New hope

Tim Lamden reports for The Daily Mail,

New hope for dementia and brain-damaged patients: Scientists develop implant that can save short-term memories from being forgotten.

Dementia sufferers and brain-damaged soldiers who cannot recall the recent past have been given new hope of retaining memories - with the advent of an electrical implant.

Researchers in the US have developed the world’s first prosthetic implant to help a disabled brain encode memories to make them last.

The essential part of the research is a computer algorithm that mimics the electrical signalling used by the brain to translate short-term into permanent memories.

...The implant has been developed at the University of Southern California and Wake Forest Baptist Medical Centre in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in a decade-long collaboration.

Although there is no way of ‘reading’ a memory, the electrical signalling makes it possible to bypass a damaged or diseased region of the brain and decode the content or meaning of a memory from its electrical signal.

According to the Financial Times, researchers told an international conference in Milan that the implant has been tested successfully on rats and monkeys and was now being used on human brains.

The project is funded by Darpa, the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is interested in new ways to help injured soldiers recover from memory loss.

But the researchers say the technology could also help to treat neuro-degenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s, by enabling electrical brain signals to bypass damaged areas in the hippocampus, the brain’s memory centre, where memories are then stored.

If it is damaged or degraded, it can fail to turn recent events into long-term memories.

Read more here.