Hacking Memory

Ted Berger, a USC researcher, spent last 10 years of his life crafting silicon chips that would recreate thought. Their chips model less than 12000 neurons, as compared to 100 billion present in human brain. Yet, as we all know, once (it might takes decades for that to actually happen) the first barrier is crossed, its a matter of time when forgetfulness will be history. What sort of world would that be? I wonder...

"In wet lab 412C on the University of Southern California’s Los Angeles campus, Vijay Srinivasan is poking a long, evil-looking needle at a slice of rat brain about half the size of a fingernail. All around him, coils of cable are piled near hulking microscopes. Glass vials and fluid-filled plastic dishes compete for space with spare keyboards and computer chips. The place looks more like a computer-repair shop than a world-class laboratory.

“Watch this,” says Srinivasan, a design engineer working with USC’s Center for Neural Engineering. A thin wire runs between the needle and a tiny silicon chip hooked up to a boxy signal transmitter. He flips a switch, and a series of small waves shimmers across a nearby screen—waves that mean exactly zilch to me. Watch what? I wonder.Srinivasan explains that the chip is sending electric pulses through the needle into the brain slice, which is passing them on to the screen we’re watching. “The difference in the waves’ modulation reflects the signals sent out by the brain slice,” he says. “And they’re almost identical in frequency and pattern to the pulses sent by the chip.” Put more simply, this iron-gray wafer about a millimeter square is talking to living brain cells as though it were an actual body part...."

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