Brian prosthesis to aid people with memory loss

If there is damage at any region that prevents this translation, then there is the possibility that long-term memory will not be formed.

The prosthesis is designed to bypass a damaged hippocampal section and provide the next region with the correctly translated memory.

Song and Berger found a way to accurately mimic how a memory is translated from short-term memory into long-term memory, using data obtained first from animals, and then from humans.

That is despite the fact that there is currently no way of "reading" a memory just by looking at its electrical signal.

"It is like being able to translate from Spanish to French without being able to understand either language," said Ted Berger from USC Viterbi School of Engineering.

In hundreds of trials conducted with nine patients, the new algorithm accurately predicted how the signals would be translated with about 90 percent accuracy.

The device that relies on a new algorithm was designed originally at University of Southern California and tested at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Centre in North Carolina.

The research was presented at the 37th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society in Milan, Italy.