Memristors!

A couple of weeks ago, i came across this and this article in New Scientist magazine. Of course it intrigued me.

This incredible circuit element, the memristor has been around theoretically since 1971. I say theoretically because the guy who proposed the idea, Leon Chua presented a paper to the IEEE Transactions on Circuit theory and the idea lay dormant until Stan Williams of Hewlett-Packard Labs in California created a memristor quite by accident in 2008, when they drew up their equations they found the circuit element that Chua had predicted over 30 years earlier.

The memristor is a resistor with a memory i.e. it can remember the last voltage you sent through it. When you switch the circuit off, the resistors state stays the same so when you switch the circuit back on you return to where you just left off. The amount of resistance is dependant on the last voltage that was sent through it.

The most intriguing thing for me about this missing circuit element is that it can "learn". A team sent three voltage pulses through a memristor and even without a fourth pulse, the memristor had "learnt" a pattern and produced an electrical current without a voltage stimulus. This happens within our own electrical circuits, the neurons that send the analog sound coming in to our brain will fire an electrical current even without a stimulus present.

This circuit element behaves like a synapse in the brain. I mean finally we could possibly model the brain, we could actually figure out the way we process sound, images. We could even get as far as figuring out what conscious thought is.

I play tennis quite a bit when I'm at home. I occasionally go into "The Zone" - i would love to know what that "Zone" actually is. I know I'm not consciously thinking and my body is essentially on auto-pilot although i sometimes i get a random conscious thought when i'm in this heightened state which will tell me what shot to hit. I hit it well who am I to argue with the Zone? The majority of the time these are shots that i have no business making yet everytime I'm in the Zone, i make them.

Finally we may be able to figure out the answer, finally we may be able to build a brain-like computer. But in order to be able to build a brain we'll have to model it in software first using a computer that isn't quite up to scratch.

Now, i think the race is on to find a practical memcapacitor and meminductor for these theoretical devices can actually store energy. These could be the way the brain stores our memories.