Excerpt from the article in Omnia Magazine:
In the late 1990s, a young Michael Kahana—then developing computer models of human memory—was invited to Harvard Medical School by a neurosurgeon friend to give grand rounds to the neurosurgery and neurology faculty. Afterward, he toured the ninth floor of Boston Children’s Hospital.
“It was the most important professional moment of my life,” says Kahana, Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Psychology.
On the ninth floor, patients with drug-resistant epilepsy were undergoing week-long monitoring with implanted electrodes to help plan a potentially curative surgery. Kahana observed a teen patient playing a video game as a recording system captured reams of never-analyzed data. Except for a small snippet used for seizure mapping, the data were deleted each night; there was nowhere to store such a massive amount of information.
These were the roots for a decades-long adventure, as Kahana calls it, leading to the realization that it’s possible to predict when somebody will remember and when somebody will forget.
Read the rest of the article in the Omnia Magazine...
