Brain Cells Fused with Computer Chips

valamaldoran writes "Looks like organic computers aren't too far off. Live Science has an interesting article about fusing brain neurons with silicon chips. From the article: 'The achievement could one day enable the creation of sophisticated neural prostheses to treat neurological disorders or the development of organic computers that crunch numbers using living neurons.'"

Comments

hippocampus chips

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Neurochips will replace up to 10,000 neurons in brains damaged by Alzheimer's and stroke: One day, a computer chip may do some of the work of a damaged hippocampus. check out Dr. Theodore W. Berger, University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

the brain has billions of neurons, so this will still be small scale...

Re:Downloading the drivers

[fatduck]

The brain exhibits a property called neuroplasticity meaning that it will reorganize its parts for greater efficiency. When brain cells are damaged, other brain cells rearrange themselves to absorb the function that the damaged brain cells can no longer perform. Researchers doing experiments on brain-controlled prosthetics noticed that they did not have to place electrodes precisely on the brain because the brain would recognize the function of the electrodes and organize its neurons to facilitate their effectiveness (in effect, recognizing them as neurons).

Re:Downloading the drivers

[FirienFirien]

Over time, the human body learns to interact. A child picks up walking by practise, a musician gets better as they practise and worse if they don't, ditto with sports players and gamers and everything at all.

This isn't restricted to behaviour. With practise over the past years, I've gained control of muscles in my face that other people don't even know exist; I find it fun to twitch them and distract people. People who split their tongues as body modification can, with practise, control both tips independently, even though the tongue is hardly designed for it; the muscle is there, and with the cut the movements change.

I very much doubt we need gene modification to control this. While it will of course be hard at first to activate the right neurons, in the same way that most people don't know how to twitch the right muscles to wiggle their ears, tic their cheeks (even though I can tic my left cheek easily, I don't yet have the fine control of my right, though from knowing that I was formerly unable to tic either and can now tic the left one under full control, I have no doubt that the right one will come with practise), or pull the really difficult one that moves the scalp back and forth, they all have the muscles there, they all have the neurons there to do it. Hook the chip up to an interface, then do random things like think about chocolate, wiggle your toes, try to talk in French; when you find something that triggers the chip, you'll be able to practise that trigger and eventually disassociate it from the chocolate/toes/translation to become a simple signal-to-chip.

Watch a pro musician or even a pro gamer play, or a fast typer type. There isn't a conscious decision to play that note or press that key; it's too fast for that. It's something that's practised enough, and it's instinctive and automatic.

Just needs practise.

Re:Knowing the letters ain't reading the book

[MichaelSmith]

Just because we can pump electricity into nerve cells doesn't mean we understand how they "think".

We can simulate the weather knowing only simple gas laws.

A little FUD

[FirienFirien]

While it's a long way off, there's possible problems with it just as there's problems with almost all tech these days. An example, Illyan from the Vorkosigan series:

In the book Memory (by Lois McMaster Bujold) we see a man with an "eidetic memory chip" in his head. Technology is far along advanced that this effectively is a huge hard drive, giving this man perfect memory of everything for the 20 years or so that he's had it in. He's then hit by something which screws up the chip in his head; and since his brain has come to rely on it as memory storage, he starts getting scrambled memories, and acts as if they were real, losing touch with reality.

I know it's a long way off and a bit extreme... but we can only hope that the early adopters will have some protection against failure and/or bugs and/or malice.

Would you do it?

[Qbertino]

Fast-Forward into Cyberpunk. Not the friendly Gibson kind, but one with intrusive neural interfaces. People showing clear signs of severe mental deseases but reporting from of the Network that they feel superb and can sense when the stockmarket is about to shift. They are so powerfull they're not even interested in money anymore and experience enjoyments mere mortals can't even dream of. They can slow down time and play WoW 12 live. Their bodies are bloated, drooling, twitching pieces of flesh, with eyeballs turned inward, watched by carebots. It's the better option than just occasionly jacking in and experiencing severe borderline like disorders by trying to cope with the real world when not logged in. Normal programmers are extinct, because these humans interfaced with machines do the jobs to get free acccess everywhere and they do them 10.000 times better than anybody else.
The question:
Would you get yourself a neural jack and hook up?
I wouldn't.

Re:Would you do it?

[MichaelSmith]

Would you get yourself a neural jack and hook up?

I would because it is the only realistic way that my mind can survive longer than my body. I don't think it has to be as bad as the picture you paint. Many people use limited neural implants now: cochlear implants. Even today we have people who spend too much time with technology at the expense of their health. Regardless of the type of interface in use I believe we will remain essentially the same.

Re:Not correct

[hairykrishna]

Actually, I'm not sure you're exactly correct. Ever caught a ball somebody threw to you? That's some hardcore calculus right there. Just because you're not aware that your brain is crunching numbers doesn't mean that it isn't. In fact, at a basic level, I guess that imagination is just some rapid number crunching.

For a more on the subject

[SwansonMarpalum]

For a more thorough treatment on the subject, check out ISBN 0-553-38343-4

Re:Better than quantum?

[msobkow]

I think there are a few different approaches that could achieve machine intelligence, but we really haven't answered some key questions before we take such chances:

1. Is it moral to create a race of slaves when so many people are out of work?
2. At what point does intelligence become sentience?
3. How can a moral framework be defined and implemented so that such a being would have the compassion to consider all viewpoints and lifeforms as equally important to the whole?

Anime studies some of those ideas, but I think it'll be quite a long time before we've answered the questions and can decide whether to risk the Terminator. After all, if such an intelligence ever got the slightest chance to connect to the internet, we could all be in a world of pain.

Re:Knowing the letters ain't reading the book

[swillden]

Just because we can pump electricity into nerve cells doesn't mean we understand how they "think".

I'm not sure that matters.

For neural interfaces to control prostheses, we don't necessarily have to understand how the brain functions, exactly, because one thing we do know about the brain is that it can learn. People with brain damage can often learn to compensate, performing the necessary processing with different parts of the brain. Given that, it will likely be enough to create the connections, then allow the brain to learn how to manipulate them. The cyberpunk ideal of a jack that can simply be added to a brain to allow a person to immediately and directly interface with machines will probably never be realized, but it seems reasonable that years of training and practice after the implantation of such a jack might come close. Even more if the brain in question is young and still developing (though there are obviously huge ethical issues with that sort of experimentation).