Scientists use a frontal-lobe implant to improve thinking skills in primates.

[slinkslowdown]

Researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center and the University of Southern California improved thinking and restored decision-making in five monkeys using an electrode array implanted into their prefrontal cortex-the area of the brain responsible for planning and decision-making.

In the study, published last week (September 13) in The Journal

Comments

[lisasimpsonfan]

It's coming....

[prehnite]

MTE

[supermouse]

That could change my life. I'd be able to work again.

[mandalaya]

It's sad that my first thought was that there are people I know who I would want to get this, because their reasoning process is highly flawed - then I thought of folks with brain damage who could use it. Still cool!

[slinkslowdown]

The article makes me wonder about people like myself who have permanent, long-term cognitive problems resulting from medications rather than a physical brain injury. But maybe the science behind this wouldn't differentiate between how the cognition is impaired and rather work because it does exist.

[unsentimentalf]

What it's doing is recording what happens in a part of the cortex when a correct decision is made and exciting those neurons to override the neural pattern that arises when a wrong decision is about to be made. I don't think the underlying reason for the wrong decision matters- in the second part it was the effects of cocaine.

It's rather baffling conceptually. One would think that the "right" pattern would be a consequence of getting the answer right, not the cause. But brain stuff is often baffling.

(Incidentally it only works with your own positive brain pattern: they tried superimposing one monkey's "correct" pattern on another and it didn't help.)

[owlsie]

This would be great for me [I have a TBI] but god damn, feeding chimpanzees cocaine is messed up.