USC’s Center for Neural Engineering researchers have developed a chip that can communicate with brain cells, a first step toward an implantable machine that could restore memories in people with brain damage or help them make new ones.

The chip can receive analog signals from live brain tissue, convert them to digital signals, and then reconvert them to an analog signal relayed to healthy neurons on the other side.

Later this year, colleagues at Wake Forest will hook up a more complex version of the chip to live lab rats whose memories have been temporarily disabled by drugs. If the animals’ brains react to the computer-supplied signals with the same regularity as the slice of rat brain in Wet Lab 412C does, it will, Berger says, be a “monumental” moment. “We’ll prove we can replace a central part of the brain that has lost a higher cognitive function, such as memory, with a microchip,” he says.

Within four years, the team aims to wire a chip beneath the skulls of monkeys, whose brains are even closer to humans. Berger predicts that human trials of a prosthetic device that can actually replace impaired memory cells are less than 15 years away.