A brain implant boosted memory recall by more than a third

Robert Hampson's team at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center worked with epilepsy patients who already had electrodes implanted in the brain for seizure monitoring. They built a mathematical model of each patient's own successful memory-encoding pattern, then used it to restimulate the hippocampus during new memory tasks.

In eight patients performing memory tasks, delivering each person's own recorded neural pattern back into the hippocampus during encoding improved recall by roughly 35 to 37 percent compared with the same patients' unassisted performance, among the first times a device had read and rewritten a person's own memory code.

The work, funded by the Defense Department's research agency, was built around epilepsy patients who already had electrodes in place for an unrelated reason, so the method cannot yet be used in people without a clinical need for brain surgery. Follow-up studies have since tested longer delays and more complex memories, part of a longer effort toward implants for brain injury and Alzheimer's-related memory loss.

A memory, re-encoded in its own code.