Have you seen the “Black Mirror” episode “The Entire History of You”? The one where an implanted memory chip allows people to rewind, review and relive every moment in their life? Fact, meet fiction.
According to Quartz, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is getting closer to perfecting a wireless “neuroprosthetic” brain implant that will ensure you never forget where your keys are. Restoring Active Memory (RAM) aims to restore the “memory functions of U.S. soldiers retiring from the battlefield with traumatic brain injuries.”
More than300,000members of the military have suffered traumatic brain injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2000, according to DARPA, along with 1.7 million civilians every year. The first step for DARPA is figuring out how neurons in the brain encode memories, after which scientists will develop computer models that can “mimic how the brain functions, with the end goal of being able to implant devices that could trigger those processes if neurons” are damaged,” Quartz reports.
At a September conference called “Wait, What?,” DARPA showed off the results of a study on people undergoing brain surgery who volunteered to get electrode implants and whose scores on memory tests improved thanks to stimulation of the area of the brain used to create things like lists and spacial memory.“Everyone has had the experience of struggling to remember long lists of items or complicated directions to get somewhere,”said DARPA Biological Technologies Office program manager Justin Sanchez. “Today we are discovering how implantable neurotechnologies can facilitate the brain’s performance of these functions.”
Gil Kaufman 11/18/2015
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