Hans Howe

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Upgrade Your Memory With A Surgically Implanted Brain Chip (bnnbloomberg.ca) 50

Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday June 16, 2019 @10:01PM from the just-like-Johnny-Mnemonic dept.
Bloomberg reports on a five-year, $77 million project by America’s Department of Defense to create an implantable brain device that restores memory-generation capacity for people with traumatic brain injuries.

A device has now been developed by Michael Kahana, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, and the medical technology company Medtronic Plc, and successfully tested with funding from America’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa). Connected to the left temporal cortex, it monitors the brain’s electrical activity and forecasts whether a lasting memory will be created. “Just like meteorologists predict the weather by putting sensors in the environment that measure humidity and wind speed and temperature, we put sensors in the brain and measure electrical signals,” Kahana says. If brain activity is suboptimal, the device provides a small zap, undetectable to the patient, to strengthen the signal and increase the chance of memory formation.

Both groups have tested their devices only on epileptic patients with electrodes already implanted in their brains to monitor seizures; each implant requires clunky external hardware that won’t fit in somebody’s skull. The next steps will be building smaller implants and getting approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to bring the devices to market… Justin Sanchez, who just stepped down as director of Darpa’s biological technologies office, says veterans will be the first to use the prosthetics. “We have hundreds of thousands of military personnel with traumatic brain injuries,” he says. The next group will likely be stroke and Alzheimer’s patients.

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50 years ago April 21-23 1966 Beatlemania arrived in Red Wing in the form of The Beatles movie “A Hard Days Night” and “Help!”. I was 7 years old and was there with my Sister Ginny, and our neighbor friends Mary and Brian Teschendorf. I remember getting dropped off and having to wait in the line that went clear around the corner of Swanson’s A&W and, at the time, that seemed like a really big deal. This painting was completed in August 2016.

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from The Writer’s Almanac

Untitled by Sharon Olson

In the place in the brain that handles names––
Hannibal, Hannaleah, Atlee Hammacher––
the names are beginning to disappear, slowly.
Kissinger is still there, with Joyce Brothers and Idi Amin,
but my friends’ relatives’ names pop in and out
along with my sister-in-law’s maiden name,
my sixth-grade teacher,
my first boss.
Some of my former lovers’ last names are gone,
last time I checked all the first names were still there,
but no dates.
Fellows I went on dates with are also gone.
The room in the brain that keeps the names is airy,
breezy, the wind wanders through
ruffling the papers stacked on ancient card tables.
Use rocks, they say,
so I am looking for rocks to weight them down.
So nice to find you here, I know you––
perhaps I was once in love with you.

I have an idea:
we will be like Brando and Schneider,
we will do it without touching, without names.

“Untitled” by Sharon Olson from The Long Night of Flying. © Sixteen Rivers Press, 2006. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

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