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Comment by goldsteinq | Hacker News Reader

> Imagine if we could connect your brain directly to a computer. Imagine if you could do things like instantly and precisely recall any Wikipedia article, any news story, any mathematical formula. Imagine if arithmetic goes from a skill you learn to a thing your brain does with 100% accuracy.

You're talking about transferring information FROM computer TO brain. We have no idea how to do it.

Transferring information FROM brain TO computer is achievable with modern tech (and that's what this link shows), but not vice versa.

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The awesome thing is that our brain is great at learning how to use and make sense of new inputs. The big one being literacy, you never think about it but you learned to interpret strange little patterns first as sounds that you hear in your head and then as entire concepts like “cat” or “happy”. The same can be said for spoken language or mathematics or musical notation. I don’t doubt that the human brain will have little trouble learning that X pattern of electrical inputs to a group of neurons means “cat” or the sound of A or even an image of a bird. It won’t come instantly and it won’t be identical to the thing it represents without wiring directly into the visual or auditory regions but it will give us a new sense and a new language.

It’s not really all that good at taking in new inputs, at least if our brains are anything like other mammals. There have been experiments where animals have certain senses depraved (eye sewn shut, for example) early in life, and then opened after their brain had fonished developing. Their brains never «learned» to take in the new sensory signals afterwards. At least not to the extent of a regular individual with all their senses since birth.

Yep, famously done with two kittens, one with agency to move and the other paws dragging on the ground - it was effectively blind and did not react to stimulus because it did not create meaning.

I’d be more interested in studies on people who have been deaf from birth and received cochlear implants later in life.

I remembered those body modifications where people insert small magnets under some finger's skin.

After a while a new feeling arises...

At least half the value or learning arithmetic is that it shapes ones neural network in some fashion in a way to make it better at certain types of thought. Skipping that learning process presumably skips those physical changes as well.

We could train our "soft" neural networks very efficiently with a computer interface. Maybe not as fast as dedicated software neural networks, but the human mind responds very quickly to feedback loops (sometimes destructively).

Which makes me wonder, what will an overtrained brain look like? What kinds of illnesses are we unleashing on the world by attaching an interface like that directly to the brain?

My pet theory is that anxiety is an over trained brain reaction.

In a lot of recovery circles there's an underlying concept of "getting out of your head" where the methodology that arises in each circle attempts to get a person to leave the circular thoughts in their heads and do/think something else.

I think this is why psylocybin is so effective for depression: it induces a state of plasticity in the brain that gives someone an opportunity to fill in the ruts they had been mentally pacing in.

Transferring information TO BRAIN is sort of the raison d'être of computers.

This comment FROM brain TO computer, FROM computer TO computer, FROM computer TO your brain.

It's awesome.

I think the point is that this brain computer interface speeds up the from-brain-to-computer part of the interface. The from-computer-to-brain transfer is the same old fashioned way.

We have perfectly good analog inputs, I'd rather we start with improving those rather than open the digital 6th sense box.

How much can you improve the human ear? More importantly how much can you improve the speed with which you perceive with the human ear and actually understand and retain information from it? You can probably double it’s efficiency. But can you make it take in information with perfect clarify at 10x the rate? 1000x? A direct interface into the brain could hypothetically bypass the ear entirely. And there is precedent for this already: we went from pointing and grunting, to speech, to writing, to digital writing, to the web. Imagine what it might have been like for me to convey this message to you if we lived in a hunter gatherer society before human speech was a thing? Now flip that forward: what specialized tools could we use to speed up communication more? About the only things we have left are real time translation devices and an AR capable of augmenting what we are looking at with relevant labels and articles. Beyond that we have no place to improve without inventing a radically new way to interface, and in nature you either improve or you die. Nothing stands still and neither will this.

Lets start with some nematodes and work our way up. Would probably need to own a Cyber-Scooby before having some digital inputs implanted.

Yes that’s true. But I think two way communication is a goal for a lot of research and whole orders of magnitude more difficult, likely not impossible.

But much more speculative. Just because we can imagine something doesn't mean science can/will achieve it. Brain-to-computer communication seems much more straightforward to achieve from a technical perspective, and has enough potential to revolutionize aspects of our lives on it's own.

Actually, and fortunately, it is impossible. This sort of brain model was preemptively debunked by Kant in Critique of Pure Reason and other works.

I think it's pretty hard to argue that any philosophical work, regardless of how important or impactful or insightful it is, can "debunk" anything.

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