A Brain-Boosting Prosthesis Moves From Rats to Humans

The patient pauses, recognizes the shape, then points to it with her finger. What she's doing is remarkable, not for what she remembers, but for how well she remembers. On average, she and seven other test subjects perform 37 percent better at the memory game with the brain pulses than they do without--making them the first humans on Earth to experience the memory-boosting benefits of a tailored neural prosthesis. If you want to get technical, the brain-booster in question is a "closed-loop hippocampal neural prosthesis." Closed loop because the signals passing between each patient's brain and the computer to which it's attached are zipping back and forth in near-real-time.