The Memory Hacker From: Popular Science - 04/2007 - page 62 By: Stephen Handelman Ted Berger has spent the past decade engineering a brain implant that can re-create thoughts. The chip could remedy everything from Alzheimer’s to absent-mindedness - and reduce memory loss to nothing more than a computer glitch. Read the entire article at: http://www.popsci.com/popsci/science/0e54d952c97b1110vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html Links: Ted Berger http://www-hbp.usc.edu/people/berger.htm http://www.usc.edu/programs/pibbs/site/faculty/berger_t.htm http://www.almaden.ibm.com/institute/bio/2006/?tedberger Neural-Prosthesis.com http://www.neural-prosthesis.com/ Neural-Silicon Hybrids Point to New Era in Technology http://www.neurotechreports.com/pages/hybrids.html Engineering on the Cusp of Computers and the Brain http://www.eetimes.com/disruption/profiles/berger-granacki.jhtml "A New Kind of Memory," Newsweek, October 2004 http://www.neural-prosthesis.com/doc/A%20New%20Kind%20of%20Memory%20-%20Newsweek%20Oct%202004.pdf --- Memory restoration and a cure for cognitive dysfunction could be the key benefits of an implantable device designed to re-create thought, which University of Southern California neuroscientist Ted Berger has been developing for the past decade. The project is in an early phase, but has reached an important milestone with the creation of a chip that is able to converse with live rat brain cells; Berger believes his concept is viable because cognitive dysfunction is, in his words, "essentially a signal-processing problem." Among the agencies underwriting Berger's project are the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Pentagon's Office of Naval Research, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Making the chip bidirectional--a sender as well as a receiver--is the major challenge Berger's team faces. The effort dovetails with Berger's long-term goal to reduce higher brain functions to a simple set of mathematical equations. The memory chip is designed to redirect sensory input--sound, sight, taste, etc.--around damaged hippocampal tissue by mathematically mimicking the functions of the injured neurons; the input signals would be intercepted, digitized, and processed by the chip, which would then convert them back to analog signals and reroute them back into the hippocampus. Among the technical challenges is devising a technique for reducing the heat output of the implant's transistors to prevent damage to healthy brain cells. Berger's work has courted controversy, with ethicists warning that the memory chip could shatter concepts of identity and alter healthy memories. Director of Dartmouth College's Neukom Institute for Interdisciplinary Computational Scientists Richard H. Granger Jr. is convinced that "replicating memory is going to happen in our lifetimes, and that puts us on the edge of being able to understand how thought arises from tissue--in other words, to understand what consciousness really means."