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Scientists Watch Thoughts Form in the Brain
- muninn_ 10y agoGreat, next they'll be able to tell when I'm mentally undressing the testers
- danielmorozoff 10y agoNature write up: http://www.nature.com/news/brain-s-chemical-signals-seen-in-real-time-1.20458 http://www.nature.com/news/brain-s-chemical-signals-seen-in-... And paper without paywall from kleinfelds lab: http://physics.ucsd.edu/neurophysics/publications/nmeth.3151.pdf http://physics.ucsd.edu/neurophysics/publications/nmeth.3151...
- bsbechtel 10y agoFor all the hype surrounding AI, virtual reality, and augmented reality as being the next big trends in tech, I really feel like brain/computer interfaces are what is really going to change our world in unprecedented ways. The technology is still a long, long ways from having a visible impact for most people, but I am more interested/excited/scared about this technology than anything else going on in the tech world right now.
- happyslobro 10y agoThis is what will make the difference between us becoming the cybernetic overlords, and us getting crushed underneath of them. Whatever powers we grant to the machines, it is critical that we also take these powers for ourselves.
- ythl 10y agoI'm still not convinced thinking, living, conscious machines are possible anytime soon, if ever. Until we understand the hard problem of consciousness and other fundamental mechanisms of the brain, we will never build true AI. Increasing system complexity and hoping for a "singularity" event is cargo cult science[1]. It's like building runways on your private island and hoping airplanes will spontaneously land and produce wondrous treasures to trade. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_science
- tim333 10y agoSystems like AlphaGo do something like thinking. I suspect progress will crack along regardless of what philosophical types think about the hard problem of consciousness. Also if you are a materialist the brain already is a thinking, living, conscious machine.
- happyslobro 10y agoAgreed, human equivalent AI is probably several hundreds of years off, at best. but we don't need anything that sophisticated to trigger an "overlords" scenario. I'm picturing something like a very good legal AI, being abused by a foreign state's hackers to ensure the incarceration of political opponents, in preparation for a coup. We're not far off from that being a plausible scenario now, but if we all had the benefit of a personal legal AI, or access to a collective legal AI, then it would be a lot harder for anyone to use the legal system against an individual opponent, as a simple weapon.
- ythl 10y agoThat's a really good point. In a world where we use machine learning to decide how to diagnose illness, pass judgment, arrest people, and more, it could be manipulated by bad actors into enslaving us one way or another (no conscious AI needed).
- CuriouslyC 10y agoWhat if consciousness is an irreducible property of matter? What if computers are already conscious, and their experience of executing code is analogous to our experience of thinking? How could we ever tell the difference?
- Balgair 10y agoThe disease and safety aspects alone are pretty cool. Blindness and deafness will be cured, as will vertigo and a host of other diseases and malformations. Think Stephen Hawking, but actually walking around and talking again, having a totally normal life again. Also, imagine having IR vision for firefighters in a house fire, or a surgeon having basically X-Ray vision, or being able to see the elements in your tap water with the aid of an inbuilt spectrometer. Really cool stuff.
- bsbechtel 10y agoAbsolutely, although I've always been interested in the aspect it can have on internal corporate communication. This is the #1 challenge/cost driver in every company today. Maybe I'm thinking in the realm of science fiction still, but to be able to effortlessly communicate the precise info every individual in an organization needs at the instant they need it would unleash an unprecedented explosion of economic growth around the world.
- Balgair 10y agoI hope not! I downsized to a dumbphone just to get away from email at night. The last thing I want to know is my boss's every whim for me. I think you are thinking of a eusocial hivemind organization. Though they are very good at getting goals done, like building these tunnels or that termite mound, they are not very adaptable outside of their environmental niche. It's the opposite of capitalism you speak of. Democracy is a thousand voices all yelling different songs to make a chorus, and it is slow and messy. However, it tends to find the 'right' choice at a higher rate than the top down model.
- bsbechtel 10y agoWell I was thinking more in terms of not only top down communication, but also bottom up (reporting, identification of problems on the ground floor, etc). The vast majority of our economy is goal-driven, with a very small percentage of workers actually defining the goals, doing creative work, or doing research. Consider the impact on the world if the latest research from the lab was instantly decimated to the entire community, feedback provided, and new knowledge spread to industry. This is the positive aspect of the technology I am thinking about (of course many, many years in the future).
- rimantas 10y agoWatch "Black Mirror" for some of the possible ways.
- randomdrake 10y agoI'm really interested in those interfaces as well. Some posit that one of the big advantages of the ways our brains evolved were in the increased size of our frontal lobe. They say this ultimately led to increased processing power by allowing our brains to have access to more data for making decisions or analyzing thoughts. I feel like we've continued this growth in some ways. Low bandwidth access to information that doesn't reside in our brains, allowing us to further our capacity for thought and understanding. Ray Kurzweil is an interesting fellow who's very much into this as well and sees our extension as an inevitability in the next few decades. Direct interfaces between the brain and the Internet (or some other network) to allow for even lower bandwidth access to information. Since you said you were interested: there was an episode of Star Talk[1] a few months back where he dives into this stuff along with Dr. Tyson and a neuroscientist. Definitely recommend it as a fun primer for where we are, what we're doing, and where some people think we're going to go. [1] - http://www.startalkradio.net/show/gazing-into-the-future-with-ray-kurzweil/ http://www.startalkradio.net/show/gazing-into-the-future-wit...
- ekianjo 10y ago> Ray Kurzweil is an interesting fellow Are we talking about the same guy who sells supplements and takes hundreds of vitamins everyday, despite there being no evidence of positive effect ? (http://www.rayandterry.com/ http://www.rayandterry.com/)
- tlow 10y agoI believe that very little is known on the effects of this kind of supplementation. Avoiding dangerously high mineral content which could lead to illnesses like kidney stones, there doesn't seem to be strong evidence AGAINST. I therefore suggest perhaps we defer judgement as there also appears to be little evidence FOR.
- tlow 10y agoI think that one of the major hurdles to BCI is the mechanism of connection. When electrodes are connected to neurons they have a tendency to be destroyed. However, one might imagine the development of sophisticated electromagnetic equipment which might suitable focus and modulate "receptor pathways" in the brain. This seems far off. Eyes are convenient sensory organs to utilize for input. Getting directly to the brain seems more like trying to manipulate electron flow in a PCB without removing the external enclosure. (not to say that's impossible, just not as easy as cutting a trace and soldering in a connection)
- selectiveshift 10y agoThe great thing about our brains is how malleable they are. We should be creating as low tech a mechanism as possible and then train our brains to use it.
- tlow 10y agoI wanted to discuss an expansion of this idea, I am so glad you brought it up. Less than 100 years ago we as humanity largely believed that we were fated with the brains and capacity we were born with. Today, we know this isn't true. In fact, cases like Phineas Gage make one wonder.[1] Now to respond to you comment. There is no reason that we couldn't develop methodologies for utilizing our sensory input to train our brains in mechanisms we've not even considered or dreamed of today. Maybe we can achieve a hyper-reality where reality speed is 5x but after a small period our brains can adjust and then we can learn at 5x. Our brains are limitless. Our ability to directly interface to them with electronics seems tenable today (but that may or may not always be true). [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage
- ericjang 10y agoThere are some very difficult challenges in brain-computer interfaces (BCI), some of which involve huge barriers presented by human biology. It's rather depressing. Presently, there is no good way to read data from the brain to a device. You can drill a hole in your head and patch-clamp some electrodes to your brain tissue, but this procedure is only recommended for treating debilitating diseases like Parkinson's. Furthermore, there is the issue of scar tissue developing over time as a small region of your brain is being bombarded with electricity / contact with foreign metals that trigger immune response. I do think a spinal tap of some sort might make more sense (rather than patching directly into brain tissue like in the Matrix), but you still get scar tissue. Non-invasive methods don't have scar tissue, but it's unclear whether measuring the surface activity of the brain yields sufficient information. Furthermore, they are highly noisy due to ambient static and muscle activity. You shouldn't move much if you want o.k. readings. The BCI dream is to have a lightweight headset that you put behind your ears like in Iron Man 3 or Big Hero 6 (and then you control robots with your mere thoughts). However, I think that kind of technology is really far away, short of some huge breakthroughs in compressed sensing and possibly superconductor physics. Even more difficult than reading data is writing it back in. There have been very early results with getting monkeys to telepathically control each other's muscle movements, but my understanding is that it's not very reliable. A reasonable survey can be found here: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1110866515000237 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1110866515...
- andrewjl 10y agoWhat about circuits / probes made from biological materials rather than metal/silicon?
- avz 10y ago> There are some very difficult challenges in brain-computer interfaces (BCI), some of which involve huge barriers presented by human biology. It's rather depressing. Completely agree. I don't think BCI is likely to take off seriously until we assert more confident control over our own biology. In particular, techniques like CRISPR may eventually open the door to temporary, local and reversible genetic manipulation of body tissues that would allow human body to grow and shed tiny BCI connectors with desired specs. This is probably a few hundreds of years of development (and political and moral arguments) away though. Depressing indeed.
- roscoebeezie 10y agoI had thoughts for some bci product. I have no clue about the feasibility. Take an EEG like the emotiv Epoch. Get lucky and hope you can still get the raw data via emokit or something like that. Construct some sort of low level two character alphabet representation. I'd imagine something similar to EBCDIC cause I'm a tortured mainframe soul, so C1 is A and so on. Using some fancy ML (deep learning?), train for your alphabet representation using EEG data while loudly subvocaling "C" or something. Once you get lucky and train a model, use your alphabet as some sort of string of consciousness recording/ instant note taking. Some how tag your thought notes so you can come back later or do some fancy searches. Do some fancy NLP on your notes or some conceptual blending or whatever is cool. Sell the software, but keep the notes "open" somehow. I'd go on but that's my idea. Steal it and hire me.
- 36bydesign 10y agoThe direct problem would be that we don't think in letters, but I like the idea.
- mhuffman 10y agoI expect this to be streamlined and used by law enforcement as an alternative for polygraphs.
- vinceguidry 10y agoBy 'streamlined' you mean hastily developed, badly tested, (on purpose) rushed to market, and then hailed as the 'new DNA testing'? By the time anyone questions its efficacy it will be too late.
- mhuffman 10y agoI can tell by your antagonistic language that you are hiding something! To the thought-extractor citizen -- we'll get to the bottom of this!
- visarga 10y agoOr it could be used to create brain computer interfaces. Or for "uploading".
- happyslobro 10y agoI expect someone to figure out a way to exfiltrate upcoming passwords by analyzing the EM radiation of these aptly named CNiFERs. Imagine, an attacker knowing your next password before you begin to type it for the first time }:)
- happyslobro 10y agoOr, more practically, an interrogator could just remind you of a time when you logged in to a particular account, and then try to capture a password as you relive the memory.
- cubano 10y agoThere seems to be a huge push against using any type of nuero-tech to build "ultimate" lie detectors, which I often find puzzling.
- _Wintermute 10y agoArticle on the CNiFER method: http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v13/n1/full/nn.2469.html http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v13/n1/full/nn.2469.html
- dschiptsov 10y agoI think it should be called "digital hallucinations" - non-reproducible (but not totally random either) visualizations, renderings of some data gained from a device build according some biased and grossly oversimplified models. It might have strong correlation with micro changes in blood flow or biochemistry, etc. but obviously have nothing to do with thoughts.
- Balgair 10y agoDid you read the same paper?
- dschiptsov 10y agoI have got some rather superficial knowledge of how the state-of-the-art brain imaging works from a couple of free MIT courses.)
- mhneu 10y agoCalcium imaging is currently a better method for realtime imaging of neural activity. http://www.nature.com/nmeth/journal/v6/n12/full/nmeth.1398.html http://www.nature.com/nmeth/journal/v6/n12/full/nmeth.1398.h... The CNiFER innovation is the ability to visualize neurotransmitter activity.
- kevinalexbrown 10y agostrictly speaking, this is calcium imaging
- nacc 10y agoJust to clarify, optically recording neural activity from ensamble of cells ("thoughts") has been done in neuroscience for many years using voltage / glutamate / calcium indicators + imaging. CNiFER is a breakthrough is because it provide ways to measure the "hormone" of brain, these are often molecules in tiny amount that modulate how cells in an area fire. A not-so-good analogy is before we can measure electrical current in wires, now CNiFER allows us to measure electromagnetic field. This will help to explain why some headphones nearby will beep when your cellphone received a message.
- saintPirelli 10y agoWhile reading I was distracted by that awesome scrolly thingy at the bottom.
- bantunes 10y agoI'm scared. The Valley is gonna "disrupt" stuff in a lot of nasty ways armed with a more developed version of this...
- importantbrian 10y agoThis makes me think of John Scalzi's The Ghost Brigades. I wonder how far it is between mapping thoughts to being able to map someone's memories and consciousness. If such a thing is even possible at all.
- wang_li 10y agoIn current MRI images of the brain, a million different data points are reduced to a single pixel in the image. Absent some kind of dramatic breakthrough in science, we are a long ways from being able to resolve individual data points inside of a person's brain.
- rasz_pl 10y agoDid they test this method on a dead fish just to be sure?
- JackFr 10y agoThe technique described here -- that of the CNiFERs is impressive. But the hype is way over the top. > When many [neurons] fire together, they form a thought. Is that a definition, an observation, a hypothesis or a result?
- aperrien 10y agoI think that depends on where you believe thoughts originate. If they originate within the brain, the ensemble firing together (in some sort of organized manner) is a thought. If you believe that they don't originate from within the brain, then the answer is unclear. More of a philosophy problem at that point, I think.
- habitue 10y agoIf you don't believe thoughts arise in the brain, then you're ignoring thousand year old results in basic physiology
- astazangasta 10y agoI've never understood how these guys managed to get a billion dollars to fund this horseshit Brain Initiative in a time when NIH funding has been declining for decades. There is probably some serious graft/nepotism behind this.
- edmundhuber 10y agoTo add to ericjang's comments elsewhere in this thread, here are my thoughts on the two most popular BCI (although I'm used to seeing BMI -- brain-machine interface) technologies: * Optogenetics advantages: don't need to insert things into tissue. Disadvantages: requires genetic engineering that is not approved for human use. Difficulty reaching deep brain targets. To image many neurons, might need to pump lots of light into an area, causing heat and cell death. Bulky. * Microelectrode arrays (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multielectrode_array https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multielectrode_array) like the Utah or Michigan array advantages: direct electrical recordings, relatively compact. Disadvantages: low density, invasiveness. It is worth noting that most behavioral studies are done with MEAs are due to their convenience/form factor. It is also important to note that these two technologies measure different things: an MEA can record extracellular voltages, so it's a relatively direct measurement of neural activity, compared to optogenetics, which relies on ion channels fluorescing, which is not exactly what most people really want to measure. A word about invasiveness: when you insert large (>1um) things into tissue, you elicit a foreign body response, starting with inflammation and ending with scar tissue or gliosis. The issue with invasive probes like MEAs is that even if you manage to avoid major blood vessels and you control bleeding and inflammation, ultimately scar tissue forms around your probes. Scar tissue is a much worse electrical interface than plain tissue, and thus the effectiveness of your BCI/BMI implant diminishes. Disclosure: I run a company (Paradromics, www.paradromics.com) developing next-generation microwire technology for brain-machine interfaces. Also, my strength is in software so while the gist of what I'm saying is probably mostly correct, I can't give details as well as others can.
- djoshea 10y agoJust to add clarification points, the term optogenetics is generally supposed to refer to any gene transfection that involves optical access, but in practice there are two separate categories: * optogenetic stimulation: using light-activated ion channels to modulate neural activity * optical imaging: using genetically targeted fluorescent proteins (mainly GCaMP) to observe the activity of neurons This article is more the second kind, and the novel aspect is that this technology couples dopamine release to calcium rises, enabling imaging of the calcium signal to be used as a proxy for the neurotransmitter's release. It's more likely to be quite useful for investigating specific scientific questions about neurotransmitter signaling than a general purpose readout for BMI. Multielectrode arrays pick up spikes or action potentials from individual neurons directly, so you get high temporal resolution but from a sparse sample of cells. This sample turns out to be enough to do a lot of interesting things, such as controlling a mouse cursor or a robotic arm. This is already in clinical trials at a few sites, including (my lab at) Stanford. Imaging approaches are really powerful, but the signals are often slower. This has to do with the kinetics of the proteins themselves and the signal that is being detected (calcium is slower than voltage transients). But you get to see the activity of lots of neurons. There are voltage sensitive channels that you can image, although the signal to noise ratio isn't nearly as high as yet. It's not immediately clear how this could be used for a BMI in humans, mainly because you would absolutely need optical access to the brain to image, so you'd either be opening up a window or implanting some kind of imaging sensor. The less invasive approaches you were hinting at are mostly in the first category (stimulation), where for longer wavelengths of light you wouldn't need something as invasive.
- ommunist 10y agoI wonder how they distinguish thoughts from feelings?