Researchers reportedly created a memory chip implant that can help the human brain remember things faster.
Researchers from the Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center and the University of Southern California created a memory chip implant that can augment the human brain’s capability to recall memories.
The research was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency who believes that brain prosthesis is the life-changing technology that could help thousands of soldiers suffering from traumatic brain injury.
The brain implants were reportedly tested on 15 patients from the Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center. The experiment yielded promising results as all the patients who received the implant showed an astounding 35 percent increase in their short-term memory powers.
The findings mean that the implant’s application can go much further than treating traumatic brain injury. It could also be utilized to help people battling Alzheimer’s and other cognitive disorders, particularly among the elderly.
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For their study, the researchers chose patients who already had brain implants as part of their epilepsy treatment. They were asked to play a series of memory-related computer games.
As the volunteers remembered things, the researchers recorded the patterns of neural firing around the hippocampus area, the part of the brain responsible for a person’s memory.
The neuroscientists reportedly focused on encoding the neural patterns that produced the correct memory.
The researchers then made the patients play the games again while electrically stimulating their brains using their own successfully encoded memory patterns. The technique was able to trigger more effective memory storage.
“We showed that we could tap into a patient’s own memory content, reinforce it and feed it back to the patient,” Robert Hampson, the study’s lead author, said.
“In the future, we hope to be able to help people hold onto specific memories, such as where they live or what their grandkids look like when their overall memory begins to fail.”
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