This book has its origins in a meeting entitled ‘‘Toward Replacement Parts for the Brain: Intracranial Implantation of Hardware Models of Neural Circuitry,’’ that took place in Washington, D.C., in August 1999. The meeting was sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), the University of Southern California (USC) Alfred E. Mann Institute for Biomedical Engineering, and the USC Center for Neural Engineering. The motivation for the meeting was a growing realization among neuroscientists, engineers, and medical researchers that our society was on the threshold of a new era in the field of neural prosthetics; namely, that in the near future it would be possible to mathematically model the functional properties of different regions or subregions of the brain, design and fabricate microchips incorporating those models, and create neuron/silicon interfaces to integrate microchips and brain functions. In this manner, our rapidly increasing understanding of the computational and cognitive properties of the brain could work synergistically with the continuing scientific and technological revolutions in biomedical, computer, and electrical engineering to realize a new generation of implantable devices that could bidirectionally communicate with the brain to restore sensory, motor, or cognitive functions lost through damage or disease.

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