In the first years of her career in brain research, Beth Stevens thought of microglia with annoyance if she thought of them at all. When she gazed into a microscope and saw these ubiquitous cells with their spidery tentacles, she did what most neuroscientists had been doing for generations: she looked right past them and focused on the rest of the brain tissue, just as you might look through specks of dirt on a windshield.
“What are they doing there?” she thought. “They’re in the way.’”
For some of the approximately 10 million people worldwide with traumatic brain injury (TBI), forming and holding onto new memories can be one of the hardest things they’ll do in a day. Now imagine a device implanted in the brain that can help them encode memories by means of small electric shocks.
Initial steps toward such a memory neuroprosthetic are being taken at the University of Pennsylvania, where researchers have started tests on brain surgery patients to try to locate, and influence, the processes that control memory formation.
El cerebro de una persona bilingüe funciona como un semáforo. Cuando tiene que elegir una palabra, da luz verde al idioma que está usando y frena con una luz roja el término del que no necesita. Este proceso natural de selección, que hace centenares de veces al día, es como una gimnasia involuntaria que mejora su materia gris.
Could a person who is paralyzed and unable to speak, like physicist Stephen Hawking, use a brain implant to carry on a conversation?
That’s the goal of an expanding research effort at U.S. universities, which over the last five years has proved that recording devices placed under the skull can capture brain activity associated with speaking.
While results are preliminary, Edward Chang, a neurosurgeon at the University of California, San Francisco, says he is working toward building a wireless brain-machine interface that could translate brain signals directly into audible speech using a voice synthesizer.
