Neuroscientist harnesses the power of virtual reality to unlock the mysteries of memory

We ’re all familiar with the image of someone donning virtual reality goggles to enter a new environment while seated at their computer.At UCLA,  Nanthia Suthana is one of the first neuroscientists in the world to harness the power of VR to unravel how someone’s brain encodes and retrieves memories while the person explores a new virtual setting on foot.Her work recently captured the attention of the popular digital network, Mashable, which profiled her in its “How She Works” video series.“Without our memories, each of us would be lost in time and cut off from other people,” said Suthana, an assistant professor of neurosurgery and psychiatry at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. “At UCLA, we are the first to blend virtual reality with a surgically implanted prosthesis to reveal what happens inside the brain when we create memories.”The ultimate goal? To develop therapeutic tools that could restore lost memories to people suffering from Alzheimer ’s disease, traumatic brain injury and other disorders.In 2015, Suthana recruited a crack team of experts in bioengineering, neuroscience, computer science and physics to help design a virtual-reality lab at UCLA. She crafted a study that correlates electrical activity from the neuro-prosthesis deep inside the brain with a patient ’s physical movement in the virtual environment. No one has achieved this before.Mashable In the Mashable video, Suthana preps research patient David Kidd, who suffer...
Source: UCLA Newsroom: Health Sciences - Category: Universities & Medical Training Source Type: news