Electronic Brain Stimulation and Memory

New Look atbrain stimulation.

Electrical Brain Stimulation Boosts Memory in Seniors, Study Finds

By Adrianna Nine on August 23, 2022 in ExtremeTech

Memory lapse remains a major concern for those approaching their golden years. As many as 40 percent of US adults over the age of 65 have some type of age-associated memory impairment, with approximately 160,000 of them receiving dementia diagnoses each year. While long-term it would be ideal to find ways to prevent the initial onset of such memory impairments, scientists are working to help seniors mediate their memory obstacles in the meantime. A new study suggests electrical currents to the brain might be a way to do just that.

Scientists at Boston University recently used a double-blind study to test the effects of non-invasive electrical brain stimulation on older adults’ memories. Having seen the brain circuits and networks involved in memory capacity in past research, the team assembled a cap dotted with electrodes that could deliver electrical currents to the wearer’s brain. These currents would focus on one of two areas of the brain: the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), which is essential to long-term memory, and the inferior parietal lobule (IPL), which is a major component of working memory. .... ' 

The Brain Rotates Memories

How might we utilize this this? Beyond just tagging memories with a time stamp?

The Brain ‘Rotates’ Memories to Save Them From New Sensations  By Jordana Cepelewicz,  Senior Writer, Quanta Magazine

Some populations of neurons simultaneously process sensations and memories. New work shows how the brain rotates those representations to prevent interference.

During every waking moment, we humans and other animals have to balance on the edge of our awareness of past and present. We must absorb new sensory information about the world around us while holding on to short-term memories of earlier observations or events. Our ability to make sense of our surroundings, to learn, to act and to think all depend on constant, nimble interactions between perception and memory.

But to accomplish this, the brain has to keep the two distinct; otherwise, incoming data streams could interfere with representations of previous stimuli and cause us to overwrite or misinterpret important contextual information. Compounding that challenge, a body of research hints that the brain does not neatly partition short-term memory function exclusively into higher cognitive areas like the prefrontal cortex. Instead, the sensory regions and other lower cortical centers that detect and represent experiences may also encode and store memories of them. And yet those memories can’t be allowed to intrude on our perception of the present, or to be randomly rewritten by new experiences.

A paper published recently in Nature Neuroscience  may finally explain how the brain’s protective buffer works. A pair of researchers showed that, to represent current and past stimuli simultaneously without mutual interference, the brain essentially “rotates” sensory information to encode it as a memory. The two orthogonal representations can then draw from overlapping neural activity without intruding on each other. The details of this mechanism may help to resolve several long-standing debates about memory processing.  ...' 

Quanta Magazine: Brain Rotates Memories to Save Them

 Made me think of how this kind of structure could be used in machine learning to perform a kind of  maintenance and change managemebt as new data is acquired.  Even lead to creativity based on current knowledge. 

The Brain ‘Rotates’ Memories to Save Them From New Sensations

Jordana Cepelewicz   Quanta Mag Staff Writer

Some populations of neurons simultaneously process sensations and memories. New work shows how the brain rotates those representations to prevent interference. 

During every waking moment, we humans and other animals have to balance on the edge of our awareness of past and present. We must absorb new sensory information about the world around us while holding on to short-term memories of earlier observations or events. Our ability to make sense of our surroundings, to learn, to act and to think all depend on constant, nimble interactions between perception and memory.

But to accomplish this, the brain has to keep the two distinct; otherwise, incoming data streams could interfere with representations of previous stimuli and cause us to overwrite or misinterpret important contextual information. Compounding that challenge, a body of research hints that the brain does not neatly partition short-term memory function exclusively into higher cognitive areas like the prefrontal cortex. Instead, the sensory regions and other lower cortical centers that detect and represent experiences may also encode and store memories of them. And yet those memories can’t be allowed to intrude on our perception of the present, or to be randomly rewritten by new experiences.

A paper published recently in Nature Neuroscience may finally explain how the brain’s protective buffer works.  https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-021-00821-9   .... ' 

Replaying Memory to Retain it

 Fascinating play.   Remember this similarity being brought up in a talk about short vs long term memories.   Now being brought into play?

How a Memory Quirk of the Human Brain Can Galvanize AI  By Shelly Fan in SingularityHub

Even as toddlers we’re good at inferences. Take a two-year-old that first learns to recognize a dog and a cat at home, then a horse and a sheep in a petting zoo. The kid will then also be able to tell apart a dog and a sheep, even if he can’t yet articulate their differences.

This ability comes so naturally to us it belies the complexity of the brain’s data-crunching processes under the hood. To make the logical leap, the child first needs to remember distinctions between his family pets. When confronted with new categories—farm animals—his neural circuits call upon those past remembrances, and seamlessly incorporate those memories with new learnings to update his mental model of the world.

Not so simple, eh?

It’s perhaps not surprising that even state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms struggle with this type of continuous learning. Part of the reason is how these algorithms are set up and trained. An artificial neural network learns by adjusting synaptic weights—how strongly one artificial neuron connects to another—which in turn leads to a sort of “memory” of its learnings that’s embedded into the weights. Because retraining the neural network on another task disrupts those weights, the AI is essentially forced to “forget” its previous knowledge as a prerequisite to learn something new. Imagine gluing together a bridge made out of toothpicks, only having to rip apart the glue to build a skyscraper with the same material. The hardware is the same, but the memory of the bridge is now lost.

This Achilles’ heel is so detrimental it’s dubbed “catastrophic forgetting.” An algorithm that isn’t capable of retaining its previous memories is severely kneecapped in its ability to infer or generalize. It’s hardly what we consider intelligent.

But here’s the thing: if the human brain can do it, nature has already figured out a solution. Why not try it on AI?

A recent study by researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst   and the Baylor College of Medicine did just that. Drawing inspiration from the mechanics of human memory, the team turbo-charged their algorithm with a powerful capability called “memory replay”—a sort of “rehearsal” of experiences in the brain that cements new learnings into long-lived memories.     ..." 

Memory Lane by Accenture

Nice idea, I have some colleagues that are working on related problems, will bring this up.

Accenture Interactive creates 'Memory Lane' AI project to tackle elderly loneliness  By Imogen Watson in theDrum

Accenture Interactive has created a project for the Swedish energy company, Stockholm Exergi, that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to tackle elderly loneliness.

Following medical research into elderly health, Accenture Interactive discovered that loneliness accelerated health problems including depression and early-stage dementia in the elderly.

To combat this, it created a project titled 'Memory Lane' that uses a voice assistant combined with conversational artificial intelligence to capture stories for future generations.

Using Google Voice Assistant, 'Memory Lane' invites someone who is lonely to tell their life story. Once captures, the discussion is then instantly converted into both a physical book and a podcast.  ... "  .... ' 

Chatbots Falling Short of Expectations

Interesting stats.  Chatbots clearly need to be better, more empathetic, more contextually focused, with better memories and links to required and up to date metadata.   When required with links to sensors as part of an IOT digital twins network than can remotely test and interact with context.  A lot of the pieces are possible, but not connected well enough as yet. 

Where are chatbots falling short of consumer expectations?  by Tom Ryan in Retailwire, with further expert comment.

According to a survey from Uberall, 80 percent of consumers who have interacted with an AI chatbot say the experience was generally positive.

When asked what elements of chatbots need improvement, 43 percent said their accuracy in understanding what customers are asking or looking for. Other areas cited included the ability of customers to get “a human customer rep involved where needed,” 27 percent; and “ability to hold a more human-sounding, natural conversation,” 19 percent.

Drift’s “2018 State of Chatbots” report found different inhibitors to chatbot adoption when it asked 1,000 consumers, “What would stop you from using a chatbot?” The top answer was, “I’d prefer to deal with a real-life assistant,” 43 percent; followed by, “I’d worry about it making a mistake,” 30 percent; “If I could only access it through Facebook,” 27 percent; “I’d prefer to use a normal website,” 26 percent; and “If it wasn’t able to ‘chat’ in a friendly manner,” 24 percent. ... " 

Helping Alexa Assistant to Learn

Fascinating piece in the Alexa Dev blog on memory measures for Alexa Assistant, am examining.  See the full technical paper linked to below.  Lengthy

How Alexa May Learn to Retrieve Stored "Memories"

By Rasool Fakoor who is an applied scientist in the Alexa Intelligent Decisions group

In May 2018, Amazon launched Alexa’s Remember This feature, which enables customers to store “memories” (“Alexa, remember that I took Ben’s watch to the repair store”) and recall them later by asking open-ended questions (“Alexa, where is Ben’s watch?”). At this year’s IEEE Spoken Language Technologies conference, we presented a paper relating to the technology behind this feature.

Most memory retrieval services depend on machine learning systems trained on sample questions and answers. But they often suffer from the same problem: the machine learning systems are trained using one criterion of success — a loss function — but evaluated using a different criterion — the F1 score, which is a cumulative measure of false positives and false negatives.

In our paper, we use a reinforcement-learning-based model to directly train a memory retrieval system using the F1 score. While the model is not currently in production, our experiments show that it can deliver significant improvements in F1 score over methods that use other criteria during training.

Typically, a machine learning system is trained to minimize some loss function, which describes how far the system is from perfect accuracy. After every pass through the training data, a learning algorithm estimates the shape of the loss function and modifies the system’s settings, in an attempt to find a lower value for the function. It’s a process called gradient descent, because, essentially, the algorithm tries to determine which way the function slopes and to move down the slope. ... " 

Technical Paper    https://arxiv.org/pdf/1810.00679.pdf

"Direct Optimization of F-Measure for Retrieval-Based Personal Question Answering"

AI Boosting Brains Memory

Related to the recent piece regards a brain pacemaker?   Is this related? The enhancement seems to be small, can it be verified?

AI Just Learned How to Boost the Brain's Memory 
in Wired    By Robbie Gonzalez

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have demonstrated how machine-learning algorithms can decode and augment human memory by triggering the delivery of precisely timed pulses of electricity to the brain. "We're using it to build...something that can look at electrical activity and say whether the brain is in a state that's conducive to learning," says University of Pennsylvania professor Michael Kahana. The project involved 25 epilepsy patients with electrodes implanted in their brain, which were used to record high-resolution brain activity during memory tasks. From the training data the team built algorithms that predicted which words in a list each patient would likely recall based solely on their electrode activity. "A closed-loop system lets us record the state of the subject's brain, analyze it, and decide whether to trigger a stimulation, all in a few hundred milliseconds," Kahana says. He notes the system improved patients' ability to remember words by an average of 15 percent. .... 

Neural Nets Remembering

Well yes, all neural nets 'remember'.  We examined that feature in their very early days.    But they don't often remember in the way we would like memory to work.    Very quickly we needed to rework their memory with new infrastructure, based on new context.  Often with new metadata.  So they remember in strict context.   Useful, but you have to be careful about the term.

Following piece is on the topic and interesting

The Neural Network That Remembers
With short-term memory, recurrent neural networks gain some amazing abilities  By Zachary C. Lipton and Charles Elkan .... 

On Memory Video Holograms

As the Verge article linked to beow  suggests, the term Hologram is being used differently and non-technically here, as kind of 3D video that can be later accessed using VR tech for interaction.  Read the whole article to understand what is being done in this space.  Is this a popular future channel for consumer remembering?

Are holograms the future of how we capture memories?
Holographic time capsules     by Lauren Goode  @LaurenGoode 

" ... holograms, a term that’s used (and sometimes overused) to describe volumetric video. 8i was looking to build up its repository of holograms, and a mom-and-baby clip seemed like a good idea for relatable content.

Scott’s first hologram taping led to her crying in a VR headset, and became what the company’s chief executive called a “watershed moment” for the then-fledgling company. ... " 

See also about the company mentioned:

8i: Mix realities with holograms:

Easily record and experience photorealistic human holograms with true volume and depth for virtual, augmented and mixed reality ... " 

Microsoft Launches Chat Bot

Now I want to see a real world application of this, beyond just an amusing interaction.   Bring on the contextual power and usefulness.   And something that can carry on a memory enabled learning  conversation.

Microsoft officially launches Zo.ai, more bot-building tools
This year was a big one for Microsoft, across the company, in expanding its AI footprint. Today, Microsoft is rolling out new bot -, translation and tools that all have an AI tie-in.    By Mary Jo Foley 

Intelligent Agents with Episodic Memories

Dan Tecuci, IBM Watson NLP Engineer  IBM Watson Health, gave a great presentation yesterday on “Enhancing Intelligent Agents with Episodic Memories”.   as part of the Cognitive Systems Institute Speaker Series.   Most notably, the crucial role of memory in a cognitive system.   Insightful.

Dan's work can be found here.
Slides here.   Recording of Presentation here.

New Memory For Wearables, IoT

In CWorld:  " ...  IBM and development partner Samsung announced they've developed a process to manufacture a type of non-volatile RAM that is up to 100,000 times faster than NAND flash and never wears out.

The two companies collaborated to develop next-generation magnetoresistive RAM (MRAM) using spin-transfer torque (STT) technology, which would lead to low-capacity memory chips for Internet of Things sensors, wearables and mobile devices that currently use NAND flash to store data.  ... " 

Hacks for Forgetfulness

The topic has always interested us.  In the modern world there are so many more things to remember.  But we have devices now, and they can provide cues in some context.    What are the best kinds of cues?  In Knowledge@Wharton.  With even some implications for retail.

Project Tango Area Learning

Mentioned previously here for retail applications.

From Google I/O

Streaming at the link.  (My apologies I thought these would be recorded at the link, but apparently are not.  Only streamed at time indicated.  If anyone has a link to the recording, let me know and I will replace with a link here)  An intro has been placed at the link below for now.

Introducing Project Tango Area Learning
May 18, 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM / Stage 1 | Hercules  (PST) 

Motion tracking on a mobile device has already enabled a whole new range of experiences, but what would be possible if your Project Tango device could have a memory? With Area Learning, Project Tango can not only see the space around you, but it can also remember the space around you. This opens up a new range of possibilities for Project Tango developers - attach virtual objects to the world that remain in place even when you restart an app, design multiplayer experiences and know the exact location of each player, pause/resume AR/VR experiences, and eliminate motion tracking drift. We'll go over basic concepts of area learning and best practices for Project Tango developers. ..  ... " 

Announced that a Tango enabled phone will be announced by Lenovo  this year.
Tango devices will be made available next month. 
Further announcements to be made here on May 18 at 3 PM PST. 

Mind Palaces

The topic of Mind Palaces have come up often as plot points on memory problem oriented TV programs.   Could you have ever guessed there were many of these?   How can a human effectively remember large volumes of data?      The approach of 'memory' or 'mind'  Palace uses visualization to tag memory items in a physical place to make it easier to remember.   More on Mind Palaces.  Could this be implemented via a supporting user interface?    Has this been tried?

Search Engines for Your Memories

In the Atlantic.   The kind of augmented reality we all need.

A Search Engine for Your Memories
An inventor at IBM has patented technology for a cognitive assistant that could learn all about you, then remind you of a name you can't remember the moment you need to say it. ... " 

See also: Enhancing abilities.   Madelaine Sayko from Cognitive Compass, presenting "Enhancing Ability Through Smart Cognitive Support Systems."    

Chips That Never Forget

And as memory sales increase, In IEEE Spectrum ... " ... The Computer Chip That Never Forgets ... Melding spin-based logic and memory could lead to low-power, instant-on electronics ... " .   A big advance for applications of the Internet of things,

Deep Brain Stimulation for Memory

In Technology Review:  Quite a considerable claim.   Now figure out how this can be controlled and measured?  " ... Work Begins on Brain Stimulator to Correct Memory ... Can deep brain stimulation affect how well and what we remember? ..  For some of the approximately 10 million people worldwide with traumatic brain injury (TBI), forming and holding onto new memories can be one of the hardest things they’ll do in a day. Now imagine a device implanted in the brain that can help them encode memories by means of small electric shocks. ... " 

Memory Implants for the Brain via Advisory Systems

I think we are some ways from being able to do this, at least in the sense it can be connected directly to the brain. Perhaps sooner as an external interface that forms a 'remembrance engine'.  Search engines by themselves already do this to a degree.  Perhaps they can be augmented to do it better.   Beyond the military, It has also been suggested for Alzheimer therapy.  Essentially it can be seen as an advisory system based on context.    In Military.com: 

" ... Now, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) wants to expand on that cutting-edge work to build other potential breakthrough medical technologies, including a pacemaker-sized device that might someday improve the memory of troops who suffered a traumatic brain injury. Think of it as a hard drive of sorts for the brain.  ... "