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Reshaping how you think about the future:


“The future is widely misunderstood. Our forebears expected it to be pretty much like their present, which had been pretty much like their past.” –Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near

We humans aren’t great predictors of the future. For most of history, our experience has been “local and linear.” Not much change occurred generation to generation: We used the same tools, ate the same meals, lived in the same general place.

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April 5, 2016, New York — People are using brain-machine interfaces to restore motor function in ways never before possible — through limb prosthetics and exoskletons. But technologies to repair and improve cognition have been more elusive. That is rapidly changing with new tools — from fully implantable brain devices to neuron-eavesdropping grids atop the brain — to directly probe the mind.

These new technologies, being presented today at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS) annual conference in New York City, are mapping new understandings of cognition and advancing efforts to improve memory and learning in patients with cognitive deficits.

Eavesdropping on neurons

“A new era” of electrophysiology is now upon us, says Josef Parvizi of Stanford University who is chairing the CNS symposium on the topic. “We have gotten a much sharper view of the brain’s electrophysiological activity” using techniques once relegated to science fiction.

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A Technicolor scientist surrounded by the latest virtual reality technology inspects a vial containing a few droplets of water—and one million copies of an old movie encoded into DNA.

The company has come a long way since the Hollywood golden age, when the world gazed in awe at the lush palette of “The Wizard of Oz” and “Gone with the Wind” provided by its three-strip cameras.

Now celebrating its centenary year, Technicolor’s laboratories are at the cutting edge of the science of filmmaking, leading a worldwide revolution in immersive entertainment.

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