Big plans The hatchery

If you could implant a device in your brain to enhance your intelligence, would you do it? A new company has just invested $100 million into developing such a device, and is being advised by some of the biggest names in science.

The company, Kernel, was launched earlier this year by entrepreneur Bryan Johnson. He says he has spent many years wondering how best to contribute to humanity. “I arrived at intelligence. I think it’s the most precious and powerful resource in existence,” says Johnson.

His goal is for human intelligence to expand and develop in the same way that artificial intelligence has in recent years. The first experiments planned will be on memory. Johnson is working with Theodore Berger, at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, who is looking at the hippocampus – a brain region key for memory.


Berger is currently studying people with epilepsy, who already have electrical implants in their brains to treat their seizures. Rather than using these implants to stimulate the brain, Berger’s team have been using them to record brain activity instead, to tell us more about how our memory works.

Memory prosthesis

Once we learn how a healthy brain functions, we should eventually be able to mimic it, says Johnson. By electrically stimulating the same pattern of activity, the team think they should be able to restore memory in people with memory disorders. Berger has already had some success with animals, and has started experiments in people. Kernel will be starting new human studies in the coming months, says Johnson.

“The idea is that if you have loss of memory function, then you could build a prosthetic for the hippocampus that would help restore the circuitry, and restore memory,” says Johnson.

People with memory disorders, for example due to a traumatic experience or ageing, are intended to be the first people to test such a prosthesis. “The first super-humans are those who have deficits to start with,” says Johnson.

But Johnson then plans to develop this prosthesis to enhance memory, and potentially other functions, in healthy people. He envisions a future in which it is normal for people to walk around with chips in their brains, providing them with a cognitive boost as they go about their everyday business.

What next?

The $100 million – from Johnson’s own pocket – will be spent on developing such a device. Ideally, it will be as tiny and easy to implant as possible, while being able to record or stimulate multiple neurons. The team are also working on ways to develop personalised algorithms – a set of rules that dictate normal brain function for an individual.

Johnson hopes that memory enhancement will just be the start. “If we can mimic the natural function of the brain, and we can truly work with neural code, then I posit the question – what can’t we do?” says Johnson. “Could we learn a thousand times faster? Could we choose which memories to keep and which to get rid of? Could we have a connection with our computers?”

Johnson has some big names advising him, including neuroengineer Ed Boyden at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who is known for his work in optogenetics, and Craig Venter, who is famous for creating synthetic life. “They too believe we are at a special point in neuroscience,” says Johnson. “I think that human intelligence will be one of the largest industries, if not the largest industry, to ever emerge.”

But others aren’t convinced. Neil Burgess, at University College London, points out that even if the team manage to record the activity of neurons in normal memory processing, it will still be difficult to find out which bits of the code to turn up and which to dampen down in order to enhance the process. “I can’t see it working,” he says.

An optogenetic approach might be more likely to work, says Burgess. Research in mice has shown that the technique can be used to tag and then activate the neurons associated with a specific memory, for example.

Read more: Matrix-style memory prosthesis set to supercharge human brain