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Pentagon Research Could Make 'Brain Modem' A Reality (thedailybeast.com)
schwit1 writes: The Pentagon is attempting what was, until recently, an impossible technological feat -- developing a high-bandwidth neural interface that would allow people to beam data from their minds to external devices and back. That's right -- a brain modem. One that could allow a soldier to, for example, control a drone with his mind. On Feb. 8, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) -- the US military's fringe-science wing -- announced the first successful tests, on animal subjects, of a tiny sensor that travels through blood vessels, lodges in the brain and records neural activity. The so-called "stentrode," a combination stent and electrode, is the size of a paperclip and flexible. The tiny, injectable machine -- the invention of neurologist Tom Oxley and his team at the University of Melbourne in Australia -- could help researchers solve one of the most vexing problems with the brain modem: how to insert a transmitter into the brain without also drilling a hole in the user's head, a risky procedure under any circumstances.
The "stentrode" is essentially a conductive stent which is installed with a catheter.
Once they add ultrasonic mesh networking to this device: they'll be able to wire up the entire brain with dozens of localized channels on a long term basis. This same technology is already being used to enable sensor arrays to be installed in muscle tissue for use in controlling prosthetic limbs:
http://neural.iit.edu/research/imes/
http://www.smpp.northwestern.edu/downloads/Troyk%20P%20IMES%20An%20Implantable%20Myoelectric%20Sensor.pdf
The significance of this is obvious: given a 4G LTE modem and a human child, we can log every byte of neural activity as a child learns to talk, walk, read, and recognize objects all to cloud storage through Amazon AWS. By strapping this same child with a "3rd eye" camera, pupil tracking software, and a microphone: we can store every moment of the child's life from cradle to grave in a giant Hadoop database and create the perfect supervised learning database for deep learning/neuroscience research.
Naturally this project should be called: TARZAN
It takes the "open loop" currently available of hashtags and social media context and gives a direct measurement of image and audio data as the child learns. It would be an ethical question as to what extent their sense of touch, taste, and smell should be suppressed to improve the signal to noise ratio.
This has the potential to create the "leap forward" advance in neuromorphic engineering. Right as the chip fab technology is becoming available to model the correct number of synapses and neurons: we'll have a database capable of supervised training this artificial brain. With multiple children: and a controlled environment(virtual reality goggles and headphones) we'll be able to correlate between the different subjects common trends in synaptic formation and use this information to guide the artificial network's backpropogation. In 30 years: it would be affordable for every child to record their life experiences with similar or better hardware, and to train their own artificial brain in parallel to their own neural development. I'm talking immortality in a very "Cylon" sense of the word.
Eventually: the imaging technology/DSP required to record every firing of every synapse in 3D will be possible, and it will be equally possible to model these synapses digitally. These "soulless" mirror images of ourselves will wake up and think they are the real "you" who just woke up from a dream.