The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is working on a project that will use brain implants to restore memories.
The project is being developed as a way to reverse the loss of memory in wounded soldiers, according to Daily Mail.
The implants could also be used to help people suffering from Alzheimer's disease and dementia.
The memory simulator is part of President Barack Obama's $100 million initiative to gain a better understanding of the human brain, Discovery News reported.
"If you have been injured in the line of duty and you can't remember your family, we want to be able to restore those kinds of functions," Justin Sanchez, program manager at DARPA, said this week at a conference in Washington, D.C. held by the Center for BrainHealth at the University of Texas.
"We think that we can develop neuroprosthetic devices that can directly interface with the hippocampus, and can restore the first type of memories we are looking at, the declarative memories," Sanchez said.
The project has raised ethical questions about potential effects the implants would have on the human mind, RT reported.
"When you fool around with the brain you are fooling around with personal identity," said Arthur Caplan, a medical ethicist at the Langone Medical Center at New York University. "The cost of altering the mind is you risk losing a sense of self, and that is a new kind of risk we never faced."
So far, researchers have made progress in reducing tremors within people who suffer from Parkinson's disease, bringing down the number of seizures among epileptics and using deep brain simulation to improve memory in Alzheimer's patients, Discovery News reported.
Robert Hampson, an associate professor at Wake Forest University who is not connected to the DARPA project, has tested memory techniques on monkeys and rodents. Hampson was able to extend short-term memory in the subjects by using prosthetics to stimulate the brain's hippocampus, which processes memory, RT reported.
Hampson said scientists need to know the exact pattern of specific memories in order to restore them.
"The idea is to restore the function back to normal or near normal of the memory processing areas of the brain, so that the person can access their formed memories, and so that they can form new memories as needed," he said.
