Remember the story I read a few years back about a man who is stabbed in the head and suffers massive brain damage? The flip on that story was there was a prosthesis that by passed and augmented the damage to his brain and allowed him to think and function.
Well that was good science fiction, but Philadelphia researchers are working on a project that may help restore memory to brain damaged patients.
Up to this point devices could only activate one or two electrodes. What the the research groups are working towards is a controller that will activate hundreds of electrodes! Plus how the electrodes fire is controlled by the patient's brain.
There are teams not only working on memory loss but also on Parkinson's. One team is working with a device manufacturer to develop a unit, within the next 3 years, capable of targeting 256 sites in the brain. The ultimate goal is a permanent and implantable device.
Read the rest of the Newsworks article HERE
2 comments:
If they get a permanent and implantable device, this could be very important. Anything from eliminating the symptom of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's to Flowers for Algernon might be possible.
Dave, I had the exact same thought, but I wondered if it was to obscure, but future devices it would seem would be very capable of something along that line. You would meed millions of points of stimulation but if they are already talking about a jump from 2 to 256 then it only goes to prove that the next generations will have thousands then millions....
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