Michael Kahana, a University of Pennsylvania psychologist, has been studying memory for over 30 years: how it works, and what’s going on when it doesn’t.
He’s not just fascinated with memory loss caused by traumatic brain injury — which affects more than 5 million people in this country — or the nearly 7 million Americans with Alzheimer’s. His research has also focused on the memory lapses that impact everyone, regardless of their cognitive health.
“We all have bad memories sometimes,” Kahana told The Post. “It fluctuates across the day, and it can fluctuate from moment to moment. That’s just how our brain circuits work. Once I realized that, then the question was, how do I get my brain to always be in its good mode?”
Kahana’s investigation into memory culminated with a landmark study, published last January, in which he and a team of researchers used computer interventions on a group of 47 epilepsy patients, delivering a pulse of electricity directly to the brain just as a memory lapse was about to occur. They did this via electrodes that had been implanted directly into the patients’ brains as part of their epilepsy treatment.
These electrodes — between 100 and 200 per person — are able to recognize brain signals when a patient is trying to remember something, and send a precisely-timed zap of electricity to the lateral temporal cortex, the part of the brain used for storing and processing memories.