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New Startup Aims to Commercialize a Brain Prosthetic to Improve Memory
- synctext 10y agoImpressive. What seems to be the underlying science: 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/berger_procieee_2001.pdf http://www.bioee.ee.columbia.edu/courses/upload/Bibliography...
- tekromancr 10y agoThis seems like a fine time to discuss the ethics of augmenting healthy brain function
- adrianN 10y agoI think we can wait until there is a working prototype.
- onion2k 10y agoConclusions about the ethics of who should be able to buy and use these devices will inform the way the business of supplying them works - effectively we need to decide the size of the potential market. Would it be people with Alzheimers? People with memory disorders? Anyone who can afford it? Would these devices be the equivalent of a prescribed medical procedure or an elective, 'cosmetic' surgery? If society as a collective group decides that the devices should be illegal to anyone without a valid medical reason (let's say we don't want children using them to 'cheat' in exams) then developing, or investing in, businesses to innovate in the area would change dramatically. 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.
- Aelinsaar 10y agoThere's no real indication that this is bottle with a genie in it; I think it's just an old beer bottle.
- bognition 10y agoyou'll be waiting a very long time. The tech is decades if not centuries off
- Const-me 10y agoI think they are fine. We can do it right now using e.g. alcohol and drugs. Both can kill you when misused. And yet alcohol is legal, half of the drugs as well. 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.
- ethanbond 10y agoLike millions of students do with amphetamines? 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.
- pizza 10y agoMake 'em legal, make 'em cheap, make 'em as mild-mannered as one unit of coffee (i.e. probably much less than even the lowest instant release formulation). Flaws?
- pythia__ 10y agoIf those who augment their brains outcompete those who don't by an ever-widening margin (seems more likely than not), this discussion topic is preemptively obsolete. Their ethics will be dominant sooner or later.
- woodman 10y agoI've been eagerly awaiting the conversion, but I was expecting it to be around the issue of biological immortality. This will be more entertaining though, because it is open to more than the religious types - anybody can try to guide the state's tools of coercion! So what justification for literally controlling what other people do with their brains will ban advocates go with, will they use stem cell research logic or interstate commerce clause logic?
- FungalRaincloud 10y agoI'm most concerned with the ethics of testing the device, which I suppose leads us to the ethics of augmenting healthy brain function. The best candidates for testing this device might not be in the best position to give informed consent. Even if they signed forms when of sound mind, there's simply no way of knowing if they would change their mind later. This means we might need to test on healthy individuals, at least until we know the risks of the device that do not relate to the disorder. 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.
- omginternets 10y agoI disagree. It's rather a fine time to discuss the ethics of selling (currently) impossible technology to investors.
- apalmer 10y agoSeems to be way to early in the cycle to start doing startups on this...
- mrits 10y agoI'd hate to be the first VP of Sales
- jcadam 10y agoIf it works too well we could find ourselves in a situation where anyone who uses their brain for a living will need 'enhancements' like this just in order to compete and be employable (even if they aren't strictly legal). Much like cycling and doping :)
- newsbeagle 10y agoBrain enhancement is coming to sports, too: http://spectrum.ieee.org/the-human-os/biomedical/devices/olympic-athletes-try-zapping-their-brains-to-improve-sports-performance http://spectrum.ieee.org/the-human-os/biomedical/devices/oly...
- throwanem 10y ago> anyone who uses their brain for a living will need 'enhancements' like this just in order to compete and be employable I presume you've heard of coffee...
- messe 10y agoThere's a saying that a mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems. It's dual is that a comathematician is a device for turning cotheorems into ffee.
- throwanem 10y agoI've worked with mathematicians, but never heard that one before. Thank you! Now I know the origin of the one about programmers being devices for turning coffee into code.
- balnaphone 10y agoAlfréd Rényi : "A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems".
- return0 10y agoMore likely, the people on top of the money chain will use it to improve their minions.
- bognition 10y agoLots of hype but sadly very little science going on here. They have a few superficial models of hippocampal circuitry but almost nothing about how that circuit fits into the larger systems of learning and memory. 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.
- kristjankalm 10y ago"An implanted memory prosthetic would have electrodes to record signals during learning, a microprocessor to do the computations, and electrodes that stimulate neurons to encode the information as a memory." 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.
- bognition 10y agoexactly!
- newsbeagle 10y agoHere's more technical detail from IEEE Spectrum on memory prosthetics, from an article about a similarly ambitious DARPA project: http://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/bionics/darpa-project-starts-building-human-memory-prosthetics http://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/bionics/darpa-project-st...
- actionjack 10y agoJohnny Mnemonic anyone?
- actionjack 10y agoJohnny Mnemonic anyone? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Mnemonic_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Mnemonic_(film)
- SamBam 10y agoI expect to see this for presale on Indiegogo or some other crowd funding site in the coming weeks...
- njharman 10y agoLike a cellphone and the internet? Or better yet, something with heads-up display like Google Glass. Or Siri/Alexis with throat mike and headphones. 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 http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~rhodes/Papers/remembrance.html
- a3n 10y agoThis is about people with dementia, not forgetting the milk.
- brador 10y agoWhat advantages could possibly exist in enhancing our ability to store data in decaying meat?
- JoeAltmaier 10y agoIts called "google"
- kctess5 10y agoThis is very true. 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.
- JoeAltmaier 10y agoWe could study the effectiveness of this brain augmentation device simply: fill out an IQ test with and without access to google. See how many points it adds! I'd be very interested in the outcome.
- kctess5 10y agoI wonder if an IQ test would be able to meaningfully capture the difference between the two groups, considering that Google kung fu is only helpful for a certain set of tasks that in my experience are often very macro-scale.