Wired News has an interesting article about the quest to create an artificial brain prosthesis. University of Southern California professor Theodore W. Berger, whose work we've previously blogged, is making headway on an implantable chip that functions like the hippocampus. That's the part of the brain that creates memories for storage.
"The team expects it will take two to three years to develop the mathematical models for the hippocampus of a live, active rat and translate them onto a microchip, and seven or eight years for a monkey. They hope to apply this approach to clinical applications within 10 years. If everything goes well, they anticipate seeing an artificial human hippocampus, potentially usable for a variety of clinical disorders, in 15 years."
