This article is about efforts by six teams to develop a hippocampal prothesis by monitoring the input/output transformations performed by the hippocampus in slice, and then creating an electronic device to mimic them.
The article quotes noted memory researchers Howard Eichenbaum and Norbert Fortin who seem to approve of the methodology.
This review article (NRN Jan 2005) has a nice summary of cross-modal neuroplasticity in humans, mostly dealing with how occipital cortex (primarily visual for normals) takes over tactile and auditory processing duties in blind patients. The authors go on to speculate that these neuroplasticity insights could be applied to neural prothestic users to speed adaptation to their new sensory apparati, like combining tactile/auditory information with the prosthetic based stimulation. There’s also a nice comparison of visual implants at several levels, including retina, optic nerve, and cortex.
Cutting edge research groups.
Where in the world is the cutting edge in neural prosthetic design taking place?
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Neat article in today’s NYT on how a tongue stimulator can re-route many different sensory modalities. The most dramatic example (which the article focuses on) is how the device helps rehabilitate a patient with extensive vestibular damage and trains her brain to use whatever vestibular neurons she has left by this alternative (somatosensory) pathway. Click below for the full article.
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In this week’s Science, Richard Andersen’s lab shows the first use of a region (relatively) distant from primary motor areas for brain readout in a reaching task. Using a very small number of neurons (8-16 cells), the investigators were able to achieve a 60-70% accuracy in predicting reach movements to a particular target (out of 8 total targets). Read on for the abstract or here for the full article.
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Looks like John Donoghue’s company will be doing human trials this year in quadraplegics! Cyberkinetics is one of the first companies (Neural Signals Inc. was the first, I think) to actually do human implants for read-out (versus other therapeutics like deep brain stimulation.
What’s really remarkable here is the speed at which research has moved to medicine. (the nature paper is from 2002!) This is how things should be.
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