Podcast: Non-invasive Memory Booster

In this episode, we explore a groundbreaking neurotechnology that boosts memory without the need for invasive surgery potentially helping people all over the world struggling with spatial memory.

This podcast is sponsored by Mouser Electronics. 

Episode Notes

(4:10) - Neurotechnology Boosts Memory Without Surgery

This episode was brought to you by Mouser, our favorite place to get electronics parts for any project, whether it be a hobby at home or a prototype for work. Click HERE to learn more about BLE and its impact on wireless communication and wearables!

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Transcript

Every three seconds, someone in the world is diagnosed with dementia. And that's pretty scary. But that's why the folks over at EPFL have decided to take on this problem by figuring out a way to non-intrusively stimulate the brain and make it work better by retaining information and becoming more plastic. So, if that's got you excited or scared, well, then let's get into it.

What's up friends, this is the NextByte podcast where one gentleman and one scholar explore the secret sauce behind cool tech and make it easy to understand.

Farbod: Hey friends, as you heard, today we're talking about neuro technology and how it's gonna make our lives better. But before we get into today's article, let's quickly talk about today's sponsor, and that would be Mouser Electronics. Now, if you're a fan of the pod, you've heard us talk about Mouser a lot, and that, it just, it makes sense, because Mouser is one of the world's biggest electronics suppliers, and by being one of the biggest, they have access to a lot of cool information. Sometimes they decide to share that information and they tend to do it in a way that's really easy to understand, which vibes very nicely with us.

Daniel: That's our mission, man.

Farbod: That's the whole goal, right? Like that's the ethos of all this. And the one that we wanna share with you guys today, length in the show notes as always, is talking about BLE, which is Bluetooth Low Energy, and the impact it's had on hearing aids. So, the world of hearing aids, it's quite foreign to me, but Daniel and I, we actually have some experience with BLE. We experiment with it back in college when we were developing sensors. And I remember at the time, it was taking the world by storm because everyone had known of Bluetooth and how great it is for wireless device pairing. But then BLE took all the great things about Bluetooth and made it better.

Daniel: And BLE for folks that don't know what that stands for, right, Bluetooth Low Energy, right? And that's just one of the things that BLE boasts, right? Much more power efficient. Because it's low energy, the device that's using the BLE protocol doesn't overheat as often, which is nice. But they also, lots of other benefits as well in terms of performance, right?

Farbod: Exactly. Sinking the left and right channels, reducing latency between when audio is generated to when you're actually hearing it, for example. All these great things have made BLE the one-stop shop for developers that want to do something wirelessly. So, like if you're using wireless headphones, odds are you have BLE chip in there. Now, why this is important for hearing aids is that the old Bluetooth chips, like all the things that Daniel basically just mentioned, overheating, high power consumption, not high enough performance, prevented it from being used for hearing aids. And now with BLE, it's become a much more popular option. And because everything else also supports BLE, every electronic device, really, your phone, your computer, the touchscreen ordering machine at McDonald's, all of them, well, that gives folks who use earring aids better accessibility to the world around them. So that's been a massive win.

Daniel: Let me tell you a quick story here.

Farbod: Tell me a quick story. Okay.

Daniel: Well, actually, I have to give a shout out to both of my grandfathers, because I think both of them listen to every single episode of the podcast. Wow. It's insane.

Farbod: Oh my God.

Daniel: One of them, Papa Jim, if you're listening, I know you probably are. He listens to the Next Byte podcast, Bluetooth linked in through his hearing aids. So, who better to talk about this or to give a shout out to, thank you, Mouser, for bringing this, or letting us know about this awesome technology that I know my grandpa uses with his hearing aids every single day. It's pretty sweet.

Farbod: I didn't even know that. Shout out, Papa Jim. And look, this is a testament, right, to the power of the things that Mouser talks about. How it impacts your day-to-day life or the people that you love or really anyone around you. So that's why we love sharing articles like this and it's really relevant to what we're talking about today. And if you're interested, as I said before, link in the show notes. Go read all about it. Read about BLE. Read about the impact that this has happened in the world. And with that said, let's talk about today's article. And we're going all the way to EPFL, which we haven't been to in a while. It's kind of shocking because we had a streak of doing only EPFL or ETH Zurich for a couple months.

Daniel: Now we're making a return to Europe in a big way.

Farbod: Yeah, we are. We are. And we're talking about spatial memory. So, have you ever woken up in a rush to get to work and just frustrated that you can't find your keys?

Daniel: Absolutely.

Farbod: That was me this morning. Sorry.

Daniel: This is a problem for me.

Farbod: Super relevant to me. And we're not alone. It's a common thing. You see it in your favorite sitcom. Very normal setting. And apparently this gets worse as you age, your spatial memory deteriorates and that becomes exacerbated if you suffer from something like dementia. And according to the Alzheimer's Disease International Association, every three seconds someone develops dementia in the world. So, this becomes a pretty drastic problem when you take a step back. And obviously, we're talking about keys, but imagine you can't figure out directions to your home or your surroundings or you’re understanding that the sense of loss has to be pretty overwhelming. And this team at EPFL wanted to take on that challenge and figure out how we could tackle such an unspoken yet massive problem.

Daniel: Well, and let's just say the widespread effects of dementia and of memory loss and of Alzheimer's by the way, this hits home for me, have family members who are struggling with Alzheimer's. So, I'm excited about new technology like this. But it's a widespread and the current treatment options aren't great, right? There are drugs that have pretty significant side effects. Other types of neural technology aimed at trying to help solve these types of issues, sound scary and invasive, not to like take too much of a direct dig, but I'm thinking of like Neuralink. Like they have promised some potential future benefits for folks struggling with Alzheimer's and dementia that involves having a hole about the size of a quarter drilled through your skull, putting a chip in your brain. So that the clear opportunity here, not just in the market, but like in the medical space, right, where there's a gap in the treatment plans with something that's non-invasive, something that's drug-free, doesn't have massive side effects, but it's still highly effective at helping specifically with boosting memory related to spatial memory.

Farbod: Absolutely. And, I'm not to take another dig at them, but Neuralink says, you can come in, it's an outpatient procedure, it's a coin size thing, a robot can do it, you can go home the same day, no worries. But we've seen quite a lot of people be concerned about the idea of a hole in their head and then what, 1,024 needles basically being weaved into their brain, especially when certain trials have not gone as expected. So, like you're saying, if you want the majority of people to be open to some sort of a brain interface or to have a wearable that interacts with their brain to that extent, non-invasive is the way to go.

Daniel: Yeah.

Farbod: And that's a pretty good segue into the contributors to this project. So obviously we're talking about EPFL, but there's two labs that came together at EPFL to make the magic happen. One of those is the Hummel Lab. Now the Hummel's Lab expertise is in non-intrusive brain stimulation. So, they've been doing research about the different regions of the brain, the different methods to do stimulation, and then what makes sense for whatever application. And then they came together with the Laboratory of Cognitive Science, who's been doing a lot of cognitive research on spatial navigation in a virtual environment, right? So, imagine you put on a VR headset and you're navigating through a park or whatever. They wanna understand how your brain is able to recall how you've been navigating and which regions are sparking up as you try to figure out where to go next, things like that. So, the combination of these two efforts gave birth to the beautiful magic secret sauce that we're talking about driving this article, right?

Daniel: Well, and like just, it's a little bit self-explanatory, but I wanna highlight exactly what it is that they did here.

Farbod: Highlight away.

Daniel: The Hummel Lab, right, focuses on non-invasive brain stimulation. I think the official acronym they use is tTIS, Transcranial Temporal Interference Electric Stimulation.

Farbod: It's a five out of 10 for me. I tried being nice about it, but that was bad.

Daniel: It's a little bit of a tongue twister. Maybe they can give me some brain stimulation to help me speak better, but I'm going to steer away from tTIS and call it like, I don't know if this is gruesome. I'm going to call it the brain zapper.

Farbod: I can get behind it.

Daniel: Four electrodes, they sit on the scalp, right? Not inside the brain, right? You don't have to, you're not cutting anything open. You're not breaking any skin. These four electrodes sit perfectly positioned on the scalp and they're able to send electric pulses into the hippocampus, which is the part of the brain that's responsible for memory and navigation. And it gives gentle electric impulses, just little tiny pulses, and the brain zapper to help stimulate the hippocampus. That's one portion of what they did, right? They've got this brain zapper, but how do they test it? How do they, you know, you've got an expert in brain stimulation. How do you understand the impacts that it has on folks with spatial memory issues? How do you help them improve? Can it help them improve with this brain zapper? The way that they tested, like you mentioned, is in virtual reality. So, they had participants wear VR goggles to navigate. They're trying to navigate through this virtual world. Remember the locations through which they passed, the route that they took, which the locations were. Did I take a right, a left, and a right? Did I take a right at the dog? Did I take a right at the light post? I don't know. Do all this in a virtual world so it's a controlled environment where participants are safe, you're not sending them out into the real world with a brain zapper on their head. Helping them understand, helping the researchers understand how well participants can remember and navigate while they're getting the brain stimulation. And as another part of that to help measure the brain stimulation and measure the brain activity, there were also scanning the participant's brain with an fMRI, which could show brain activity in real time. So, it's three pieces in my mind, three ingredients here to the secret sauce. One of them being the brain zapper. The second one being this virtual reality headset in this virtual reality world where they're doing the testing. And then third one here being the MRI that they're doing the measurements on the brain to show brain activity in real time. And with all three, they're able to set up this testing approach where they tried to understand which type of pulses from the brain zapper and which electrode positions might help stimulate the hippocampus in a way that improves brain plasticity or adaptability, which helps with memory.

Farbod: Well, I mean, think about these efforts in isolation, right? So, you have a group who's built a lot of knowledge about how to do non-intrusive brain stimulation, but it's very difficult for them to come and say, please let us zap your brain and then experiment on you as you navigate through this maze in real life. That's challenging, right? Then you have this other group who's actually built expertise on how do we measure someone's ability to navigate through space in a virtual environment so that they don't physically have to move around. And also, we can monitor them under this condition where we can have a MRI machine that tells us the brain activity as they do whatever. So, you bring them these two technologies, these two efforts and combine them and you get what you just talked about. And it gives some very interesting feedback, like confirming that tTIS or as Daniel likes to call it, the brain zapper has a very direct and a clear impact on recall time. And that's someone's ability that when you tell them, go through this area and look at these landmarks and then you tell them, hey, can you get back to this specific landmark? How fast can they remember where that was and they start moving towards it? And the researchers, like you were saying, believe that this is because of brain plasticity or an increase in brain plasticity that's promoted by that brain zapper. Essentially, while you're doing the zapping, you make the brain more susceptible to learning new information and actually retaining it. And the fMRI, it confirmed all of this, which is the benefit of having that extra layer of observation in the experiment. And that in itself is fascinating, it's incredible, right? And the researchers said in the future work, they wanna expand this and figure out how they can use it for like therapeutic integrations and stuff like that. But where my mind went is like, imagine if you ever seen the X-Men movies, like Professor X, the helmet that he puts on and then he can see the world. Imagine as a struggling college student, the night before an exam, you're trying to cram, you put on a helmet of this sort, you turn it on and then you just study away. And for the duration that that helmet is on, your brain becomes more plastic and then you can consume more information and actually retain it better. Now they said, they're targeting the hippocampus and the regions around it because that's where memory and spatial information is contained. But I wonder if you can target it for different applications as well. For example, studying for an engineering exam, you know?

Daniel: Yeah, no, no, that makes a lot of sense, right? This is, there's obviously clear impact here, potentially for folks struggling with dementia, struggling with Alzheimer's, but it makes me wonder in a very similar way. I think they've used the tTIS, this brain zapper method, in previous studies to try and help, I think it was, I was looking at the past research, I think it was with motor learning, like so to help people control their body better, and stimulating specific portions of the brain was successful in increasing the speed of motor learning for new physical tasks. So, I think it's demonstrated here in a number of different ways, like spatial memory, motor learning, like there are some benefits here. I am interested as well to see like, what's the gamut here? I think that there's like probably a, some considerations around like, are there bad side effects? I don't know, but like, in a way where you have like these gentle impulses that are just helping and nudging the brain and helping the brain to be more active and learn the right things and react in the right way. It sounds really interesting to me. It's not something I'd like to try.

Farbod: Yeah, that's what I was gonna say. You know me or you know us. We're the kind of people that are very enthusiastic about these technologies and definitely wanna be first in line to try them out. But for the general audience, I think them taking the approach of let's make a medical device first that has a very clear value add. And in a controlled setting, it has no downsides. And let's study it and better understand how it could be used for other things. That's the best approach. So, they have my full support, whatever that means to them to keep continuing this and R&D-ing it and then pushing it out for the people that really need it right now. And then in the future, if they want to make a spinoff that makes it for recreational or the average Joe user like me, I'm super into it.

Daniel: Well, and let me just highlight the “so what” here in very quantitative terms, because it's something, it's frustrating to me sometimes when I don't get numbers. So, I want to be, I want to cater to the folks who are like me out there and want to see real numbers like, give me the facts. How does this work? Yeah. They measured two main things. Departure time, which basically is like, so you navigate through this maze virtually, and then you tell someone to like, hey, go back to that light post. You saw a little bit ago, departure time. Like they bet they measured how long it took the person to think in their head before they started navigating after they were given the cue to return to a certain location. The average departure time was reduced by about 18% with this brain stimulation. So, this means, it indicates that someone has improved recall, they have confidence in the way which they will navigate. If you say, you know, if I've just walked through a virtual park in this VR scenario and they say, go back to this lake. And if I'm departing heading toward the lake that they're telling me to go to with this queue, 20, almost 20% faster than without the brain stimulation. That indicates that like, I have better confidence. I know where I'm going. I remember where the lake is and I'm going to head there. And one of the things that they mentioned is they did this total trial which was like, you have to go here, here, here, and find the right location. The total trial time was also decreased by about 11%. So, 20% faster and remembering where I need to go and 11% in total time to navigate there and get where I need to go. And one of the things that I mentioned is the navigation velocity was actually fixed. So, it's not like someone, if they were really confident, they could like virtually navigate to the pond that much faster. Truly the, the time benefit here from navigation was around remembering the direct route, navigating more efficiently, because there was no throttle, let's say, to go fast or slow. You could only just head in a certain direction.

Farbod: This is why we like going back to EPFL, because of gems like this. Yeah. But yeah, I think I don't really have anything else to talk about. You want me to just wrap it up?

Daniel: Just one last thing from my end. I think I said it personally. This hits home for me. So, I’m excited about this potential for non-invasive treatments, for dementia, for cognitive decline, folks that are elderly or have brain injuries. I'm excited to see them test this more to confirm that there are no negative side effects, to confirm that it's better for wider use. And again, for whatever it's worth, our opinion, just two dudes talking about tech. EPFL, super interested in this. Want to make sure, I think they've tested it only on healthy people so far. So, they need to do more research to figure out how much does this help folks with dementia. But super interesting, 20% increase in departure or 20% decrease in time before departure. 11% faster navigation. I mean, dude, I'd take that on my drive to work.

Farbod: That's what I'm saying. I clear value add for someone like me so I can only imagine what the medical upsides are gonna be.

Daniel: Yeah.

Farbod: But yeah, so if you're someone like me who cannot go to the grocery store without looking at Apple Maps or you struggle to find your keys every morning.

Daniel: Come on man.

Farbod: Well, what can I say? You probably have bad spatial memory and the bad news is that it's not going to get better as you age. And if you happen to suffer from dementia, which everyone in the world, every three seconds, someone is diagnosed with dementia according to the Alzheimer's International Society, then it becomes an even bigger problem. So, this isn't just about going to the grocery store or finding your keys. This is about difficulties managing your life. So, folks over at EPFL have decided to tackle this problem. And the way they wanna do it is pretty novel. It's non-intrusive, so no brain surgery, none of that. No one's gonna put a chip in your head. They found a way to use electrical impulses to stimulate your brain and make it more plastic and therefore allow you and allow your brain to consume information and retain it much, much better. And they've actually tested this with people already and the results are quite impressive. We're seeing 20% improvement in terms of how quickly you can respond to going back to a specific place. And the implications of this and what it means for the average person, even if you don't care about spatial memory right now, are even more interesting because let's say you wanna use it for studying, you wanna use it to just be better at tasks or whatever. This could potentially help you on that journey as well. Yeah, that's the quick gist of it.

Daniel: I love it.

Farbod: All right, that's the pod. Thanks.

Daniel: See yah.

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The Next Byte: We're two engineers on a mission to simplify complex science & technology, making it easy to understand. In each episode of our show, we dive into world-changing tech (such as AI, robotics, 3D printing, IoT, & much more), all while keeping it entertaining & engaging along the way.