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Scientists Develop Brain-Microchip Bridge
dreampod writes "Canadian scientists have developed a microchip capable of monitoring the electrical and chemical communication channels between individual neurons. This is the first time scientists have been able to monitor the interaction between brain cells on such a precise and subtle level. In addition to providing the ability to see more easily the impact of drugs on various mental disorders during testing, this provides one of the first fundamental steps towards real mind-machine interface."
I'll be looking forward to discuss these developments at the Singularity Conference this weekend!
TFA is vague but it looks like the cells in question are being kept alive outside the organism. I suppose this could be adapted into an implantable device, but cochlear implants almost do that anyway.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Before jumping on this, read the small print.
They take out a piece of brain tissue, and implant it into the machinery, not the other way around. I'm not sure about you guys, but that kind of interface doesn't seem too useful to me, although it could be useful for diagnosis.
What I really want is a vampire plug that sits on my optic nerve(s) and captures everything I see and records it to a hard drive. I would like it to automatically tag timestamps with my thoughts at the time, but that can wait for version 2.0.
I thought this sort of thing was quite difficult, without vapourizing the tissue and dropping it into a mass spectrometer. I know CSI can drop a grain of goop into a breadmaker and have it pinpoint every compound, dna profile and isotope distribution in a few seconds, but I kinda guessed that was a TV-ish thing.
The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place. - GB Shaw
I wonder if 100% of the brain is monitored and analyzed if somewhere in there we will finally find a soul.
obligatory xkcd
Technology is progress too fast. Really incredible.dofus kamas
So, resistance is futile, conductance useful.
I'm looking forward to version 2.0, otherwise know as Harvey (for all you Farscape fans).
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Making a chip that measures chemical or electrical changes in the brain is easy. Anyone with a little knowledge about electronics and chemistry can build a large scale prototype, and with enough money you can make it small enough to be implantable. The trick is getting it to use very little power (less than 1uA average) and getting FDA approval.
Electrical changes in the brain are typically 100nV-1mV and 10kHz (depending on what you're looking for). You can measure what's going on by hooking up a pair of wires to brain tissue, amplify the signal using an instrumentation amplifier with a high pass filter, and then sample the resulting voltage with an ADC.
For chemical changes you usually apply a voltage waveform and measure the current (this depends on the chemical). The current response can indicate the presence of a certain chemical and changes to the current waveform can indicate concentration (this is called Voltammetry). This can be done with a few opamp's, a sense resistor and an ADC. The article doesn't mention a lot of specifics, so I guess they could also be referring to rheoencephalography (sweep the frequency of a sine/pulse waveform and measure phase shift and amplitude reduction as it's across brain tissue).
...no need for implants, just use SLF/ELF waves
sounds cool where are the Bionic arms and legs?
With individual brain cells you won't get anything close to that. Even trying at will of doing something, probably won't be very useful, will be more like getting slow binary signals or morse code. And raising the number of cells should be not help, your concience just works at another level, would be like hiting with a building a touchscreen of the size of the iphone.
A bridge allows passage both ways, this allows the machine to read the cells, the other problem seems to be it applies to cells outside the brain, although I suppose an implant is the next step.
Ah we'll see something like Interface (ISBN: 0553372300) is just a few short year. Kinda like fusion as a practical source of electricity...
I believe this will be an easier way to immortality than any genetic treatment.
If you think about, from the moment on that you can store you memories and later thoughts in a chip, just like you do in your brain, how can you distinguish between what goes on in your biological brain and digital one? Where is the barrier?
I know we are still far from that time. Perhaps decades at the best, but just think about the philosophic implications of that and how the concept of life, intelligent life and humanity will need to be re-defined.
It's a "brave new world".
I, for one, welcome our microchipped brainiac overlords.
Opponents of "socialized medicine" argue that capitalism is necessary for cutting-edge medical research, here is an example of the opposite.
Wow! But being of modest means, I'm afraid I'll have to settle for ad-supported circuitry.
I forget if it was a Shadowrun book, or a William Gibson novel, but one of the protagonists had been captured, and the bad guys had cheerfully plugged THEIR equipment into the hero's skull jack. Think "A Clockwork Orange", only without the need for eyedrops.
You really don't want an implant that can allow someone to root your brain.
[End Of Line]
Another Bridge to Nowhere...
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
...to study these devices under varying physical conditions...say, a determinate study to isolate the fractional conductivity effects of Grey Goose vs. Jägermeister...
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
*Golf clap*
Bravo sir.
you will be assimilated, resistance is futile
Jeez, I almost read it as 'Scientists developed brains'. I could have presented some of those as birthday gifts to my boses!
Get 535 of these ready for implant and equipped with a basic math & econ101 enhancement module and send them on your fastest aircraft along with a team of implant technicians to Washington DC.
Stat!!
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
I for one welcome our new implanted-micro-chip-augmented human overlords.
Resistance is Futile. Prepare to be assimilated.
Borg motto.
padme
Queen Amidala's civilian name.
I got the "ohm" part (resistance), but is there a reason you mixed Star Trek and Star Wars allusions?
Yep, those guys turn $5 pulse meter into $5k FDA-approved pulse measurement stall.
That's $5 for the meter and $4,995 for bodily-fluid-proofing and the sort of testing needed for a warranty. We went over this the last time someone recommended using mass-market consumer electronics as a medical device.
Imagine being locked in a tank, where you are fed intravenously. You cannot see anything but blackness. You cannot hear anything except the steady rhythm of a machine.
One plot point in Mr. Holland's Opus is that the human womb transmits sound. It's low-pass filtered, but it's enough to make human babies react differently to the rhythms and tone contours of the mother's language than to those of a foreign language.
Any attempts to escape are countered by the fact that the tank you are in is padded where you cannot breach it
This study claims that the child's lungs send the birth signal when the child is ready to escape.
What I really want is a vampire plug that sits on my optic nerve(s) and captures everything I see and records it to a hard drive.
Don't watch any vampire movies in this state, or one or more MPAA members will try to slay you.
I have always been most curious on what impact direct machine brain interfaces would have on Human communication. If we can communicate thought, feeling, and memory at the speed of light where is the barrier between you and I? Where do I stop and you begin? Would the direct connection of billions of humans to one another form a self aware super intelligence?
There are times where I feel this may be our only chance at survival as a race. If we don't unify to the point where each one of us sees that harming another human is the same as harming ourselves then as technology advances a single misguided human may be able to do enough harm to destroy the entire species.
This then seems to have weird parallels to religious teachings, the golden rule comes to mind. Selflessness versus Selfishness; a common theme across a lot of religions.
But if we could form the equivalent of a God-like intelligence. Does that make the idea of God at least more plausible? If God is plausible and religions have been "training" us morally for a day when clustering was technologically possible, that would be rather... interesting.
Admittedly this is a bit more optimistic and pro-religious than is customary for slashdot but these are MY random bits of waxing imaginative dammit....
I'm a tinfoil hat wearing freak on my worst days, but any fear of this project is trumped by my William Gibson fanboy-isms and my desire to keep my career moving long after Carpal Tunnel Syndrome cripples my hands. In all seriousness - does this announcement constitute a good reason to start working on the scaffolds for a new DNI-based X desktop?
Every trollism an AC posts is prefixed, in my mind, with "A. Coward whined, in a weak and cowardly voice:"
I sure wish that we could get more insight as to what it monitors and how we can use that to our advantage...brain chemistry being a big part in so many brain illnesses, i think sometimes it may well be the door to a healthier tomorrow...as well, making a chip interface to hook up to your computer is finally here...count me in...
"Hey there Dave, nice weather we're having. *twitch* WE SHOULD GO BUY SOME PEPSI! *twitch* Whoa, what just happened?"
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
This could eventually lead to direct neural interaction with the Internet (or its future outgrowth, the Metaverse)... Beware of the Snow Crash
I DID NOT MURDER HIM! *bangs fists on table*
-Sonny (I Robot)