Hack Your Brain With A Memory Reader – Neuroscientists have ‘hacked’ the brain’s memory pathways with a system that could help to improve the recollection of specific memories. Research led by Wake Forest University (WFU) and the University of Southern California (USC) has now shown it can sometimes help people recall particular images with greater ease.
Electrical and magnetic brain stimulation have recently emerged as promising new ways to give overall cognitive performance a boost. Researchers have used a computer model that essentially watches a person’s brain activity to try and figure out what patterns align with the memory of specific images.
When participants took part in a visual memory test, this model generated stimulation patterns for each individual, and these patterns were tied to memorizing images of animals, buildings, plants, tools, and vehicles.
When those same neural ‘codes’ were artificially fed back into the hippocampus, participants in the study were better at matching previously observed images from memory in about 22 percent of cases.
Category-based, content-specific code stimulation significantly alters memory delayed recognition in 22.4% of instances and 37.9% of instances in which the patient had impaired memory and received bilateral stimulation, clearly indicating that MDM-based stimulation has the potential to be used to significantly modify memory.
