$21.6 million funding from DARPA to build window into the brain

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has awarded the University of California, Berkeley $21.6 million over four years to create a window into the brain through which researchers – and eventually physicians – can monitor and activate thousands to millions of individual neurons using light.

The UC Berkeley researchers refer to the device as a cortical modem: a way of “reading” from and “writing” to the brain, like the input-output activity of internet modems.