Silicon chip mimics brain cells

“A repairman doesn’t need to understand music to fix your broken CD player,” says Ted Berger. He and Vijay Srinivasan are working at USC’s Center for Neural Engineering to develop silicon chips that’ll fix everything from momentarily memory lapses to Alzheimer’s disease. “The difference in the waves’ modulation reflects the signals sent out by the brain slice,” Srinivasan says. “And they’re almost identical in frequency and pattern to the pulses sent by the chip.” In other words, their chip is acting just like a chunk of real brain, to the degree that they can measure real brain. [GT]

The Memory Hacker [via Medgadget]