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 Alzheimers 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

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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."
