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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?"
It would start a market, particularly in college, when you need to know something. Just implant a piece of brain with some knowledge, kinda like the matrix.
You: I need a bubble sort.
Tank: Comin right up
* Eyes flutter *
You: Lets go!
What, me Tweet?
...sounds like the name of a geek college.
It just has to say "I don't understand and "Where's my tea?".
A dyslexic man walks into a bra.
Fun stuff...on the path to Kurzweil's future.
We can all upload our brains into Neural Net Hardware.
Scarrrry......
Where the Music Matters
Most people would waste a brain extension. Any expansion in intellectual power must be preceded by an expansion in social capacity for learning.
o/` Everybody wants prosthetic
foreheads on their real heads o/`
So lets say they get this working. Would it then be possible to record every moment of your life and store it away?
is how long before someone overclocks one of these things? How many tops (thought operations per second) could you get? How would you cool something like that?
That's not a soda... it's a caffeine delivery device!
(But you'll have to get in line behind me!)
Yes, with the ever increasing student body, ASU is slowly becoming a hypocampus... ...and I think several of the students need some brain work done as well...
*was that out loud?*
"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams."
I wonder how long it will be before we can have HUDs
That would be wonderful. Script kiddie h4x0r5 your in-brain HUD and makes it so all you can see is the goatse.cx guy. No thanks, I'll keep my HUDless brain.
Trolling is a art,
"Forgetting is the most beneficial process we possess," Williams says. It enables us to deal with painful situations without actually reliving them.
I am very interested in seeing how the brain would adapt to this. Would the brain always remember things or, in the case of trauma, learn to halt impulses before they reach the implanted area so that they are "forgotten"?
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
Abby, Abby Normal.
Click here or here.
*taps prostetic arm*"I lost my arm in Nam.."
*taps prostetic leg*"I lost my leg in Korea.."
*taps head* "I lost my brain voting for Bush.."
I have a feeling this will be modded down.. heh.
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...
Back in the day when I was studying to be a cognitive scientist (whatever that means), we did a lot of talking about what the nature of intelligence / mind actually is. 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.
So, we proposed an experiment. Let's say you took a guy who had completely lost function in a very small, localized area of the brain, and built a machine capable of reproducing its function entirely. You stuck it inside the guy's head, and he was magically fixed.
Now, make the area affected progressively larger - lets say, by replacing the whole hippocampus. Or the entire left hemisphere of the brain. Or, what the hell, the whole thing. At what point do you say that it's no longer a mind, and is "just" a machine?
So, that's the first thing I thought of when I saw this story. 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?
Why are these stories all based upon making the disabled normal? What about making the normal more powerful?
But in the end there is no debate. Those who stand in the way of progress will be killed by the products of progress (implanted guass rifles). Those who make the disabled normal will be killed by those who make the normal something more.
Now we'll have a bunch of people running around and saying things like "Stapling machine, Mrs Zambesi"
Yet Another Web Site
"If you lose your hippocampus you only lose the ability to store new memories,"
/. were just an oversight!
And I thought duplicate stories on
Soon we'll be more hippocampus than human.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
This post is serious. Don't laugh.
I wonder what portions of 'you' would be noticeably different to your family & friends?
I don't think the word should be "different", but "better". Things like Alzheimer's can be disastrous to your family. You disappear, and a completely different, and usually unwanted, person is the replacement. It's a horrible disease.
consider:
- the hippocampus is a black box (they can't even see the "object code," if you will
- complex systems are notoriously difficult to debug
I find the claim that the scientists have considered every possible behavior and simulated it in firmware to be suspect.
How can they be sure they have considered every possible input/output? How can they be sure that what they observed was "correct" behavior?
Any biologists or neuroscientists care to elucidate? Also, how similar is the human hippocampus to the rat's? Couldn't the behavior differences require complete regression testing? It seems like this increase in precision in medicine demands a commensurate increase in the precision of testing.
In Kurzweil's future, I believe that he proposed uploading of the brain, but knew of no meaningful way to get 'you' into a computer.
What he meant by this, of course, was that if you were to copy an image of your brain into a computer, then the real 'you' would still be outside the machine, watching the image of you play with all the bells and whistles and fun things that their new digital life afforded them.
So, I would suggest the following:
1) nano-machines are placed into your brain, where they spread out and cradle every neuron.
2) as neurons die (old age, etc) the nano-machine become active, and emulate the neurons that they're cradling. These would be the Type I nano-machines.
3) eventually, you have a completely robotic brain, devoid of biological tissue, but the structure of the brain still encodes it's function, so... how do we 'upload' without having the problem of two copies of you?
4) the nano-machines are slowly replaced by a different kind of nano-machine... one that can only act as a transmitter/receiver of information, and cannot do any computation itself. These type II machines offload the processing that they would have to do to a computer outside your body, and as more and more type II's are introduced, more and more of the computing takes place outside of 'you'... now it's easy to see how 'you' could get into the machine...
And that's that. Of course, some would suggest the following:
1) make copy of person's brain in a computer
2) kill the person
But would that really transfer 'you' - your consciousness, and the perception of self? Or would it just be an emulation that thinks it's you?
I don't know. Neither does Kurzweil, as far as I can remember.
(Apologies to Mr. Kurzweil if I've misquoted or otherwise screwed up your ideas - it's been a while since I've read your work)
The hippocampus integrates short-term memory into long-term. People who have had their hippocampus damaged (or removed) are unable to form any new long-term memories. They live incredibly interesting lives, because everyone they meet is a new person - every time they meet them. Why would you want to actually have yours replaced?
I told my wife that if I had my hippocampus removed, I'd get to sleep with a new woman every night, and not even be cheating on her! She didn't appreciate the comment so much, though....
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
The difference between the brain and the heart is that we understand
how the heart works in detail. Treating the hippocampus like a "black
box" will probably not work. This just begs the question of how the
brain works, which we still don't know. I would never let someone
open up my skull and implant something if they couldn't explain how
and why it works. Sorry but this is not news, just some promising
research combined with wishful thinking.
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.
Don't get your hopes too high for this invention. The process overall is very, very cool, but the fact that they don't understand how the hippocampus works, they just worked out a neural net model of imputs and outputs in rats, leads one to believe there will be a lot of bumps down this road. In that way the model they worked out isn't nearly as interesting as how they interface the chip with living tissue, and how they mapped the pathways of the hippocampus in the first place (or, for that matter, if there is variability within hippocampuses or if it is predetermined by genes).
Of course, I want one, and I want to mod it. Record an encoding of a lecture, and play it back on the train ride home. Or do a 2 second loop of someone while they say their name, in order to remember those bloody things (why can't people just e-mail their names to my phone?). Or, as in the case of Daredevil, put an encoding on hold until the end of a film in order to know if it is worth wasting space on.
I can't wait until I get Alzheimers just to try this out! Fortuitously, that will be about the same time this chip comes out of beta.
The ______ Agenda
But would that really transfer 'you' - your consciousness, and the perception of self? Or would it just be an emulation that thinks it's you?
I think it would be you. Think of it this way: if the emulation is good enough so that no observer can distinguish between the original and the emulation, then that person has been transferred.
There's no reason to believe that the person being emulated is any more qualified an observer than anyone else. If it's good enough to fool outside observers, it's good enough to fool the person being emulated.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
While the hippocampus is critical in forming memories, it doesn't pass every single experience you have into memory. This device is the same... it merely mimics the hippocampus' behavior. The researchers even admitted that they didn't know how the hippocampus works. Rather they just reproduced the behavior that a working hippocampus would produce.
;-)
In other words, this device is to the hippocampus (a part of your brain involved in encoding data for storage) what Samba is to Windows....
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Another interesting thing to note is that drugs like alcohol and marijuana affect short-term memory by interferring with the hippocampus. One of the reasons that happens is because the hippocampus has a high number of cannabinoid receptors. But if this organic part of the brain were to be replaced with electronics, would the drug's effect on memory be diminished or disappear? Think about that the next time you decide to wear beer (or bud) goggles.
Basically, it seems they sent an input to it, got the output, and repeated that enough times to make a chip that produces the right response for each input. I see some problems with this:
First, isn't the brain a dynamic thing? This doesn't sound like something that can adapt.
Second, does this method work at all? If I say, sent bytes to a router, analyzed the output, and made a chip that produced that output with the input I sent, would it work? It just sounds way too simplistic.
Maybe somebody has better info on this?
Yet again, the real world imitates one of his stories. He has a couple of stories based in a world where everyone's brain is swapped out for a crystal computer. Mindfuck stuff about the true seat of consciousness, mortality and the meaning of "human". Just remembered "Reasons to be cheerful", specifically about brain prosthesics and personality.
Home page with free stories
This is my third Greg Egan post in the last few months and they've all been ontopic. He thinks big thoughts about our near future and is a much better writer than Cory Doctorow, imho.
In both methods you mention, it's the pattern of thought and memory that's perceived as important, since Kurzweil discards brain tissue so easily in favor of nano-machines and machine processing. Personally, I agree with this assessment on both logical and religous grounds, as well as ethical grounds.
If that's true, that means that both the 'you' inside your brain and the 'you' inside the computer in the 'copy and kill' method would both really be you. Both have memories, emotions, and preferences of the original. It would be unethical and immoral at that point to destroy either one.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
These things are great. I just had one installed yesterday.
These things are great. I just had one installed yesterday.
These things are great. I just had one installed yesterday.
These things are great. I just had one installed yesterday.
These things are great. I just had one installed yesterday.
What about all those wonderful chemicals that also affect our mind and how we think/feel? I think that having a purely electronic hippocampus could have some devious side affects.
That's metaphysics; you are presupposing the existence of consciousness independent of a physical medium.
At present, there is no evidence to support (or refute) your hypothesis.
It's just as possible that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of chemical activity in a special configuration of neurons known as a "brain" - in much the same way that "Pac-Man" is an epiphenomenon of certain electrical impulses in special configuration of silicon known as a "Z80 CPU and EPROMs", or "P4 2.4GHz, hard drive, and MAME".
If the materialist viewpoint is the case, and the copy is destructive, then yes, one of me experiences death. And one of me experiences a lifetime before transfer to machine, followed by an odd transitional moment (which may not be "experienced" per se -- can a machine actually be said to be "running" code in the nanoseconds between clock cycles?), followed by life as a machine.
More interestingly, if the copying process is nondestructive, one of me experiences being the aforementioned weird transition from "running on meat" to "running on silicon", and the original experiences nothing worse than having some kind of funky scanner waved over me.
I'd like to run on silicon. fork() me a few times, plug my copies into space probes, and lob them off on random paths to star systems, and HLT me until there are enough photons bouncing off my solar panels to run my clock. It may take 500,000 years to go from star system to star system, but who cares? I cease to exist for half a million years at a time, but those are the boring parts of the trip anyways. Finally, I could see the galaxy on five Altarian dollars a day!
I think the Hippocampus is used to decide what to remember and what not. This goes for both short term and long term memory. Now, if you take LSD for example, this kind of knocks out the Hippocampus or at least prevents it from functioning correctly. That's why you get the weird illusions and color sensations. The hippocampus can't sort out important from unimportant anymore. So I guess people with implants would be immune to LSD?
Um... I didn't do it!
".. Do you know that the first memory implant was designed to give people perfect life? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. ..." :)
Some believed that we lacked the programming language to describe
Hm... Long term memory failure
Hyperom.com
That's not true. It was thought to be the case until recently. Here's one of the first links I found: check it out.
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
To:someguy@somewhere.com
Subject: Brain Enlargement!?!
Yes with our patented technique you can increase your I.Q. by at least 40 points!?! I myself didn't believe it when I first heard of this technique! But it works!!! (ad nauseum)...
Maybe they can somehow bootleg this into those Nigerian money scams.
What is music when you despise all sound?
No one understands how the hippocampus encodes information. So the team simply copied its behaviour. Slices of rat hippocampus were stimulated with electrical signals, millions of times over, until they could be sure which electrical input produces a corresponding output. Putting the information from various slices together gave the team a mathematical model of the entire hippocampus.
I suppose it's nice they were careful to avoid infringing on the brain's IP. (Or should that be The Brain's IP; I imagine he has a number of patents under his evil little belt.)
And the brethren went away edified.
...a math co-processor installed.
2+2? 5, of course. Dammit, I got an Intel.
if(!toilet_paper) roll.replace(new roll);
I wonder what you would get if you modelled the hippocampus of someone with "photographic" memory in silicon and transplanted it into someone else? The first "killer app" for wetware?
--Horse_pheathers
5 rem first we clear the screen
;-))
10 PRINTCHR$(147)
11 rem store old values
12 A=PEEK 53281:B=PEEK 53280:C=PEEK 646
15 rem set screen to black
20 POKE 53281,0:POKE 53280,0:POKE 646,0
25 rem check for keypress
30 GET A$:IF A$="" GOTO 30
35 rem restore old values
40 POKE 53281,A:POKE 53280,B: POKE 646,C
45 rem retun key pressed just for the heck of it.
50 PRINT"You pressed";A$;" to get your screen back!"
I'm not sure about the syntax of the PEEK command nor about the PRINT statement on line 50. As you can probably see, this 'screensaver' has been through some editing during previous discussions about it. Funny how so many people respond to my sig! Originally it just started out as 53281,0 and 53280,0 to create some quick black. Sadly the BASIC program is too long for my sig. Oh, and I as yet refuse to create a full-blown subroutine using GOSUB/RETURN just for to check for a pressed key but you're welcome to submit a patch and add features.. the thing is GPL'ed but adding the GPL in REM statements seemed a bit over the top
Learn from the mistakes of others. There isn't enough time to make them all yourself.
So by your reasoning an advanced AI could never have a spirit, sould, whatever it's called with out killing/stealing someone else's?
I think his point is that the AI would have *a* spirit/soul/whatever; it just wouldn't be *your* spirit/soul/whatever. It's effectively a brand new and entirely seperate entity from you.
You make a perfect virtual copy of yourself. The copy is happy and immortal and everything, but *you* are still stuck in your body. *You* haven't gone anywhere. You've just been photocopied. Something nearly indentical to you would be immmortal, but *you* wouldn't and you'd eventually die. Which defeats the purpose of the whole exercise.
The best way to keep *you* going would be the gradual replacement that others suggested.
So how long before Hollywood forces them to add digital rights management so you can't steal the movie you just watched? I can see it now, you are only allowed to remember the movie for 3 days and then you have to go to the theatre again.
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...