Ted Berger is trying to build a microchip that can remember things for us. He teaches biomedical engineering at the University of Southern California, and his goal is to create a device that can take over for the hippocampus of the brain, translating thoughts into long-term memories. But that’s a complicated task. Berger would like to help patients with severe memory loss, but at the moment he’s teaching rats to pull a lever. He studies what happens when the rat learns a task — how the electrical signal of an individual thought moves through its brain. If scientists can identify the electrical pattern of a thought, could they, one day, implant that thought or memory in another person? Berger doesn’t think so, and he says we should be relieved.
