The Memory Hacker

Berger has grown accustomed to this reputation. He has spent most of his career on the fringe of his field, only to watch that fringe become the leading edge in recent years. As a young Harvard graduate student in physiological psychology in the 1970s, he published a now-classic study of eye-blinking in the prestigious journal Science that established him as an oddball wunderkind in the competitive field of neuroscience. By the time he earned his Ph.D. in 1976, at the age of 26, he had accumulated 10 papers and an award from the New York Academy of Sciences. But as he ascended the ranks of academia, he grew increasingly restless with the accepted wisdom of his colleagues. â€The idea was that you could solve every brain problem with a drug or surgery,†Berger remembers. He began to chart a different path in the 1980s.

At the time, most neuroscientists largely regarded the brain as a poorly understood swamp of biochemical interactions. Berger, however, set out to reduce higher cognitive functions to a set of mathematical equations based on how neurons responded to various stimuli-equations that could then be coded into some form of prosthetic device. Even in casual conversation, Berger seems eager to demystify the brain. â€Its cells are nothing but leaky bags of salt solution, 20 microns in diameter,†he says, laughing.

But beyond his professional ambition, it´s the medical and therapeutic potential of neural chips that has most inspired Berger´s singular vision. A machine able to revitalize memory cells would change the lives of millions of Americans who suffer from brain disease, and offer relief to the families that care for them. In 1999, that possibility became personally significant for Berger. At a time when he was keynoting conferences around the world, his mother suffered a stroke and developed strange neurological symptoms typical of hippocampal damage. â€She didn´t speak, but she could laugh and sing,†recalls Berger, who grew up in Poughkeepsie, New York, the son of an electrical-engineer father. His mother´s illness and resulting death in 2005 had a profound and grounding influence on his work. â€It suddenly made my research more than just a cool laboratory problem to solve,†Berger says. â€Instead of just thinking about [the brain chip] as solving one of the great puzzles of neuroscience, I now think mostly in terms of increasing the quality of life for stroke, epilepsy and dementia patients.â€

Today an estimated 4.5 million Americans suffer from Alzheimer´s, at an annual cost of some $100 billion, according to the Alzheimer´s Association and the National Institute on Aging. â€And those figures are just going to climb as my generation gets older,†says Berger, who can rattle off the grim statistics from Alzheimer´s and other brain disorders that disturb memory. Another 5.3 million Americans are victims of traumatic brain injuries, which can trigger a variety of neurological dysfunctions affecting the hippocampus, including memory loss, epilepsy and Parkinson´s disease.

Where Berger once had difficulty attracting research partners, his recent triumphs in the laboratory, coupled with the emerging medical potential of his work, have put him front and center. He now heads a National Science Foundation review panel on neuro-prosthetics. As the leader of a national project investigating the brain-computer connection, he has attracted some of the country´s most prominent scientists to his 65-member team. One of USC´s top biomedical engineers, Vasilis Marmarelis, developed the modeling theory for his chip, now being road-tested at the university´s Los Angeles labs, where Berger directs the Center for Neural Engineering. And Sam Deadwyler, a national expert on pharmacology, will test the chip on the brains of live rats later this year at Wake Forest University. Berger is no longer on the fringe.