The silicone chip below functions just like a live brain cell and can communicate with other brain cells as well, thereore we may be calling it an artificial neuron in the near future. At the University of Southern California Center for Neural Engineering, scientists have created the beginning of an amazing device whose final goal is to revive Alzheimer and brain trauma patients’ memories. Design engineer Vijay Srinivasan can demonstrate how this tiny silicone chip can send impulses down a wire to brain cells. The signals between the chip and a brain cell are almost identical to signals between two communicating brain cells!

Dr. Ted Berger is the big brains behind this idea and he believes that this chip’s ability to communicate with live brain cells is the first step to a fully implantable machine that can possibly one day replace the entire brain. This is a long way down the road and sounds like turning humans into robots, but it is definitely a major breakthrough in human-computer interfaces.

-Amy Shah

This entry was posted on Friday, April 6th, 2007 at 2:26 pm and is filed under Biomedical Electronics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.