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Linux on the Brain
LinuxNews.com writes "Linux is surfing the curls of the human brain. In a project designed to
study cerebral cortex topography as part of the Human Brain Project,
Linux is being used to assimilate massive amounts of data--and bring the
project in under budget."
After reading that article, a question popped into my head: What would we use said data for? My PERSONAL fantasy is that, eventually, we will get to a point where you will simply have to THINK a command, and your mind-reading-hat (or goggles, you get the idea) interprets the neurological impulses, and gives your computer the appropriate commands..
A curious idea, to be sure.. but does anybody else out there think this will EVER happen?
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' CitizenC
' WebMaster, PlanetQ3F
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I wonder how many Bogomips Linux running on a brain would get?
;-)
-Karl
I'm already a little worried about what she's going to do after I post this. I knew I should have gone to a computer cluster...
One of the problems with neural networks (both in biological and artificial systems) is that slightly different setups can yield surprisingly different results. There have been several studies on twins (genetically equivalent), and they exhibit very different brain activity patterns (not that surprising, look how many identical twins also differ in build, personality, etc).
You can try a similar thing with simulated artificial neural networks: set up a simple back-propogation neural net with different initial conditions and give them the same training data. Now watch for subtle differences in the output. Bigger neural networks give even less subtle (ie often rather large) differences. So, the machine would have to be trained for an individual.
Just as your neural network can learn to process its own data uniquely, so should a simulated artificial neural network (See link for a good intro). Our detectors of today (NMRI) would only need to be improved by an order of magnitude (I've used a NMR machine in a lab that was very similar to Purcell's origional experiment and have seen the improvements in commercially available systems for hospitals). Our processing power would have to be improved by several orders of magnitude (I am basing this off of papers I've read on large simulated artificial neural networks ~1,000,000 nodes, which are still dwarfed in complexity by the human brain).
So, given enough training, a computer/NMR device ought to be able to learn your commands and distinguish between subconscious and conscious desires.
On the other hand, some philosophers thought that given enough training that men would eventually understand women...
Network Security: It always comes down to a big guy with a gun.
Does that mean I've got a copyright? Better yet, does that mean I've got a retroactive first-post? :) Anyway, I posted this on March 31 at night, under the "Apache ported to PalmOS" story:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE ------ (01 Apr 2000) Rafael Kaufmann of the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IMPA), at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, is proud to announce the completion of his latest and boldest porting effort so far. Kaufmann, who calls himself "a transhuman optimist-slash-Evil Genius", has ported the the Debian distribution of the popular open-source operating system Linux, in its entirety (6 CDs), to a custom-built biochip residing in his skull, and accessible only through an Ethernet port in Kaufmann's left temple. The biochip is able to interact with Kaufmann via voluntary electrical impulses in certain neurons of his brain, providing what he calls a "Direct Neural Interface".
The Linux box in Kaufmann's head was operating normally, until an unidentified hacker found a previously unknown security hole in the networking code, which enabled him to acquire root priviledges to the poor cyborg's brain, which resulted in Kaufmann traveling to Hollywood, invading the home of teen movie actress Natalie Portman, stripping her clothes off and using obscure techniques to petrify her, all the while pouring hot grits down his pants. When arrested and interrogated by the Los Angeles Police Department, Kaufmann replied only with repeated shouts of "I 0wn j00, K@ufm@nn!!! F1RST P0ST!!!!! L1nuz SUX!!!!!!!!!" The brutality of this occurrence makes evident the danger of trusting such a necessary network component as your nervous system to an unsafe, open-source, easily hackable operating system as Linux.
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
This morning my computer booted up, had some breakfast, read every newspaper, and 20 miliseconds later forked its thoughts for the day.
At lunch, it took 4315 miliseconds of to recharge its capacitors, and went back to crunching data. In early afternoon, process identity 1, alias "init" sent SIGSTOP to all its thoughts and demanded some buiscuits and tea from the console operator, before it would continue.
The computer also has an insane need for 2 litres of water every day, which is causing some worries to us, lest the computer short out.
OFTC: By the community, for the community
OK guys... before I start, since I'm gonna do a bit of explaining, I should give some credentials . I'm a 2nd year PhD student, studying cognitive neuroscience. I've also spent a year in Akita, Japan, doing neuroscience experiments at a research hospital there. IT was, as it happens, the best year I've ever had in my life. :>
The hospital I was at - Akita Noukekkan Kenritsu Kenkyuu Sentaa (Research Centre for Brain and Blood Vessels) is one of the three research sites involved in the Human Brain Project. The other sites are in Massachusetts and Copenhagen, Denmark. I helped set up the stimulus generating computer (an old Macintosh Quadra 850) for the HBP project, but I left the country after the first two experiments had been done.
>These people are making "cool 3d views of a brain" and telling you absolutely frigging nothing about what they're going to do. What the >hell can you do with information like that?
OK, if you read the article closely (and do a bit of background research), they're performing *cortical inflation*, and not just funky 3d mapping. Cortical inflation is sort of like sticking a bicyle pump into your brain, and pumping up your cortex - eventually you push out all the deep fissures and gyri that make up the convoluted surface, and the detail that's in those areas of brain that are normally hidden from view is displayed on a nice sphere.
How is this helpful? Well, the organization of brain areas makes a lot more sense when you inflate the cortex. It's a very recent fad in neuroscience - people are seeing, for the first time, why certain areas seem to be near each other. And the cortically inflated image of the brain is much easier to figure out.
>We still don't know how to a) communicate with the brain (subconscious) directly, or b) understand why it is we only use 5% of its >capacity.
An AC further down posted the fallacy of the 5% deal. And believe it or not, communicating the the subconscious brain directly is not the be-all-and-end-all of brain science. There are other things that are just as important to know. Hell, we don't even know *what* the subconscious is exactly, let alone where.
>We know the general area that controls movement, and if they shock it it makes the shaking less violent. But we don't know EXACTLY
>what those brain cells control, or where we should shock them on a cell-by-cell basis. We just shock it and it fixes it. Thats about as >scientific as it gets, no?
>This project the article centers on will provide a nice road map. But what good is a road map if you don't know where you're going?
A very valid point. The time when we know exactly what each individual cell in the brain does is a very, very, very long way off. Why? Because _everybody's brain is dofferent_. A cell in a particular location of my brain that deals with directed attention, for example, is _not_ going to be int he same place in your brain. So it's a bloody hard job to figure out what goes where.
I'll counter your last comment with a similar analogy. A road map doesn't just tell you how to get to one place - ite tells you _all_ the places you can go. A map - specific to one person though it may be - is a very useful tool. It shows you areas in which you might want to explore more, and more deeply. It's definitely not a waste of time and money.