Ultrathin Silk-Based Brain Implants

hatboyzero writes "University of Pennsylvania engineers have designed silk-based electronics that can stick to the surface of the brain, allowing for better brain-computer interfaces. The researchers say the silk-based devices are thin and flexible enough to reach previously inaccessible areas of the brain."

Comments

Oblig XKCD

[rachit]

http://xkcd.com/644/

Re:Oblig XKCD

[mcgrew]

The brain doesn't use a bus, its connections are parallell yet serial. Nothing man has devised is anywhere near as complex. We know vastly more about the brain than we did fifty years ago, and we still know next to nothing about it.

If this were as advanced as some of you guys are making it out to be, blindness, deafness, and paralysis would be a thing of the past. We're still a long way from Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.

Re:Oblig XKCD

[mcgrew]

In 1964 Yuri Gagarin had gone to space (and straight back down) only three years earlier; space flight was in its infancy (I posit that it still is). Space stations (the Russian MIR was the first) were far into the future, as were communications satellites (IINM the first was launched that year). There was no GPS, of course.

There were no self-opening doors; in Disney's biography, it notes that some time after Star Trek debued, Disney went to Paramount to try to get the tech for the self-opening doors, only to find that it was just stage hands pulling the doors open; grocery store doors had handles and didn't open by themselves until the late sixties or early seventies.

There was a microwave oven in 1947, but it was almost two meters tall; microwave ovens in the home didn't happen until the seventies. TV sets still used tubes, as did most electronics; the IC came much later (a small IC cost $1000 per circuit in 1960 dollars). Video recorders existed, but only for commercial use, not in the home, and nobody dreamed that some day you would be able to "time shift".

The two way radio I had in the USAF in the early seventies was the size of three bricks and weighed about as much, and could hardly be characterized as a "cell phone", You couldn't call anyone not on your frequency, let alone call anyone in the world who had a telephone.

Minicomputers were multi-user computers; the PDP-7 pictured in the wiki article was the size of a couple of refrigerators. "SRI researcher Douglas Englebart in 1968 gave a preview of what would become the staples of daily working life in the 21st century - e-mail, hypertext, word processing, video conferencing, and the mouse. The demonstration required technical support staff and a mainframe time-sharing computer that were far too costly for individual business use at the time."

That list just scratched the surface of what we take for granted that didn't exist, or existed only in the lab or commercial use at the time. There weren't even digital watches or digital clocks. Autos didn't have fuel injectors, ABS, air bags, or even seat belts. It was an analog world; the only interaction most people had with computers were utility bills that came on Hollerith cards that said "do not fold, bend, staple, or mutilate". That meant no digital music, no digital video, no internet, no word processors; hell, carbon paper was more prevalent than photocopiers.

When I broke both my arms at age seven, they knocked me out with ether -- automotive starting fluid, and used plaster casts. When I had a hemmoroid operation in 2002 there were all sorts of sophisticated monitoring devices. The doctor said "ok, you're going to sleep now" and the next thing I knew I was awake in the recovery room and couldn't even tell I'd been drugged (although they warned me that if I drove in the next 24 hours I'd get a DUI). That's in stark contrast to ether, which was horribly nightmarish going under and sickening after waking back up. I wrote about a friend's experience with modern medical tech in a journal last year.

I have an implant in my left eye that was FDA approved in 2003; after being extremely nearsighted all my life, and farsighted as well in middle age, I now have better than 20/20 vision. That's better tech than Dr. McCoy, who had no cure for Kirk's age-related farsightedness except antique reading glasses. The device cures nearsightedness, farsightedness, astigmatism, and cataracts; it's a lens that replaces your eye's focusing lens, and sits on struts so you can focus (most people can't after middle age, the lens gets hard).

There was nothing wireless except transistor radios. The list goes on and on; it was primitive as all get out, but didn't seem so to us at the time.

Re:What can we access from the brain surface?

[Anonymous Coward]

Quite a bit is localized to the cortex, such as motor control. It's also used for higher thought, but that's too random to really do much with. Humans have the most advanced cortex of any animal, although that also means it's thicker (1.5 - 4.5 mm), which may present the problem you propose.

Re:What can we access from the brain surface?

[pieisgood]

The brains cortex is where all the processing is done. When we go deeper into the brain what you get are long axons that interconnect regions of the brain. In the middle of the brain is the corpus collosum which acts an information transfer center from the left to the right brain and vice versa. Now the cortex its self is a 3 dimensional matrix, as you said. I doubt we will be able to (in any near future scenario) build small enough electrodes and exact placement techniques as to make brain implants that function perfectly along side our own brain activity. This silk interface is good for rough signaling and signal reception... which is a great first step. /tangent

Re:Reminds me of Beneath a Steel Sky

[Anonymous Coward]

Schreibman Port
Just saying.