Automatically-Triggered Brain Stimulation during Encoding Improves Verbal Recall

Fig. 4 (modified fromEzzyat et al., 2018). Stimulation targets showing numericalincrease/decreasein free recall performance are shown in red/blue. Memory-enhancing sites clustered in the middle portion of the left middle temporal gyrus.Everyone forgets. As we grow older or have a brain injury or a stroke or develop a neurodegenerative disease, we forget much more often. Is there a technological intervention that can help us remember? That is the $50 million dollar question funded by DARPA ' sRestoring Active Memory (RAM) Program, which has focused on intracranial electrodes implanted in epilepsy patients to monitor seizure activity.Led byMichael Kahana 's group at theUniversity of Pennsylvania and including nine other universities, agencies, and companies, this Big Science project is trying to establish a “closed-loop” system that records brain activity andstimulates appropriate regions when a state indicative of poor memory function is detected (Ezzyat et al., 2018).Initial “open-loop” efforts targeting medial temporal lobe memory structures (entorhinal cortex,hippocampus) were unsuccessful (Jacobs et al., 2016). In fact, direct electrical stimulation of these regions during encoding of spatial and verbal information actuallyimpaired memory performance, unlike an initial smaller study (Suthana et al., 2012).1{SeeBad news for DARPA ' s RAM program: Electrical Stimulation of Entorhinal Region Impairs Memory}However, during the recent CNS symposium onMemory Modulat...

Source: The Neurocritic - March 31, 2018 Category: Neuroscience Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs