five hours or more after stimulation stops.

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There are a number of interesting elements, including Microsoft’s suddenly aggressive move to use Azure as an Internet of Things host, which suggests that in the future, many of our homes and businesses (at least their lights, HVAC and security) will be managed remotely in the Microsoft Cloud. Don’t get upset, as this is likely a ton better than what we are doing today. (Yes, there is something called “smart home abuse,” and it is a real threat.)

There will be a ton of Azure announcements during the week: new servers, a vastly more powerful Azure Global Network, business intelligence, and SQL. What caught my eye was a product that’s free (at least initially) — a new version of Microsoft Teams. I think Teams could be a foundational way to fix governments in general, with a little extra help from artificial intelligence.

I’ll explain and then close with my product of the week: a new 10-inch affordable Microsoft Surface Tablet with a Pentium Gold processor (Pentium was one of the most powerful brands every created).

Why I Don’t Like Collaboration Products

Let’s start with why collaboration products in general often leave me less than excited. My educational background was in business, with a focus on motivation and employee development. One of the things I learned early on is that no tool alone will force people to do something they don’t want to do, and if they really want to do something, the lack of a tool won’t stop them.

Over the years, programs like forced ranking pitted employees against each other, effectively discouraging collaboration. Companies like Microsoft have discontinued the programs, but the related behavior generally continues. In general, incentives like raises and bonuses not only are less common but also are tied to individual or corporate behavior rather than team behavior.

Few employees have the power to impact corporate results, and if you are competing with others for your bonus, raise or promotion, why would you collaborate with them? A tool like Microsoft Teams, alone, can’t fix that — but it could become a foundational element to an eventual fix.

Dysfunctional Government

Perhaps the most dysfunctional “teams” you’re ever likely to find are in politics — not just U.S. politics, either. If you watch what goes on in other governments, where things often degrade into open violence, our folks actually don’t look as bad.

None of these groups are known for making progress, however, and collaboration — particularly between political parties in the U.S. — has been almost as rare as a unicorn. It is particularly fascinating that even though the overall approval rating for the U.S. Congress is so low as to suggest that every politician would be fired if an election were held today, individually we mostly seem to like the office holders (otherwise, they wouldn’t get reelected).

I think this is mostly because we have no real clue what our representatives actually are doing. We have a belief that they are doing a good job, but we don’t really have a good independent way of validating our belief. What’s more troubling is that instead of being in a situation where we influence our representatives, we’re often the targets of their powerful marketing efforts to sway our opinion, even in opposition to our own best interests.

What if we had a real-time tool to assess how well our elected officials were taking care of our interests? In a company, what if we had a way to ensure that employees were behaving consistently with company imperatives, strategies and goals?

Microsoft Teams + AI

What Microsoft Teams does is coordinate interactions. One of its most interesting aspects is that it can take notes at meetings automatically, index those notes back to a video of the meeting, and provide ways to rapidly locate key pieces of information.

In this way, it can document commitments, agreements, positions (and the foundational arguments that support them), and create an audit trail. This trail not only can help optimize a collaborative effort, but also can highlight team members who are unwilling to cooperate (there is always that one jerk who enjoys shooting down anything that might look like progress); or are abusive, discriminatory, racist, or two beers short of a six pack (I expect every one of you flashed on someone when I said that).

It also can showcase the heroes who drive progress, constantly act consistently with corporate policy and approved behavior; and demonstrate leadership skills along with the proper application of those skills.

Microsoft increasingly has been associating AI capability with this tool, but what if that AI could, after a meeting, send management a note with a performance review of everyone in the meeting? Who participated, who did their email, who moved the ball forward, who created obstacles, who behaved inappropriately, etc. What if you could get a report showcasing what you did right and wrong based on that review, so you could modify your own behavior to be a better team player and better employee, objectively not just subjectively?

Wouldn’t that motivate you to perform better, since you would know the reports was feeding into your own performance review, ensuring that you would get credit for the work you did as a team member, not just individually, by promoting team playing? It would also pretty much screw the assh*les in the meeting, so that alone would get me to consider it.

Applied to Government

In the case of government, you’d play the role of employer. You would see how well your chosen representatives were doing their jobs — at least with regard to what they said and how well they collaborated to get results — and they would see how well they were meeting your expectations.

These reports also would flow to the various political parties, so they would have more insight into when to support incumbents versus replacing them on the ballet because they weren’t doing their jobs. (Given Congress’ approval ratings, you’d think that just fixing the “do the job” part would have a massive positive impact.)

You likely could create this ad hoc, just by feeding C-SPAN into Microsoft Teams and then wrapping it with a report-generating AI that constantly would rank your representatives against your documented interests, actual progress toward those interests, and — using that same metric — against competitors, both inside and outside your party.

I’m willing to bet a lot of us would flip on our representatives if we knew whether they agreed with us and could see how well they carried the day. We’d want both, because someone who just agrees but can’t get support is nearly as bad as someone who isn’t aligned with our interests.

Privacy Questions

One of the complaints I can anticipate to this approach is its potential to intrude on privacy. However, politicians lead a public life, and what they say often is either misreported or taken out of context.

More important, when they do screw up, their first alert may come when the screw-up is reported publicly, rather than in real time when they could address it more effectively. With this tool, they or their staff could be alerted. Alerts even could be automated — for example, driven to their smartwatch or, even better, a surgically implanted cattle prod (to get their attention). Just kidding, sort of…

In most companies, there’s someone always trying to take notes, and it is hardly unusual for someone in a meeting who objected to their treatment or the outcome to run to management with a complaint.

Having a heads-up so you could apologize during the meeting — or have the documentation to defend yourself — could be critical to surviving the result. This tool, tied to an AI, could do both. In short, the privacy was never there, and this just better ensures a positive outcome from your participation in a meeting or presentation event.

Wrapping Up

In large part, the problems we have either managing effectively or ensuring that our politicians do their jobs have their roots in a lack of objective information on real performance.

Increasingly, everything we do is being captured by something. Right now, it is more likely that information would be used to justify an action against us or our employees and not focused on making both better.

Tools like Teams are designed to focus on making the collaboration process more effective, but they easily could be modified with AIs to allow both employees and politicians to change behavior and improve performance.

We need to get better, and our very survival likely will depend on improving the effectiveness of our governments. Done right, this eventually could result in a huge step: not only toward making our companies better places to work (by preventing the Harvey Weinsteins of the world either from being formed or from making it into management), but also toward eliminating the politicians who have been doing us the most harm.

Oh, and one other thought: At least with companies, there is nothing that would prevent a sharp manager from using the transcripts and records from Teams to assess behavior and better coach employees. Just saying…

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The head of the Iranian delegation to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) Summit on Science and Technology held in the Kazakh capital, Astana, has proposed that Muslim countries set up a forum comprising women who have secured accomplishments in the domain of technology.

“A new cultural and civilizational movement is taking shape in the Muslim world,” said Abdolhossein Fereydoun, who is also an advisor to the Iranian minister of science, research and technology.

“Iran specifically welcomes the development of scientific diplomacy and technology in Muslim countries, and to that end, embraces major joint scientific projects in the fields of satellite technology, super computers and oceanic studies,” he added, according to a Farsi report by Mehr.

He said figures show Islamic countries’ share of world scientific articles has risen from 2% to 8% over the past 16 years, which, he noted, is regarded as a considerable growth.

“Moreover, the rate of publishing scientific materials in OIC member states is eight times higher than the average global rate,” he added.

He said Iran is working closely with OIC members in the field of education, science and technology, and added regional as well as international centers are contributing to the development of Sci-Tech parks and a regional oceanography center.

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