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By Stephen Handelman | April 2007
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.
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.
Ted Berger, Srinivasan's boss and the mastermind behind the tangle of coils and electrodes, has arranged this demonstration to provide a small but profound glimpse into the future of brain science. The chip's ability to converse with live cells is a dramatic first step, he believes, toward an implantable machine that fluently speaks the language of the brain—a machine that could restore memories in people with brain damage or help them make new ones.
Remedying Alzheimer's disease would, if Berger's grand vision plays out, be as simple as upgrading a bit of hardware. No more complicated drug regimens with their frustrating side effects. A surgeon simply implants a few computerized brain cells, and the problem is solved.
Down the hall, Berger rises to greet me in his office. An imposing man with a shock of gray hair, Berger, 56, has the thick build of an aging athlete and the no-nonsense manner of a CEO. Can a chunk of silicon really stand in for brain cells? I ask. “I don't need a grand theory of the mind to fix what is essentially a signal-processing problem,†he says. “A repairman doesn't need to understand music to fix your broken CD player.â€
What the chip is saying is anyone's guess—the content of the conversation is beside the point, Berger continues. It's straight mechanic-talk from the man who has created a prototype of the world's first memory implant, basically a hardware version of the brain cells in your hippocampus that are crucial to the formation of memory. The chip is meant to replace damaged neurons in the same way other prosthetic devices stand in for missing limbs or improve hearing. “If we can mimic even 10 percent of the brain's efficiency and power, it would be humongous,†Srinivasan tells me later.
Berger's research team—an all-star roster of neuroscientists, mathematicians, computer engineers and bioengineers from around the country—has so far managed to reproduce only a minute amount of brain activity. Their chip models fewer than 12,000 neurons, compared with the 100 billion or so present in a human brain. Yet researchers within the field say that even this small number represents a stunning achievement in the field of neuro-engineering. “It's the type of science that can change the world,†says Richard H. Granger, Jr., a professor of brain sciences who leads the Neukom Institute for Interdisciplinary Computational Sciences at Dartmouth College. “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.â€
FROM FRINGE TO VANGUARD
Berger walks me outside on this balmy late-summer afternoon and drives us down the Santa Monica Freeway in his lemon-yellow Jaguar convertible. We're on our way to USC's Information Sciences Institute at Marina del Ray, just 30 minutes south from Wet Lab 412C, where computer programmers have been helping Berger fine-tune his chip. The big challenge, Berger says as he guns ahead of an 18-wheeler, is to make the chip fully bidirectional, so that it can both generate and receive signals, just like a real cell.
Berger's professorial monologue seems strangely at odds with his flashy style. The hair flying back from his temples, the designer shirt, the sports car—all this gives him the bearing of a dot-com millionaire, not a researcher who spends his days thinking about rat brains. “To be honest,†he says, “the general reaction to what we're doing is: Wow, this is really cool, but you guys are nuts.â€
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.
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.
Ted Berger, Srinivasan's boss and the mastermind behind the tangle of coils and electrodes, has arranged this demonstration to provide a small but profound glimpse into the future of brain science. The chip's ability to converse with live cells is a dramatic first step, he believes, toward an implantable machine that fluently speaks the language of the brain—a machine that could restore memories in people with brain damage or help them make new ones.
Remedying Alzheimer's disease would, if Berger's grand vision plays out, be as simple as upgrading a bit of hardware. No more complicated drug regimens with their frustrating side effects. A surgeon simply implants a few computerized brain cells, and the problem is solved.
Down the hall, Berger rises to greet me in his office. An imposing man with a shock of gray hair, Berger, 56, has the thick build of an aging athlete and the no-nonsense manner of a CEO. Can a chunk of silicon really stand in for brain cells? I ask. “I don't need a grand theory of the mind to fix what is essentially a signal-processing problem,†he says. “A repairman doesn't need to understand music to fix your broken CD player.â€
What the chip is saying is anyone's guess—the content of the conversation is beside the point, Berger continues. It's straight mechanic-talk from the man who has created a prototype of the world's first memory implant, basically a hardware version of the brain cells in your hippocampus that are crucial to the formation of memory. The chip is meant to replace damaged neurons in the same way other prosthetic devices stand in for missing limbs or improve hearing. “If we can mimic even 10 percent of the brain's efficiency and power, it would be humongous,†Srinivasan tells me later.
Berger's research team—an all-star roster of neuroscientists, mathematicians, computer engineers and bioengineers from around the country—has so far managed to reproduce only a minute amount of brain activity. Their chip models fewer than 12,000 neurons, compared with the 100 billion or so present in a human brain. Yet researchers within the field say that even this small number represents a stunning achievement in the field of neuro-engineering. “It's the type of science that can change the world,†says Richard H. Granger, Jr., a professor of brain sciences who leads the Neukom Institute for Interdisciplinary Computational Sciences at Dartmouth College. “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.â€
FROM FRINGE TO VANGUARD
Berger walks me outside on this balmy late-summer afternoon and drives us down the Santa Monica Freeway in his lemon-yellow Jaguar convertible. We're on our way to USC's Information Sciences Institute at Marina del Ray, just 30 minutes south from Wet Lab 412C, where computer programmers have been helping Berger fine-tune his chip. The big challenge, Berger says as he guns ahead of an 18-wheeler, is to make the chip fully bidirectional, so that it can both generate and receive signals, just like a real cell.
Berger's professorial monologue seems strangely at odds with his flashy style. The hair flying back from his temples, the designer shirt, the sports car—all this gives him the bearing of a dot-com millionaire, not a researcher who spends his days thinking about rat brains. “To be honest,†he says, “the general reaction to what we're doing is: Wow, this is really cool, but you guys are nuts.â€