Whether it's the U.S. Department of Defense, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or world-class inventor Elon Musk who flies into space and neuroscience from electric vehicles, they are all enthusiastically seeking brain-implant contributions to humans One day in the future, human memory will eventually make a great leap forward with the help of a brain implant device?
Dong Song, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Southern California, presented his findings at this year's annual meeting of the American Neuroscience Society. This is the first human experiment to prove that people have short-term memory and working memory Memory can be significantly improved by the stimulation of foreign implants.
Short-term memory refers to the neural behavior of short-term storage of information, without the repetition of the conditions, most of the information in the short-term memory retention time is very short, usually only 5 to 20 seconds, the longest no more than 1 minute, such as people found the phone number Immediately after dialing, after the end of the phone number will be forgotten, so short-term memory is sometimes called phone number memory.
Working memory used to be another term for short-term memory, but as the research progresses, scientists have argued that working memory has its own peculiarities: Psychologists Badley and Hitch argue that working memory has the dual function of processing and storing messages , Affecting many of the complex cognitive activities of people, and Wikipedia also notes that working memory plays an important pivotal role in reading, understanding and reasoning.
Previous studies have shown that inserting electrodes into the animal's brain stimulates memory recall, and to test whether humans can benefit from electrodes implanted in the brain, the team recruited 20 epilepsy patients who were willing to participate in the study, each of whom had previously been implanted With the help of a physician, the team inserted extra electrodes in the control of the disease in a similar fashion as the "memory prosthesis" they developed.
The experiment is mainly to imitate the normal working path of Hippocampus. When we receive stimulation from the outside world, the complex electrical signals will pass through the memory center of the brain ─ ─ control short-term memory, long-term memory, spatial positioning functions, located on the left and right The hippocampus of the cerebral hemisphere returns.The signal from the hippocampus returns to something different and sent to long-term memory preservation, which researchers describe as "accurately translating Spanish into French," and people without long-term memory are like A wandering soul in the world, Alzheimer's disease, the hippocampus is the first damaged area, the performance of symptoms of memory loss and loss of direction of consciousness.
▲ Sea Horse Back (pink part below). (Source: By OpenStax College 'CC BY 3.0', via Wikimedia Commons)
Subjects played a simple memory game. The researchers took the opportunity to observe the subjects in the recall, which areas of the hippocampus were triggered, followed by "small electric shocks" on these specific areas to mimic normal patterns of brain activity. Finally, the data were analyzed Showed an average increase of 15% in short-term memory and a 25% improvement in working memory for all subjects. Although this technique is still under development, studies seem to indicate that "brain implants that enhance human memory" The big business ─ ─ as the proportion of people suffering from Alzheimer's disease and Alzheimer's disease increased year by year.
Musk already has the dual identity of executive electric car maker Tesla and SpaceX chief executive SpaceX, but his braiding dreams are not limited to this. In April this year he just confirmed a new company named Neuralink, Designed to develop "neural lace" technology, the brain can "read" computer-uploaded data by developing a USB-like port to connect the human brain to a computer, which can also "download" brain memory , An ambitious plan to prevent mankind from eventually being replaced by artificial intelligence, predicting that technology will eventually target the human body in the future, and it seems that we have moved towards that future.
Although innovations can be disruptive as investments in neuroscience advance into better times, as reported by Science Daily, scientists have seen four major threats: personal and identity exposure, loss of autonomy, companies / governments / Hackers gain more power to manipulate people and social inequality may expand, and mental intensification may also become an arms race. In the process of technological innovation, relevant ethics norms should be further strengthened.
Note: Electrode implanted in the brain can accurately monitor the activity of brain cells and is one of the adjunctive treatment tools for epilepsy, spinal cord injury and neurological disorders.