The first step towards a personal memory maker
Decent memory is a matter of livelihood, of independence, most of all of identity.
Human memory is the ghost in the neural machine, a widely distributed, continually changing, multidimensional conversation among cells that can reproduce both the capital of Kentucky and the emotional catacombs of that first romance.
The news last week that scientists had developed a brain implant that boosts memory — an implantable “cognitive prosthetic,” in the jargon — should be astounding even to the cynical.
App developers probably are already plotting yet another brain-exercise product based on the latest science. Screenwriters working on their next amnesia-assassin scripts got some real-life backup for the pitch meeting.
The scientists are in discussions to commercialise the technology, and so people in the throes of serious memory loss, and their families, likely feel a sense of hope, thin though it may be. These things take time, and there are still many unknowns.
But for those in the worried-well demographic — the 40-is-the-new-30 crowd, and older — reports of a memory breakthrough fall into a different category.
What exactly does it mean that scientists are truly beginning to understand the biology of memory well enough to manipulate it? Which reaction is appropriate: the futurist’s, or the curmudgeon’s?
The only honest answer at this stage is both.
The developers of the new implant, led by scientists at the University of Pennsylvania and Thomas Jefferson University, built on decades of work decoding brain signals, using the most advanced techniques of machine learning.
Their implant, in fact, constitutes an array of electrodes embedded deep in the brain that monitor electrical activity and, like a pacemaker, deliver a stimulating pulse only when needed — when the brain is lagging as it tries to store new information.
When the brain is functioning well, the apparatus remains quiet.
“We all have good days and bad days, times when we’re foggy or when we’re sharp,” said Michael Kahana, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania and senior author of last week’s report.
“We found that jostling the system when it’s in a low-functioning state can jump it to a high-functioning one.”
If this system, once refined, one day provides support for people with extreme deficits, it will sharply improve lives (insurers willing). The older person with creeping dementia will have more years living independently. The veteran with traumatic brain injury may regain just enough sharpness to find a decent job, or a career.
For most everyone else, the central discovery behind the device — that goosing a wandering brain can make it somewhat sharper — is already deeply familiar. Human beings have been doing this deliberately, and forever: with caffeine, nicotine, prescription drugs like Ritalin, or more virtuously, with a brisk run around the park.
“We have good evidence that things like nicotine and aerobic exercise improve some aspects of attention,” said Zach Hambrick, a professor of psychology at Michigan State University. “The stimulation may be activating some of the same systems, only more directly and precisely.”
One such ability that people with extraordinarily precise memory have in common is known as selective attention, or “attentional control.” In a common measure of this, the Stroop test, people see words flash on a computer screen and name the colour in which a word is presented.
Answering is nearly instantaneous when the colour and the word are the same — “blue” displayed in blue — but slower when there’s no match, like “blue” displayed in red. The men and women who compete in memory competitions score very highly on such tests and often do so well into their thirties, when the ability is typically on the wane.
This skill is partly inherited, but psychologists have shown that just about anyone can stretch his or her native ability using the same technique that the memory champs do: mentally arranging new names, facts or words in a deeply familiar place — along subway stops, for example, or in a childhood room.
In one continuing study, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis trained a group of 50 older adult volunteers to memorise word lists using location imagery — a socalled memory palace.