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Category: neuroscience – Page 1,018
How will we interact with the intelligent machines of the future? If you’re asking Bryan Johnson, founder of startup Kernel, he’ll tell you those machines should be implanted inside our brains.
His team is working with top neuroscientists to build a tiny brain chip—also known as a neuroprosthetic —to help people with disease-related brain damage. In the long term, though, Johnson sees the product applicable to anyone who wants a bit of a brain boost.
Yes, some might flag this technology as yet another invention leading us toward a future where technology just helps the privileged get further in life.
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When you never need to say a word because your AI reads your mind. Who knows; maybe we’ll end up with a new population of introverts and anti-socialists for researchers to study.
Scientists at the University of Rochester have developed a computer model that can predict sentences by looking for brain activity patterns that are associated with different words.
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Interesting research paper on motor cortex-based brain-computer interface (BCI) research conducted by researchers from UW. Sharing with fellow partners and researchers trying to advance BMI as well as those researching and/ or re-creating brain/ neuro patterns in systems.
The neurons in the human brain are densely interlaced, sharing upwards of 100 trillion physical connections. It is widely theorized that this tremendous connectivity is one of the facets of our nervous system that enables human intelligence. In this study, over the course of a week, human subjects learned to use electrical activity recorded directly from the surface of their brain to control a computer cursor. This provided us an opportunity to investigate patterns of interactivity that occur in the brain during the development of a new skill. We demonstrated two fundamentally different forms of interactions, one spanning only neighboring populations of neurons and the other covering much longer distances across the brain. The short-distance interaction type was notably stronger during early phases of learning, lessening with time, whereas the other was not. These findings point to evidence of multiple different forms of task-relevant communication taking place between regions in the human brain, and serve as a building block in our efforts to better understand human intelligence.
Citation: Wander JD, Sarma D, Johnson LA, Fetz EE, Rao RPN, Ojemann JG, et al. (2016) Cortico-Cortical Interactions during Acquisition and Use of a Neuroprosthetic Skill. PLoS Comput Biol 12: e1004931. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004931
Editor: Olaf Sporns, Indiana University, UNITED STATES
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Luv this.
Smart devices implanted in the body have thus far not been able to communicate via Wi-Fi due to the power requirements of such communications. Surgery is required when the battery in a brain stimulator or a pacemaker needs to be replaced. Not only is this expensive, but any surgery has inherent risks and could lead to complications. It is therefore critically important that the battery life in implanted medical devices be preserved for as long as possible.
Other constraints limiting how much power a device can use include their location in the body and their size. New emerging devices that could one day reanimate limbs, stimulate organs, or brain implants that treat Parkinson’s disease are limited by the same factors.
Smartwatches, smartphones and other similar Bluetooth enable devices continuously transmit communication signals. A team from the University of Washington (UW) consisting of computer scientists and electrical engineers, have developed a method that utilizes these signals and converts it to Wi-Fi signals. The new method uses ten thousand times less energy than traditional methods do. Another huge advantage of this method is that it does not need any specialized equipment.
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Ray believes we’re becoming gods.
People tend to ask Ray Kurzweil all manner of questions about technology and the future. But they also want to know about his own personal philosophy. In one session last summer, a questioner asked Kurzweil if he believes in God. Of course, many of us struggle with the question, he replied, and to him, it’s not unambiguous.
There’s variability in how we describe God, but he thinks there are some commonalities. Shared traits include creativity, love, and intelligence—attributes we tend to also value in conscious beings. To Kurzweil, consciousness is the ultimate measure of spirituality. Much of our morality is based on whether an entity is conscious or not (even though it’s still hard to define).
“Everyone with very few outliers believes in the sacredness of a conscious person, and in fact, non-conscious things, like a machine or a diamond, are only important in so far as they affect the conscious experience of conscious beings.”
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The human brain has Quantum consciousness according to China. Why a cogitative thinking system that truly mimics the human brain will require QC.
Chinese scientists have proposed a new theory that explains why humans are so much more intelligent than animals even though our brains are often much smaller than those of other species. Researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Neuroscience and Neuro-engineering have previously carried out studies backing the theory that the brain not only processes and passes on information not only through electrical and chemical signals, but also with photons of light.
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