American-neuroscientists from the University of Southern California, and North Carolina’s Wake Forest University believe that the restoration of lost long term memory could be achieved through brain implants within the next few years.

The team of neuroscientists believe they have figured out how long term memories are made, stored and brought back, and thus they hope to restore memory that may have been damaged or lost through stroke, or localised injury.

In order to restore a patient’s memory, scientists record memory being made in a healthy part of the brain. The data they collect from that is used to determine what the damaged portion of the brain should be doing. Electrodes are then used to stimulate the damaged portion of the brain to replicate the action of the healthy tissue.

Experiments have been carried out on rats and monkeys, and results have indicated that certain signals can be replaced with the use of electrodes.

Implants have already been placed in brain tissue to treat patients who suffer from epilepsy and Parkinson’s disease. In fact, some 80,000 people have had such devices placed in their brains.

A researcher on the project, Doctor Hampson said:

It’s now commonly accepted that humans will have electrodes put in them — it’s done for epilepsy, deep brain stimulation, (that has made it) easier for investigative research, it’s much more acceptable now than five to 10 years ago.

Right now it’s not a device, it’s a fair amount of equipment. We’re probably looking at devices in the five to 10 year range for human patients.

The team suggest that with drugs and implants, they will be able to treat early dementia.

When looking at a patient with mild memory loss, there’s probably enough residual signal to work with, but not when there’s significant memory loss.

There are always those skeptics, Constantine Lyketsos being one of them. Lyketsos is a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at John Hopkins Medicine and is currently conducting a trial using deep brain stimulator implants on Alzheimer patients. Lyketsos feels:

The brain has a lot of redundancy, it can function pretty well if loses one or two parts. But memory involves circuits diffusely dispersed throughout the brain so it’s hard to envision.

But according to Hampson the breakthrough is “like the difference between a cane, to help you walk, and a prosthetic limb – it’s two different approaches.”

This is set to be one of the biggest breakthroughs of 2013.

[Source: CNN News]