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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?"
Why not both?
I remember those kinds of debates, and it always seemed to me that people got very hung up on the idea that only human experiences count for anything. There was this assumption that AI's goal is to become human is the sense that it actually experiences mental states identical to those of humans. But - what's wrong with having sophisticated mental states that aren't human mental states?
It will be really interesting once this sort of prostetic brain surgery happens - to be able to interview the patients and see if they really feel as if their mental states are different as a result of the new "tissue".
That's assuming that the power of attorney is given to a family lawyer. Often guardianship/power of attorney is obtained by family members who care for a person who is no longer able to take care of financial/medical decisions.
As a person in that situation (my wife had a stroke 3 years ago that left her with communication/cognition difficulties) I'd be willing to see what something like this would do, and given the choice of "would you like to be like you were before" I'm fairly certain she would agree. I'm not sure what would qualify as "living well otherwise" with some forms of brain damage.
Unfortunatly, things like this are still a long way off, but here's hoping.
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You raise a very interesting point. Recording. With the chip designed to be external, there is definitely the ability to have your memories recorded onto chips. Or even more interesting, have people upload their memories to a computer, to where you can download them and store them in your head.
This could be a boon for training. Imagine being able to pull down a file from the net, jacking into a usb port, and after a while, being able to speak chinese. Or have an intimate knowlege of physics. Wow.
On the other hand, it would make the term "knowledge transfer" more insidious. Law enforcement would love this. Suspicious spouses too. Having an interface like this would end the last private place in your existence: your own head.
But this is only just come out of it's conceptual stage. It'll be interesting to see where the technology takes it.
Who knows what changes in thought patterns might occur with completely fresh neurons in a brain?
No need to wonder; look at how "fresh neurons" behave in real life. In other words, look at newborn babies. The answer is "not much".
Neural weights only really have meaning in highly specific contexts. Even if you could "copy & paste" neurons in your brain, the new location would render the neurons effectively noise, having no coherent effect, and thus having effectively no effect at all.
Again, you can partially see this in the real world. We've watch people's brains adapt to losing vision and going to sound for their primary input, converting vision brain area to sound brain area in the process. It's not magical; the old vision stuff is effectively useless and completely re-purposed. Cognitive-level concepts are far, far, far higher then neural weights. So the old neurons are effectively full of garbage.
That's the reason this is so impressive to me. We've more-or-less decoded how the ear transmits sound to the brain, and have devices that can do this now, albiet not quite as well as real ears yet. We've started with ocular implants, though I don't know if that uses direct ocular nerve stimulation. This is because there are reasonably rational patterns that the sense data is transmitted in.
But once you're inside the brain, the nerve impulses have no objective meaning. "Thought transmission", if it is ever acheived by technology, won't be as simple as replaying neural impulses from one brain into another; there's no one-to-one correspondence between neurons, and certainly no corresponence to neural weights. (Odds are, we'd have to learn to use it, and it would 'just another' line of communication, not 'mind reading' as it was portrayed in past literature. Of course, if too much information is transmitted skilled "telepaths" might still get more information then the sender intended, just as reading body language can tell you more then the speaker intended.)
To acheive any success with an internal brain structure, understood or otherwise, is (IMHO, this is subjective of course) orders of magnitude more interesting then the ocular implants, which were pretty impressive themselves.
Again, I emphasize: This isn't magic. This is droll reality. Out of context, a neuron is nearly useless.
Visual pathway prosthetics work either by stimulating the retinal ganglion cells in the eye, or by stimulating in primary visual cortex.
Neither way has yet proved useful enough to deploy on a large scale. It is a little tougher than a cochlear implant, because you have to seal the device inside the eye, and provide a power source that can stimulate a bunch of microelectrodes.
Just because we don't understand something now doesn't mean it cannot be replicated in the future. There was a time, about 30 years ago, when simulating the function of the human ear was unheard of. Now, patients get cochlear implants and can understand speech. Artificial hearts are in use. The brain is a matter of time, the retina will come relatively quickly, next will be implants that couple motor cortex to external devices, there are already stimulating electrodes that modulate the motor system...
where we will be in 30 more years is pretty cool.