Shades of cyberpunk! New Scientist is reporting the world’s first brain prosthesis – an artificial hippocampus – is about to be tested in California, with thie silicon chip implant performing the same processes as the damaged part of the brain it is replacing. The prosthesis will first be tested on tissue from rats’ brains, and then on live animals. The job of the hippocampus appears to be to “encode” experiences so they can be stored as long-term memories elsewhere in the brain. The hippocampus is the most ordered and structured part of the brain, and one of the most studied. “If you lose your hippocampus you only lose the ability to store new memories,” says Theodore Berger of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. “If you can’t do it [create a brain chip] with the hippocampus you can’t do it with anything”. While eventual trials on monkeys will tell us a lot about the prosthesis’s performance, there are some questions that will not be answered. For example, it is unclear whether we have any control over what we remember. If we do, would brain implants of the future force some people to remember things they would rather forget?