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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.
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."
"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?
*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?
This post is serious. Don't laugh.
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?
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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);
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...
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