(Wired)

If you want to get technical, the brain-booster in question is a “closed-loop hippocampal neural prosthesis.  Closed loop because the signals passing between each patient’s brain and the computer to which it’s attached are zipping back and forth in near-real-time. Hippocampal because those signals start and end inside the test subject’s hippocampus, a seahorse-shaped region of the brain critical to the formation of memories. “We’re looking at how the neurons in this region fire when memories are encoded and prepared for storage,” says Robert Hampson, a neuroscientist at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center and lead author of the paper describing the experiment in the latest issue of the Journal of Neural Engineering