Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Inside the New Science of Neuroengineering

Posted by timothy on from the your-jar-is-due-to-be-changed dept.

palegray.net writes "Wired brings us a look into the world of neuroengineering, the science of hacking the brain to improve its function. Dr. Ed Boyden is the director of MIT's Neuroengineering and Neuromedia Lab, focusing on innovative methods of physically altering neuroanatomy for various purposes. As useful as discoveries in the field may be, the work certainly raises moral and ethical questions. From the article: '"If we surgically or electrically modify someone's personality... that raises many questions about personal identity, (of) who we are at our core," says Dr. Debra Matthews of The Berman Institute of Bioethics. "We place ourselves in the mind and therefore the brain. (Mood-altering surgery) feels like fundamentally modifying who a person is."'"

1 of 83 comments (clear)

  1. Interesting, but call back in 20 years by Felgerkarb · · Score: 4, Interesting
    As interesting as this article was -- especially as he got into this from studying the neuroscience of bird song, something I was involved with years ago -- I think it's a stretch to call this 'engineering'.

    It is an interesting take on an old technique. Instead of using direct electrical stimulation to stimulate the brain, he uses virally-transcoded neurons to respond to different wavelengths of light....then pipes a fiber optic cable into a mouse brain. To do what? To make it run in circles.

    It's a proof of technology, but nothing more. Engineering the brain would imply we understand how it works, which, more or less, we still don't. Not really at a cellular level, not really at a systems level, not even really at a gross level either. We know an order of magnitude more than we did even a decade ago, but we are no closer to altering behavior than we were when the lobotomy was invented...the first 'neuroengineering'.

    I think it is much more likely that we will first have engineered modules, either synthetic neuronal or otherwise, that will process independently and then 'plug into' our pre-existing sensory input pathways, rather than direct brain modification.