{"id":32350,"date":"2016-12-02T00:46:45","date_gmt":"2016-12-02T08:46:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/12\/the-neuroscientist-whos-building-a-better-memory-for-humans"},"modified":"2017-06-04T09:00:56","modified_gmt":"2017-06-04T16:00:56","slug":"the-neuroscientist-whos-building-a-better-memory-for-humans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/12\/the-neuroscientist-whos-building-a-better-memory-for-humans","title":{"rendered":"The Neuroscientist Who\u2019s Building a Better Memory for Humans"},"content":{"rendered":"

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In an epidsode of the dystopian near-future series, Black Mirror<\/em>, a small, implantable device behind the ear grants the ability to remember, access, and replay every moment of your life in perfect detail, like a movie right before your eyes.<\/p>\n

Theodore Berger, a biomedical engineer at the University of Southern California, can\u2019t promise that level of perfect recall\u2014perhaps for the better\u2014but he is working on a memory prosthesis. The device, surgically implanted directly into the brain, mimics the function of a structure called the hippocampus by electrically stimulating the brain in a particular way to form memories\u2014at least in rats and monkeys. And now, he\u2019s testing one that could work in humans.<\/p>\n

Berger\u2019s device hinges on a theory about how the hippocampus transforms short-term memories, like where you deposited your keys, into long-term memories\u2014so you can find them later. In his early experiments, he played a tone and then puffed air in a rabbit\u2019s face, causing it to blink. Eventually, just playing the tone would make the rabbit blink, just like Pavlov\u2019s famous salivating dogs. Berger recorded the hippocampus\u2019 activity with electrodes, and as the rabbits learned to associate the tone with the air puff, patterns in those signals changed in a predictable way.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In an epidsode of the dystopian near-future series, Black Mirror, a small, implantable device behind the ear grants the ability to remember, access, and replay every moment of your life in perfect detail, like a movie right before your eyes. Theodore Berger, a biomedical engineer at the University of Southern California, can\u2019t promise that level [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":354,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1902,11,1499,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32350","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bioengineering","category-biotech-medical","category-cyborgs","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32350","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/354"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32350"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32350\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59594,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32350\/revisions\/59594"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}