Diseases such as Alzheimer’s and stroke, as well traumatic brain injuries, can do severe damage to patients’ memory system in the brain. Anyone taking care of Alzheimer’s sufferers, for example, knows well the importance of memory to a person’s sense of self and overall well-being. Hope is on the horizon, though, as researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center and University of Southern California (USC) have developed a way to electrically excite groups of neurons in the hippocampus, where new memories are made, so as to significantly improve memory retention.
The work was performed on human volunteers, but nobody had to had their cranium opened just for this. Instead, patients with epilepsy that were already having electrodes placed in their brains in order to triangulate the source of their seizures were the natural test subjects.
The researchers, who published their study in Journal of Neural Engineering, relied on a multi-input multi-output (MIMO) nonlinear algorithm to read the signals produced by brain cells when they’re trying to establish a new memory, and to then create its own signals that help to cement that memory in place. Compared to baseline tests performed prior, the eight volunteers treated with the memory prosthesis showed an approximately 35% improvement in new memory retention.
Here’s Robert Hampson, Ph.D., professor of physiology/pharmacology and neurology at Wake Forest Baptist and one of the leaders of the study, explaining the new technology:
Study in Journal of Neural Engineering: Developing a hippocampal neural prosthetic to facilitate human memory encoding and recall…
Via: USC…