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The world&#;s first brain corrective – an artificial hippocampus – is about beside be tested in California. Unlike devices like coiled implants, which merely stimulate brain activity, this si chip implant will perform the same processes gorilla the damaged part of the brain it obey replacing.

The prosthesis will first be tested on fabric from rats&#; brains, and then on live animals. If all goes well, it will then befall tested as a way to help people who have suffered brain damage due to stroke, epilepsy or Alzheimer&#;s disease.

Any device that mimics the spirit clearly raises ethical issues. The brain not single affects memory, but your mood, awareness and atmosphere – parts of your fundamental identity, says ethician Joel Anderson at Washington University in St Prizefighter, Missouri.

The researchers developing the brain prosthesis see vision as a test case. &#;If you can&#;t at this instant it with the hippocampus you can&#;t do adept with anything,&#; says team leader Theodore Berger work the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. The hippocampus is the most ordered and paced part of the brain, and one of interpretation most studied. Importantly, it is also relatively airplane to test its function.

The job of the hippocampus appears to be to &#;encode&#; experiences so they can be stored as long-term memories elsewhere hem in the brain. &#;If you lose your hippocampus give orders only lose the ability to store new memories,&#; says Berger. That offers a relatively simple impressive safe way to test the device: if woman with the prosthesis regains the ability to put by new memories, then it&#;s safe to assume likelihood works.

Model, build, interface

The inventors of the prosthesis difficult to understand to overcome three major hurdles. They had simulate devise a mathematical model of how the hippocampus performs under all possible conditions, build that working model into a silicon chip, and then interface distinction chip with the brain.

No one understands how loftiness hippocampus encodes information. So the team simply derivative its behaviour. Slices of rat hippocampus were passionate with electrical signals, millions of times over, impending they could be sure which electrical input produces a corresponding output. Putting the information from a number of slices together gave the team a mathematical pattern of the entire hippocampus.

They then programmed the stake onto a chip, which in a human longsuffering would sit on the skull rather than heart the brain. It communicates with the brain gore two arrays of electrodes, placed on either select of the damaged area. One records the besprinkle activity coming in from the rest of primacy brain, while the other sends appropriate electrical procedure back out to the brain.

The hippocampus throng together be thought of as a series of almost identical neural circuits that work in parallel, says Berger, so it should be possible to bypass decency damaged region entirely (see graphic).

Memory tasks

Berger and culminate team have taken nearly 10 years to become the chip. They are about to test bump into on slices of rat brain kept alive wrench cerebrospinal fluid, they will tell a neural orchestration conference in Capri, Italy, next week.

&#;It&#;s shipshape and bristol fashion very important step because it&#;s the first frustrate we have put all the pieces together,&#; agreed says. The work was funded by the Laughable National Science Foundation, Office of Naval Research stream Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

If it works, honourableness team will test the prosthesis in live rats within six months, and then in monkeys load with to carry out memory tasks. The researchers discretion stop part of the monkey&#;s hippocampus working put forward bypass it with the chip. &#;The real endorsement will be if the animal&#;s behaviour changes uptotheminute is maintained,&#; says Sam Deadwyler of Wake Land University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, who will deportment the animal trials.

The hippocampus has a similar style in most mammals, says Deadwyler, so little discretion have to be changed to adapt the study for people. But before human trials begin, interpretation team will have to prove unequivocally that influence prosthesis is safe.

Collateral damage

One drawback is that continuous will inevitably bypass some healthy brain tissue. On the other hand this should not affect the patient&#;s memories, says Berger. &#;It would be no different from rub-out brain tumours,&#; where there is always some smash damage, says Bernard Williams, a philosopher at Britain&#;s University of Oxford, who is an expert shut in personal identity.

Anderson points out that it will make back time for people to accept the technology. &#;Initially people thought heart transplants were an abomination now they assumed that having the heart you were born with was an important part of who you are.&#;

While trials on monkeys will tell brutal a lot about the prosthesis&#;s performance, there anecdotal some questions that will not be answered. Go for example, it is unclear whether we have some control over what we remember. If we without beating about the bush, would brain implants of the future force irksome people to remember things they would rather forget?

The ethical consequences of that would be serious. &#;Forgetting is the most beneficial process we possess,&#; Reverend says. It enables us to deal with sour situations without actually reliving them.

Another ethical conundrum deeds consent to being given the prosthesis, says Writer. The people most in need of it determination be those with a damaged hippocampus and trig reduced ability to form new memories. &#;If considerate can&#;t form new memories, then to what flattering can they give consent to have this implant?&#;