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Brain Prosthesis Ready For Testing
jhouserizer writes "New Scientist is reporting that an artificial hippocampus is ready to undergo testing. The leader of the team of scientists is Theodore Berger of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. They hope these artificial hippocampuses can replace damaged (stroke, Alzheimer's, etc.) portions of your brain. I wonder what portions of 'you' would be noticeably different to your family & friends? I wonder how long it will be before we can have HUDs, such as in this story by Cory Doctorow?"
Isn't that why we have 'power of attorney'? When you're of sound mind, you appoint someone that you can trust to look out for *your* best interest(s).
Case closed in my books...
Keep in mind that this implant only passes signals on in a predefined way to other parts of the brain. From what I understand, the hippocampus isn't responsible for interpretation of the data, it just does some encoding and passes it on to our long-term storage.
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Get back to me when my brain starts working.
The reason it worked is that the doctors harvested muscular stem cells and implanted them in the heart, which is basically one big muscle. To do that with a brain, you will need to use neural stem cells. Interestingly, the most common place to get neural stem cells is from the hippocampal region.
Of course, implanting neural stem cells into a brain may have some unintended side effects. Who knows what changes in thought patterns might occur with completely fresh neurons in a brain?
Hippocampii is not the plural of hippocampus.
and
Hippopotamii is not the plural of hippopotamus.
Just want to head that one off at the pass.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
There was a "strong anti-AI" camp which believed that Artificial Intelligence couldn't happen - even if you created a perfect simulation of a brain, you'd just be "simulating" intelligence, whatever that means [...] Once we can perfectly replicate the functionality of every last bit of the brain, do we just have a really nifty toy, or a genuine mind?
I am not an AI expert, but I think that the main difference between the mind and the AI is that random, uncontrolled processes are incorporated in your thoughts, which is not the case for AI (unless this random component is simulated?) The encoding in your brain works like lossy compression.
This is the basis for the generation of imaginatory processes and the fact you can't recall a picture with the precision of a computer.
You got modded as funny, but the disorder in Memento is exactly the disorder that's caused by massive damage to the hippocampus, IIRC.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
There's no way. How many neurons does the rat hippocampus have - about 300,000 or so, right? Consider that researchers modelling individual neurons to high degrees of accuracy run simulations that can take hours to model a few seconds of a single neuron's operation. What kind of computing power would it take to simulate hundreds of thousands of neurons accurately enough so that it can replace the wetware? Brains are way too complex for a single chip to replace any significant slices of them, at this point. Consider also that the hippocampal neurons are intricately and finely connected with neurons in other brain regions. How would you hook such a thing up? These researchers are sticking electrodes in and getting sum signals from large groups of neurons. That's very different from how the hippocampus is connected.
This has gotta be a hoax.
Anyway, when I first saw this headline I was thrilled at the prospect of scientists anywhere actually understanding any chunk of brain well enough to replace it (with a semiconductor, no less -- those must be some awesome I/O buffers on that ASIC -- what's brain voltage, uV? nV?).
Then I saw:
They just brute-forced it! This is remarkable achievement, but moreso from tech implementation standpoint than a brain understanding standpoint.
The point is, we don't have any clue at all about the uber-divx format that encodes human perception or memory. So the idea of storing it outside of the brain (or even viewing it, or cross-connecting 2 brains) is kinda silly at our level of understanding.
We just found a little chunk (the hippocampus) that is essential to storing memories and happens to get whacked often enough by stroke and such. Then we did an all-possible-input-combos test on this chunk (using rat brains, apparently), recorded the outputs, and burned the whole thing into a look-up table in a chip, and (this is the cool part) connected the chip to a real brain, bypassing a broken hippocampus chunk.
We just mimicked a relatively simple part of the brain with an exhaustive, brute-force approach that may not scale well to human hippocampi.
everything in moderation
Marvin Minsky wrote a novel (out of print according to Amazon) that contains this exact idea. The book is called: The Turing Option: A Novel
I do research on hippocampal functioning --- more specifically, I build neural network models of how the hippocampus supports memory for specific events. I was surprised by the statement in the new scientist article that "we know nothing about how the hippocampus encodes memories". There is actually quite a lot of consensus among researchers as to how the different subregions of the hippocampus support its overall function of storing and retrieving memories. If you want more information, a good place to start might be this paper that I wrote with my colleague Randy O'Reilly. Go to:
e mo ry/
http://www.princeton.edu/~psych/PsychSite/compm
then click on the first article under "Review Papers". You can follow the references to find other, relevant papers. Also, I should say that I am extremely skeptical that the prosthesis described in the New Scientist article will be able to substitue for an actual hippocampus. One of the key properties of the hippocampus (and the brain more generally) is that it *changes* as a function of experience --- every time you store a new memory in the hippocampus, it changes the strengths of synapses, which in turn changes the input-output function. So I can't see how it would be possible to replace the hippocampus using a simple, static lookup table. I may be missing something, but I think we are still a very long way from building an artificial hippocampus, and I think that we won't be successful in this endeavor unless we build in some knowledge about how the structure actually works...
correction - they actually used stem cells from his blood. So who knows whether this technique might apply to other structures as well?
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Step 1: Have the Google brain implant.
:)
Step 2: Go onto lots of quiz shows and win prizes.
Step 3: Profit.
Look... no ??? for step 2.