Michael Kahana, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, has been studying memory for more than 30 years: how it works and what’s happening when it doesn’t.
He’s not just fascinated by memory loss caused by traumatic brain injury — which affects more than 5 million people in this country — or the estimated 7 million Americans with Alzheimer’s. His research has also focused on memory errors that affect everyone, regardless of their cognitive health.
“We all have bad memories sometimes,” Kahana told The Post. “It fluctuates throughout the day and can fluctuate from moment to moment. That’s just how our brain circuits work. Once I understood that, then the question was, how do I get my brain to always be in its best state?”
Kahana’s investigation of memory culminated in a landmark study, published last January, in which he and a team of researchers used computerized intervention on a group of 47 epilepsy patients, delivering an electrical pulse directly to the brain, so how it was almost a lack of memory. happen. They did this via electrodes that were implanted directly into the patients’ brains as part of their epilepsy treatment.
These electrodes — between 100 and 200 per person — are able to recognize brain signals when a patient is trying to remember something and send a precise jolt of electrical energy to the lateral temporal cortex, the part of the brain used for storage and processing. . the memories.
The results were better than even Kahana could have hoped, with the brain stimulation leading to a 28% improvement in memory. While he remains cautiously optimistic, he cannot contain his enthusiasm.
“I think we’re on the cusp of a new era in human neuroscience and human neurotherapeutics,” he said.
Kahana is not alone in exploring the possibilities of brain-computer interfaces. Across the country, scientists are developing brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) that can be used to treat everything from memory loss to speech disabilities to paralysis.
Just last year, patients in a Stanford Medicine study were so amazed by their memory improvements after a 90-day treatment with brain implants that some of them refused to turn off the devices.
And in August, Neuralink, the neurotech startup owned by Elon Musk, announced plans to implant a BCI — designed to give paralyzed patients the ability to use digital devices by thinking alone — in a second subject of the human test.
Noland Arbaugh, a 30-year-old Arizona man paralyzed from the neck down after a diving accident eight years ago, received the first Neuralink implant in January of this year. In a March live broadcast on X, Arbaugh demonstrated how he can use his thoughts to control a computer cursor to play games and email. In May, it was announced that the device had suddenly started to detach from Arbaugh’s skull, but that the problem had been fixed.
Musk has predicted that there will be hundreds of people with Neuralinks within a few years and “millions within 10 years”.
In August, researchers at Switzerland’s Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne unveiled a brain that converts thought to text with 91% accuracy and is even smaller than Neuralink’s chip.
Progress is happening by leaps and bounds, so much so that the FDA will hold a workshop later this month on clinical outcome assessments for BCIs.
“If preliminary results are replicated, we could be years, not decades, away from some kind of meaningful assistive technology for individuals with serious illnesses and disabilities,” said Anna Wexler, a Perelman School of Medicine professor who studies ethical, legal and social issues. . problems related to emerging technology.
When we think of computers helping patients with ALS (formerly known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease) to speak, the first person who comes to mind is usually Stephen Hawking, the famous theoretical physicist who spoke with a microprocessor computer powered by Intel . While he could communicate, his voice sounded metallic, like a robot in a sci-fi movie.
But for 45-year-old Casey Harrell, who lost his ability to speak due to ALS, a brain-computer interface called BrainGate2 has given him back his voice — his actual voice.
Harrell has been given the ability to communicate with his 5-year-old daughter.
“She hadn’t had the ability to communicate much with me for about two years …,” Harrell told Scientific American in an August 2024 story. “I can help her mother parent her. I can have a deeper relationship with her and tell her what I’m thinking. I can just tell her how much I love her.”
David Brandman, a UC Davis neurosurgeon who helped develop the brain chip, said the BCI interprets brain signals that are then played back by a voice assistant software.
“The system is about 97% accurate and allows it to say words from a 125,000-word dictionary,” Brandman told The Post. “Using artificial intelligence, we’ve also recreated the sound of his voice so that the text can be spoken out loud by the computer to sound like him before he was diagnosed with ALS.”
As a reminder, the challenges get a little darker. A person’s memory fades and flows, and the problem is not always stable. It’s not always about trying to provide an overall improvement in memory performance, according to Brent Roeder, Ph.D., but “to improve memory performance for specific important or urgent information, such as, “Did I take my medicine this morning? ‘”
Roeder, a researcher in the department of translational neuroscience at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, studies how to replicate individual codes within hippocampal activity for specific memory information.
He and his fellow researchers achieved this with a “memory prosthesis,” an electrode inserted into the brain that interacts with the hippocampus, making neural recordings when a patient performs a specific memory task. “Once these unique memory codes were created, we used them to stimulate during the memory task to determine if we could enhance the patient’s memory performance,” says Roeder.
In other words, they encoded memories for future reference, creating Post-It notes to remind the brain of what it had forgotten.
As they discovered, it helped patients remember very specific information. It didn’t just improve their memory overall – although it did, with memory increasing anywhere from 11% to 54% – but specifically memory errors that interfere with everyday life, like forgetting where they put their car keys or if they turn them off. the stove.
One advantage of this type of approach is that it’s not limited to a specific condition, Roeder said: “The hope is that once it’s ready for clinical use, it will be able to be used to treat any condition that impairs memory function. from traumatic brain injury to dementia and Alzheimer’s.”
As exciting as the research is, the question remains as to how this technology will be used. Or, as Wexler put it, “blurring the lines between BCIs for treatment and enhancement.”
“If an implanted BCI allowed people to type at the same speed as we can type with our fingers or dictate with our voice, I doubt most people would be interested,” Wexler said. “But if it can make a really significant or measurable improvement — something that hasn’t been demonstrated — then things will get interesting.”
That seems to be what Musk is banking on. In a July 10 video posted on X, he claimed that Neuralink’s long-term goal is to “give people superpowers” and provide functionality “far greater than a normal human.”
But scientists like Roeder do not share these ambitions. “The focus of our research has always been restoring function that has been impaired due to disease or injury,” he told the Post. “We think giving someone back what they’ve lost is a superpower.”
Just getting the technology to the point where it becomes widely available will be no small feat. After all, this involves brain surgery. As Tom Oxley, chief executive at brain interface startup Synchron, said during a 2022 TED talk, “The brain doesn’t really like having needles stuck in it.”
Kahana agrees that this is a hindrance. “We can’t modulate your brain with a gun from afar,” he said. “So for this to work, you have to get into the brain.” But, he adds, it is becoming increasingly safe to do so. “A lot has changed in recent years. The image is better, the electrodes are small. When the time comes, I wouldn’t hesitate to do the procedure myself.”
He co-founded Nia Therapeutics to help commercialize brain implants, with funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, part of an effort to help veterans with brain injuries. But it’s also personal to him.
“I have a son who doesn’t speak, can’t say a distinct word. He uses a device to communicate, which as you can imagine is incredibly difficult. Search through the menu to find the right word. He knows what he wants to say, but how do you translate that brain pattern into spoken language?” Kahana explained. “You and I are taking it so easy, we take it for granted. But if someone could develop a technology to decode those brain signals, well… that would be really something.”
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