Even if you grant some advanced room tempeture super coductivity technology, the hemodynamic response (the increase in blood flow) is to slow for use in neuroprosthetics.
The primary cortical areas are involved in low level signal processing - not consciousness. High level thoughts and awareness are processed in tertiary cortical areas like pre-frontal cortex. Damage to the primary cortical areas results in deafness or blindness, but you have awareness and can think. Damage to the tertiary cortical areas, e.g pre-frontal cortex, results in the loss of high fucntions like intention and awareness. Check out Oliver Sacks "The man who mistook his wife for a hat" for interesting discriptions of some of these lesions.
fMRI uses powerful magnetic fields (> 1 Tesla) to generate a signal. So your tin foil cap won't help. But on the bright side, with current technology it take a super-cooled machine weighing several tons to do the job.
The time course of fMRI is currently way too slow for use in neuroprosthetics. As for reading thoughts -- the studies looked at primary auditory and primary visual cortex, the two cortical areas least likely to be involved in conscious thought. The mind reading, neuroprosthetic spin is just that, spin. The really importart finding in these studies is the correlation of fMRI signals with electrical activity in the brain. fMRI measures increases in blood flow which has been suggested to be caused by increases in electrical activity in the brain - these studies provide evidence to suport this hypothesis. Scientist that study the electical signals in the brain directly (like me) have routinely critized fMRI studies because until now in was unclear how the results related to signal processing in the brain. There is still one major short coming of fMRI. Imagine that 50% of the neurons in an area of the brain increase their electrical activity while 50% equaly decrease their activity. This would result in a large change in signal processing but no change in blood flow and therefore would not show up in a fMRI scan. That said, fMRI is a powerful tool for understanding neural function, particularly in human who for some reason object to letting you stick electrodes into their brains. These new studies make in an even more useful tool.
I am also a neuroscientist. One who has been working in neuroprosthetics for several years and who is on patents for neural prosthetic technology that actually exist. The parent is absolutely correct. Any information broadcast into cortex would be very crude and likely also unpleasent. David Brindley (the god father of visual neural prosthetics) found that patients would not tolerate the crude visual input from the few electrodes that he used. However, it is nice to know thatI don't have to actually do build anything or do experiments anymore.
"People need to learn, senstive data is only protected in ONE place, inside our minds. Keep it there and no one can snoop it."
You haven't been reading the recent stories on neuroprosthetics. Soon you will have to encrypt your temporal lobe, and firewall your pre-frontal cortex!!
Of course you provided no evidence in support of your rant. You don't even consider that in most case of home invasion or assault the simple display of a firearm will send a criminal running. The answer to accidental shootings is not no guns, but rather proper gun training. Considering that there are something like 80 millions privately owed guns in America, most people are doing a pretty good job of keeping their firearms safe. Of course there is always going to be some idiot who points a weapon that they were SURE was unloaded at someone and ends up injuring or killing them, but that is no reason to take the principle tool of self-defence away from safe, law abiding citizens. Many studies have shown that private gun ownership is correlated with lower levels of crime. A survey of prisoners showed that they were more afraid of a private citizen with a gun than of the police. You only have those rights which you can actually defend.
Of course, then it would be preferrable to be on Mars as terrorists would be busy suicide bombing your local Startbucks and shooting down your vacation flight to Disneyland.
The brain makes use of both time and frequency domain multiplexing. Also, individual neurons encode information in highly dimensional spaces. So, the may well be far more the 100 degrees of freedom available. It depends on the decoding algorithm. The is particularly true when you record from high level cognitive areas of the brain.
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Even if you grant some advanced room tempeture super coductivity technology, the hemodynamic response (the increase in blood flow) is to slow for use in neuroprosthetics.
The primary cortical areas are involved in low level signal processing - not consciousness. High level thoughts and awareness are processed in tertiary cortical areas like pre-frontal cortex. Damage to the primary cortical areas results in deafness or blindness, but you have awareness and can think. Damage to the tertiary cortical areas, e.g pre-frontal cortex, results in the loss of high fucntions like intention and awareness. Check out Oliver Sacks "The man who mistook his wife for a hat" for interesting discriptions of some of these lesions.
fMRI uses powerful magnetic fields (> 1 Tesla) to generate a signal. So your tin foil cap won't help. But on the bright side, with current technology it take a super-cooled machine weighing several tons to do the job.
The time course of fMRI is currently way too slow for use in neuroprosthetics. As for reading thoughts -- the studies looked at primary auditory and primary visual cortex, the two cortical areas least likely to be involved in conscious thought. The mind reading, neuroprosthetic spin is just that, spin. The really importart finding in these studies is the correlation of fMRI signals with electrical activity in the brain. fMRI measures increases in blood flow which has been suggested to be caused by increases in electrical activity in the brain - these studies provide evidence to suport this hypothesis. Scientist that study the electical signals in the brain directly (like me) have routinely critized fMRI studies because until now in was unclear how the results related to signal processing in the brain. There is still one major short coming of fMRI. Imagine that 50% of the neurons in an area of the brain increase their electrical activity while 50% equaly decrease their activity. This would result in a large change in signal processing but no change in blood flow and therefore would not show up in a fMRI scan. That said, fMRI is a powerful tool for understanding neural function, particularly in human who for some reason object to letting you stick electrodes into their brains. These new studies make in an even more useful tool.
This reminds me of Gate's Law -- No computer will ever neeed more than 640k of RAM.
I am also a neuroscientist. One who has been working in neuroprosthetics for several years and who is on patents for neural prosthetic technology that actually exist. The parent is absolutely correct. Any information broadcast into cortex would be very crude and likely also unpleasent. David Brindley (the god father of visual neural prosthetics) found that patients would not tolerate the crude visual input from the few electrodes that he used. However, it is nice to know thatI don't have to actually do build anything or do experiments anymore.
"People need to learn, senstive data is only protected in ONE place, inside our minds.
Keep it there and no one can snoop it."
You haven't been reading the recent stories on neuroprosthetics. Soon you will have to encrypt your temporal lobe, and firewall your pre-frontal cortex!!
Of course you provided no evidence in support of your rant. You don't even consider that in most case of home invasion or assault the simple display of a firearm will send a criminal running. The answer to accidental shootings is not no guns, but rather proper gun training. Considering that there are something like 80 millions privately owed guns in America, most people are doing a pretty good job of keeping their firearms safe. Of course there is always going to be some idiot who points a weapon that they were SURE was unloaded at someone and ends up injuring or killing them, but that is no reason to take the principle tool of self-defence away from safe, law abiding citizens. Many studies have shown that private gun ownership is correlated with lower levels of crime. A survey of prisoners showed that they were more afraid of a private citizen with a gun than of the police. You only have those rights which you can actually defend.
Of course, then it would be preferrable to be on Mars as terrorists would be busy suicide bombing your local Startbucks and shooting down your vacation flight to Disneyland.
The brain makes use of both time and frequency domain multiplexing. Also, individual neurons encode information in highly dimensional spaces. So, the may well be far more the 100 degrees of freedom available. It depends on the decoding algorithm. The is particularly true when you record from high level cognitive areas of the brain.
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from Microsoft and disable autorum permenantly! Does this mean that Microsoft is violating DMCA??