Restoring Memory, Repairing Damaged Brains with An Artificial Hippocampus

A team of scientists from Wake Forest University did a study, and tried to learn about the role of the hippocampus in learning. They used rats and recorded the brains activity in the two main sub regions of the hippocampus CA3 and CA1, when the rat was to learn a task that involved pulling one of two levers to get a treat, and learning which lever gave the treat. When the scientists would block the neural interaction between the two areas, with pharmacological agents, the rats no longer displayed the long term learned behavior, and would forget which lever did what after about 5-10 seconds. After a lot of experimentation, they learned about the interactions between the CA3 and CA1 regions of the hippocampus, and developed an artificial hippocampal system that could duplicate the neural interaction between the two regions, and help/enhance the long term memory process. When this device and it's electrodes, were implanted in the rats, it lead to the restoration of memory in the rats that had there long term memory pharmacologically blocked, and in rats without the pharmacological drug, the long term memory, was actually enhanced by this device. I thought this was extremely interesting, because of its possible uses in humans, like curing Alsheimer's, or helping students retain more information for their upcoming physiology test.

Source: http://neurosciencenews.com/restoring-memory-repairing-damaged-brains-artificial-hippocampus-dr-berger-usc/