A New Implant is Being Developed for Enhancing Human Memory

In 1998, Andy Clark and David Chalmers proposed that a computer operates together with our brains as an "extended mind," potentially offering additional processing capabilities as we work out problems, as well as an annex for our memories containing information, images, and so on. Now a professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Southern California, Theodore Berger, is working to bring to market human memory enhancement in the form of a prosthetic implanted in the brain. He's already testing it attached to humans. The prosthetic, which Berger has been working on for ten years, can function as an artificial hippocampus, the area in the brain associated with memory and spatial navigation. The plan is for the device to convert short-term memory into long-term memory and potentially store it as the hippocampus does.