DARPA, at the behest of the US Department of Defense, is developing a black box brain implant — an implant that will be wired into a soldier’s brain and record their memories. If the soldier then suffers memory loss due to brain injury, the implant will then be used to restore those memories. The same implant could also be used during training or in the line of duty, too — as we’ve reported on in the past, stimulating the right regions of the brain can improve how quickly you learn new skills, reduce your reaction times, and more.

The project, which DARPA has wittily named Restoring Active Memory, is currently at the stage where it’s seeking proposals from commercial companies that have previously had success with brain implants, such as Medtronic. As yet, we don’t know who has submitted proposals to DARPA, but it’ll probably be the usual suspects. Medtronic, which creates deep-brain simulation (DBS) implants that are almost miraculous in their ability to control the debilitating effects of Parkinson’s disease (video embedded below), is surely interested. Brown University, which famously created a brain-computer interface that is implanted into the brain and communicates wirelessly with a nearby computer, must be a contender. Companies with big R&D budgets, like IBM and GE, might be involved as well.

The Restoring Active Memory project has two key targets. First, we need to be able to actually analyze and decode a human’s neural signals. Some work has been done in this area, such as brute-forcing the encoding of the optic nerve, but we’re a long way away from reading a bunch of neural spikes and knowing exactly what the person is thinking or experiencing. Second, we want to take that knowledge of how we encode memories (stored experiences), and somehow use it to re-program a human brain that has experienced memory loss. “Ultimately, it is desired to develop a prototype implantable neural device that enables recovery of memory in a human clinical population,” says the proposal. (Read: What is transhumanism, or, what does it mean to be human?)

This might sound like something out of a sci-fi film — and to be honest, we’re probably quite a few years away from such an implant. While we’ve had a fair amount of success with tDCS and DBS, we’re still very much at the dumb, brute-force stage of neuroscience. The lobotomy might be out of vogue, but modern implants aren’t that much more refined — they just run electricity through a specific part of the brain. We’re not entirely sure why it works, and except for turning the device off we can’t really control it. We are a long, long way away from measuring the exact pattern of neurons firing that gives a soldier the ability to use a sniper rifle or defuse a bomb. (Read: MIT discovers the location of memories: Individual neurons.)

Still, an implanted device — rather than external, cranial-mounted instrument — is definitely the way to go, if we want to learn more about how the human brain encodes memories. When you boil it down, all memories are ultimately just a specific set of neuron connections and electric pulses (spikes). It stands to reason that, eventually, with enough painstaking data collection (provided by the implant) and a lot of analysis (supercomputers) we’ll be able to work out the exact combinations required to re-program a human brain to remember certain experiences, memories, and skills.