Upgrade Your Memory With a Surgically Implanted Chip!
Upgrade Your Memory With a Surgically Implanted Chip
Brain prostheses for the computer in your skull.
By Caroline Wintern June 10, 2019, 3:00 AM PDT
In a grainy black-and-white video shot at the Mayo Clinic
in Minnesota, a patient sits in a hospital bed, his head wrapped in a bandage.
He’s trying to recall 12 words for a memory test but can only conjure three:
whale, pit, zoo. After a pause, he gives up, sinking his head into his hands.
In a second video, he recites all 12 words without
hesitation. “No kidding, you got all of them!” a researcher says. This time the
patient had help, a prosthetic memory aid inserted into his brain.
Over the past five years, the U.S. Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency (Darpa) has invested $77 million to develop devices
intended to restore the memory-generation capacity of people with traumatic
brain injuries. Last year two groups conducting tests on humans published
compelling results.
The Mayo Clinic device was created by Michael Kahana, a
professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, and the medical
technology company Medtronic Plc. Connected to the left temporal cortex, it
monitors the brain’s electrical activity and forecasts whether a lasting memory
will be created. “Just like meteorologists predict the weather by putting
sensors in the environment that measure humidity and wind speed and
temperature, we put sensors in the brain and measure electrical signals,”
Kahana says. If brain activity is suboptimal, the device provides a small zap,
undetectable to the patient, to strengthen the signal and increase the chance
of memory formation. In two separate studies, researchers found the prototype
consistently boosted memory 15% to 18%.
The second group performing human testing, a team from
Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, N.C., aided by colleagues
at the University of Southern California, has a more finely tuned method. In a
study published last year, their patients showed memory retention improvement of
as much as 37%. “We’re looking at questions like, ‘Where are my keys? Where did
I park the car? Have I taken my pills?’ ” says Robert Hampson, lead author of
the 2018 study.
To form memories, several neurons fire in a highly
specific way, transmitting a kind of code. “The code is different for unique
memories, and unique individuals,” Hampson says. By surveying a few dozen
neurons in the hippocampus, the brain area responsible for memory formation,
his team learned to identify patterns indicating correct and incorrect memory
formation for each patient and to supply accurate codes when the brain
faltered.
In presenting patients with hundreds of pictures, the
group could even recognize certain neural firing patterns as particular
memories. “We’re able to say, for example, ‘That’s the code for the yellow
house with the car in front of it,’ ” says Theodore Berger, a professor of
bioengineering at the University of Southern California who helped develop
mathematical models for Hampson’s team.
Both groups have tested their devices only on epileptic
patients with electrodes already implanted in their brains to monitor seizures;
each implant requires clunky external hardware that won’t fit in somebody’s
skull. The next steps will be building smaller implants and getting approval
from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to bring the devices to market. A
startup called Nia Therapeutics Inc. is already working to commercialize
Kahana’s technology.
Justin Sanchez, who just stepped down as director of
Darpa’s biological technologies office, says veterans will be the first to use
the prosthetics. “We have hundreds of thousands of military personnel with
traumatic brain injuries,” he says. The next group will likely be stroke and
Alzheimer’s patients. Eventually, perhaps, the general public will have
access—though there’s a serious obstacle to mass adoption. “I don’t think any
of us are going to be signing up for voluntary brain surgery anytime soon,”
Sanchez says. “Only when these technologies become less invasive, or
noninvasive, will they become widespread.”
BOTTOM LINE - Two teams of researchers have demonstrated
that their implants consistently boost memory retention. Now if we can just
skip the surgery.
Comments
Post a Comment