A new paper in the Journal of Neural Engineering describes Facilitation of memory encoding in primate hippocampus by a neuroprosthesis that promotes task-specific neural firing The research - from Sam Deadwyler's team at Wake Forest University (and funded by DARPA) really is pretty amazing - if it pans out. Four Rhesus macaques were trained to perform a short-term delayed-match-to-sample memory task, involving remembering the position and shape of an icon on a screen, and then picking it out from a line-up up to 40 seconds later. The task is difficult. Even though the monkeys were trying hard to succeed, in order to earn a tasty juice reward, they made a lot of mistakes. ...until they got a helping hand:
An array of electrodes was implanted into the hippocampus, able to both record neural activity and stimulate it. Using a mathematical model called "MIMO", the authors first determined the pattern of ...
