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'Living' cyborg chip stores rudimentary memories
The journey to pack more (proverbial) internal storage into the human brain has been going on for years, but a recent development at Tel-Aviv University could actually bring us one step closer to storing rudimentary memories on a manmade device. Reportedly, a new experiment has shown that it is indeed possible to store said memories "in an artificial culture of live neurons," which is a fairly significant step towards the "cyborg-like integration of living material into memory chips." Essentially, Itay Baruchi and Eshel Ben-Jacob carefully examined the firing patterns of a sea of electrodes and found that they could "deliberately create additional firing patterns that coexist with the spontaneous patterns." These forced patterns could theoretically represent simple memories stored in the neuron network, and after giving it a go on their own, they were able to see "memory patterns" persist for over forty hours in a homegrown concoction. Of course, the duo isn't likely to stop before producing "the first chemically operated neuro-memory chip," and while we could all use a longer train of thought every now and then, the studies could also "help neurologists to understand how our brains learn and store information."[Via TGDaily]
