A Cure to Long-Term Memory Loss?

Theodor Berger

One of the new technological developments of 2013 has been the idea of memory implants.  Theodor Berger, a biomedical engineer and neuroscientist, wants to create a way to restore severe memory loss.  Severe memory loss can occur form Alzheimer’s, strokes, or injuries to the brain.  After 24 years of research he developed silicon chips to repeat the signals neurons give off.  By implanting these chips in the brain, he believes that him and his team may be able to restore the ability to remember.

To Mr. Berger, memories are electrical pulses that are generated by a number of neurons. He primarily focuses on the hippocampus part of the brain and tries to create a chip to serve as the hippocampus.  He tried his theory on live rats.  He first trained these rats to push one of two levers to receive a treat.  While doing this, he recorded the pulses from their hippocampus.  He and his team then captured a code (from the pulses) they thought was the memory for receiving the treat.  The rats where then given a drug to interfere with their long-term memory.  In turn, the rats forgot which lever resulted in a treat. Once his team pulsed the code into the rat’s brain they were able to pick the correct lever again.

After this successful test, an experiment was done on monkeys in a similar fashion.  This time the task was to recognize an image.   Once the monkeys were implanted with the right code their performance improved on identifying the image.  Within the next two years, Mr. Berger and his team want to conduct studies by actually implanting memory prosthesis (an artificial part) in animals.  They hope their chips can form long-term memories in a number of settings.  One obstacle that stands in his way is if the pulse codes are not generalizable.  In this case, his chips would only be limited to producing memories for a few situations.

 

Besides this obstacle, Mr. Berger and his team are planning human studies.  He currently works at the University of Southern California. Clinicians there are testing the use of electrodes on the brain to see if they can detect and prevent seizures on patients with epilepsy.  If this project is successful, Mr. Berger and his team hope to work with them on looking at the memory codes within these patient’s brains.   With this new research, Mr. Berger hopes to one day help people who have suffered severe memory damage regain the ability to hold memories.

 By Jacob Ludwig