New Startup Aims to Commercialize a Brain Prosthetic to Improve Memory
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
There so many major technical issues that make this little more than vapor wear.
The hippocampal neural code is largely un-understood. Without the code they'll be flipping random bits and hoping for the best (akin to flipping bits in ram without understanding how the OS is representing data in RAM).
We still don't have reliable hardware for reading the activity of the brain. Most implants go bad after a few weeks with very few lasting up to a few years. Surgery every few years is unreasonable as each implant will leave behind permanent damage.
Next writing information to the brain is still in its infancy. We can disrupt processing with electrical stimulation but too much current will trigger a seizure (especially in the hippocampus). There's a lot of hope around Opto-genetics but we still need to figure out how to get targeted expression in an already developed human brain. It can take years to get expression right in developing mice.
or in other words -- we record "signals", then compute something, and finally "stimulate" the neurons. I appreciate that this isn't a scientific report but this borders on parody.
The magnitude of technical, computational and biological problems to be solved here in order to achieve anything even remotely close to the headline would require 3-4 major scientific breakthroughs. With all respect, you don't publish them in IEEE proceedings.
What springs first to mind is remembering lots of data, or doing arithmetic fast. But would such a brain prostethic offer any real-world benefits over a human using a laptop or calculator?
OTOH, I suppose you could record signals from someone skilled in something, and then use those to augment training of someone else. Like in The Matrix. But by then we would be bumping into what today are philosophical questions, like "how compatible are different people's mental models of self and of the world"?
Also, what would this mean for e.g. eyewitnesses used in court? In a dystopian world, you could always imagine some criminal gang "programming" otherwise reliable eyewitnesses to give them alibis. Or even a shady government implanting memories of a crime into someone's head, in order to make them confess to that crime.
Or, suppose that a government could literally read your mind and tell if you did something or not. Would you be protected from that under the Fifth Amendment?
http://www.medicaldaily.com/period-pain-drug-can-cure-alzhei...
I suspect they fell out of "stealth mode" because they're up against the clock here. We may have simple pill-based Alzheimer's treatment in a decade or so. Brain surgery is a hard sell even if they solve all the technical issues. If the inflammation theory is right, then a anti-inflammation treatment that can work its way past the blood-brain barrier might be the best treatment here. If its just a modified NSAID it would be very cheap and very low risk.
>“He thinks the next big challenge for the human race is how to improve our brains,” says Berger.
The problem I see is that intellectual people overvalue intellectualism. Way too many billionaires are funding vanity pie-in-the-sky projects like keeping their minds alive and youthful forever or brain training sites/apps instead of funding things that could actually work and help 'regular' people. I suspect socially smart people know how to play deep pocketed nerds and empty their wallets. This startup seems like a fairly bullshit venture imo, or at least way too pie-in-the-sky to remotely go public or start sending out press releases.
Just like the advances that have been made in brain-computer interfaces that record from the motor cortex, it's quite possible that the brain's plasticity allows it to work with relatively simple circuitry. There's no reason to slow down development of technology like this (as long as it's safe). I believe they've shown some pretty promising clinical results in humans already.
Also, they've got some of the best memory researchers in the world on their team (Boyden), so it's not like they're unaware of the challenges they are addressing.
Berger, T.W., Baudry, M., Brinton, R.D., Liaw, J-S., Marmarelis, V.Z., Park, Y., Sheu, B.J., and Tanguay, Jr., A.R. Brain-implantable biomimetic electronics as the next era in neural prosthetics. Proceedings of the IEEE, 2001, 89, 993-1012.
http://www.bioee.ee.columbia.edu/courses/upload/Bibliography...
Much like cycling and doping :)
I presume you've heard of coffee...
In essence, you can't easily put the genie back in the bottle, so it's better to decide what you're going to do with the genie before it's out.
What make you believe that the technology is centuries off?
What’s more interesting to me is how to control/license the providers so their augmenting devices don’t include marketing BS, or don’t mess with user’s motivation to sue the provider.
We should've started this discussion a good long while ago. But yes, we had better get on it. The gap between the haves and have-nots will widen exponentially with technology like this.
We should be thinking about ethics in our new, exciting world, but for the most part, we tend to make decisions about ethics via popular consensus. Even if some of us might be vocal about this being a bad idea (ethically, or otherwise), if the majority are seeking it out, it's still likely to happen.
Augmenting my memory since reading about the Remembrance Agent and getting into wearable computers in the 90's http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~rhodes/Papers/remembrance.html
I'm curious what kinds of evolutionary biology impacts technologies like Google's search engine have on humanity. Before the internet, there was a large motivation to memorize information in order to quickly retrieve it without a very costly lookup operation. Now, a more efficient method to access information is to "index" the information with your brain - i.e. just remember how to find it quickly with the right search terms. This way, a significantly larger amount of information can be accessed very quickly by an individual.
I have noticed this in my own life. I consider my ability to recall things with Google to be a skill, and I consciously do not memorize pieces of information which I am fairly sure I will be able to find in <10 seconds. I think that using my brain as an index allows me to ingest more concepts, and as a result of that make more connections between concepts. It's definitely not without downsides though, an obvious one being a very high level of reliance on internet access. I wonder how this will play out over time, and if there are directly observable physiological differences between individuals with and without the internet as a form of memory-augmentation.