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My only worry with this is that it might be too focused on developing technology rather than doing basic science to make such things possible. Time and time aga
by gene-h 9y ago
My only worry with this is that it might be too focused on developing technology rather than doing basic science to make such things possible. Time and time again trying to develop the tech before the science is ready has not been very fruitful.
Current neural interfaces tend to kill neurons and eventually fail. Determining how to avoid these problems is still a very big question. This is incredibly important for making practical neural interfaces. However, the approaches developed might not necessarily be compatible with technologies developed here. For example, the manufacturing process might need to be completely different, or a flexible substrate might be required.
There has progress in solving these problems though:
https://phys.org/news/2017-03-graphene-based-neural-probes-probe-brain.html https://phys.org/news/2017-03-graphene-based-neural-probes-p...
- devindotcom 9y agoYeah, I've been working on a BCI explainer and this is a critical point. The science isn't even close, either in hardware, software, or even basic brain knowledge. Of course, it's kind of one of those situations where you need the knowledge to get the knowledge, but we'll break the cycle somehow!
- gene-h 9y agoI wouldn't be too worried about the software, the human brain is pretty good at adapting to things. A great demonstration of this was an experiment where congenitally blind people were able to 'see' by sitting in a chair with an array of 400 vibrating pads.[0] There has also been some success on the software side with hippocampal prostheses[1]. All in all it's pretty simple stuff, we've been able to reverse engineer the transfer function for part of the hippocampus, so if that region is damaged we can emulate it with an implant and some matlab code. I would say that this is the end of the beginning for BCIs. [0]https://tcnl.bme.wisc.edu/laboratory/founder https://tcnl.bme.wisc.edu/laboratory/founder [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocampal_prosthesis#Recent_development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocampal_prosthesis#Recent_...