On Jul. 13, 2017, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) awarded UC 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.

The researchers’ goal: to read from a million individual neurons and simultaneously stimulate 1,000 of them with single-cell accuracy.