Okay, first the bad news: all you people playing video games non-stop are screwed. Apparently playing extensively shrinks your cognitive brain. Sorry, that’s pretty rough. I mean, at least playing while drunk won’t…
Oh, crap.
Okay, so all those folks you know who spend twelve hours a day while wasted, get about four hours of sleep, and then work just long enough to feed their addiction? They’re literally playing their brains smooth.
Meanwhile, on the upside, scientists have created an artificial hippocampus – on a chip – and used the model on rats. (The hippocampus is the part of our brain organ that is responsible for the formation of memory.) They planted the chip in these rats, and then used drugs to suppress the natural hippocampus.
And it worked. The chip-based module replicated the brain’s natural function. The rats learned and had memory as if there was nothing askew.
Now we’re a long way from replicating the memory-formation of “press this to get food” and remembering Lord of the Rings and having that replicated, but this is a BIG first step in that effort. Highly cool. I suppose there’s a downside if you’re a half-empty sort: this is also a major step in having a “live” mind within silicon – we’re a step closer to SkyNet or ViKi…