THE EDGE 24 APRIL 2018

BREAKING
NEWS
[Document subtitle]

NUR HAZIRAH BINTI SABRI

IMC401 (IM1B)

BRAIN IMPLANT 0
 THE EDGE
DARPA-Developed Brain Implant Can Help
Recover Your Memories.
Can a neural implant help
you recover your memory?
A Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency
(DARPA) funded research
pilot suggests that the
answer may soon be yes.
BRAIN IMPLANT
24 APRIL 2018
What is Brain N o l o n g e r
Implant? s c i e n c e
f i c t i o n , a
The device works like a “ p r o s t h e t i c
peacemaker, sending electrical m e m o r y ”
pulses to aid the brain when it is n e u r a l
i m p l a n t c a n
struggling to store new a c t u a l l y
information but remaining quiet i m p r o v e s h o r t
t e r m
when it senses that the brain is m e m o r i e s .
functioning well.
WHAT IS DARPA?
The Defence Advanced Reasearch Projects Agency
(DARPA) is an advanced technology branch of the
U.S Department of Defense. The purpose of the
agency is to try out new technologies and make
them operationally ready, if possible and to reach
beyond current military technology to do
something new.
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THE EDGE 24 APRIL 2018

Michael Kahana, a professor of

psychology at the University of
Pennsylvania and his team
developed an experimental brain
stimulation technique that improves
memory by applying a pulse of
electricity directly to the brain
when and where it’s needed most. In
a early demonstration, they say
their approach improved word recall
in epilepsy patients by 15 percent.

B rain stimulators are used for treat people

They worked with epilepsy
with Parkinson’s disease, tremors or severe
muscle spasms. They comprise thin electrodes patients who were preparing
inserted through a hole in the skull into the part for surgery to their seizures.
of the brain that controls movement . These Their brains were already
connect via wires under the skin to the battery wired to monitor their neural
implanted near the neck. When turned on, an activity. For each person,
electrical current stimulates part of the brain researchers identified the
and damps down the movement problems. unique patterns of brain
activity that indicated when
their neural memory storage
Researchers recruited the patients to play a simple
process was working and when
memory game “identifying which of several images it wasn’t working. That
were shown on a previous screen” and mapped patient’s information was fed into a
neuron activity, especially in the hippocampus, the part computer algorithm that could
of the brain responsible for memory creation. predict when a memory lapse
was abaout to occur based on
signals from the brain.

At Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, they do a small trial on 15 patients. “Prosthetic
memory” implant helped patients improve short-term memory by an average of 35
percent – a “substantial improvement” according to lead research Robert Hampson. “We
were not surprised to find that this worked, but what surprised us was how successful it was.”

BRAIN IMPLANT 2
 THE EDGE 24 APRIL 2018

Memory is at the heart of who a person actually is. Without our memories, we lose our sense
of self. – Hampson

The researchers asked patients to memorize and recall lists of nous. The
stimulation was aimed at the lateral temporal cortex – a part of the brain associated
with word recall. Some recall tests were performed with the device on while in
others the devide was off and it seemed to work. On average, researchers say
participant’s recall performance improved about 15 percent when it was on.

They took 75 minutes to

identify the photo. They were
given sets of three images at
time, including the original
image and new photo. When
stimulated with the correct The Challenge of developing this
spatiotemporal codes, the technology is that memories are wholly
patients showed a 35 percent
based on patterns and restoring memories
improvement in memory on
would require knowledge of those patterns.
average over baseline.
Experiments have shown that scientists can
bolster short term memory in animal models
by analyzing and replicating the patterns
created by the neurons, but restoring long
term memories in human brains is
exponentially more difficult.

BRAIN IMPLANT 3
THE EDGE 24 APRIL 2018

The researcher’s goal :

to restore memory for patients
F00TN0TE
who suffer from traumatic brain
injuries, strokes, memory loss Brain Implant is a new technology,
due to aging, Alzheimer’s or belongs to DARPA Agency. It can help
other diseases, creating neural human to recover their memory when
they are in serious injury and can’t
memory triggers in patients
remember anything.
who don’t already have
electrodes implanted.

Blog’s link : https://proudlucy.wordpress.com

Prepared by : NUR HAZIRAH BINTI SABRI (IM1B)
Prepared for : SIR JUWAHIR BIN ALI

BRAIN IMPLANT 4