Rat experiment diagram & Theodore Berger (via USC)
Alzheimer's disease may one day be defeated with a simple "on" switch.
In an experiment, Theodore Berger of USC Viterbi School of Engineering, and his team, was able to make rats remember and forget with a toggle of a switch. Working along with a team lead by Sam A. Deadwyler of the Wake Forest Department of Psychology and Pharmacology, neural transmissions within the rat's hippocampus were the target of the several different augmentations.
During the study, rats were taught a particular task, push a lever left then right for water. Changes in the rat's hippocampus were recorded. This area is responsible for long-term memory. The team them blocked the neural firings within the sub-regions CA3 and CA1 of the hippocampus using pharmaceutical drugs. The trained rats no longer knew what to do.
Berger and his prosthetics research team created an artificial hippocampal system that can duplicate the pattern of signals between the CA3 and CA1 system. In other words, creating an artificial triggering of the long term memory area for the rat to access. When the team activated the embedded electrical device, sent the artificial hippocampal signal, the rat's long-term memories were restored.
Additionally, when the electrodes were implanted in unobstructed hippocampus rats, their memory functions strengthened and improved overall. Burger writes, "These integrated experimental modeling studies show for the first time that with sufficient information about the neural coding of memories, a neural prosthesis capable of real-time identification and manipulation of the encoding process can restore and even enhance cognitive mnemonic processes."
The collective teams plan on applying this technology on primates. They hope to one day restore function to those who suffer from stroke, accident, and of course Alzheimer's disease.
Eavesdropper
