USC researchers are developing the first brain prothesis, an artificial hippocampus to replace damaged brain tissue.

Scientists will initially test the “brain chip” on rat brains. The silicon-chip programming was developed by stimulating slices of rat hippocampus with electrical signals millions of times to determine which input produced a corresponding output. The chip would translate activity coming from the rest of the brain and send the necessary output instructions back to the brain.

Comment: this development reinforces Ray Kurzweil’s concepts of reverse-engineering, scanning, and downloading the brain to external computational systems.