4 ms·

Consider that advances in decoding how memory and other aspects of the brain work isn't going to be possible until you can read from neurons in real time with h

Consider that advances in decoding how memory and other aspects of the brain work isn't going to be possible until you can read from neurons in real time with high enough temporal and spatial resolution. Neuralink may be the enabling factor in massive advances in neuroscience, not actually a consumer product, but a microscope.

tsimionescu 6y ago
That's not necessarily useful. Trying to understand the brain starting from the neuron level is arbitrary and certain to be an extremely difficult problem, because of the incredible scale of the brain. However, computation doesn't happen solely at the inter-neuron communication level, but also inside each neuron itself. Finally, trying all of this in mammals and even humans, instead of trying to first do it on something like a nematode or even simpler organism is such an obvious way of putting the cart before the horse that I can't take it seriously. There is 0 chance that this approach will have any kind of success in understanding memory and thought. I am extremely hopeful they will do some extremely good work in helping give people with various spinal chord injuries some amount of control over their limbs, including the ability to sense, which would be a tremendous life improvement and would make the whole thing worth it. But it's much, much easier to reach half the speed of light with chemical rockets than it is to understand software by studying individual transistors in a running processor.
- cromwellian 6y ago
  "There is 0 chance that this approach will have any kind of success in understanding memory and thought" You don't need to understand it, you just need to be able to derive a correlation. Look, we've already been able to do this in a crude fashion with both brainwaves and PEM and fMRI. What you're saying is that you'll never understand biology without studying DNA, and molecular biology, but you can "understand" a complex system at many different levels. Or locating say, the language center of the brain at a gross anatomy level is useless. All of these coarse grained high level scientific discoveries have advanced the state of the art. Neuralink isn't try to decode the bits in your neurons. They're trying to construct a broad association between spike patterns and thought processes. We've already had success doing this, they're just upping the resolution. And to say that this can't grant your more than 0 insight into how memory works is as silly as saying that brain injuries to things like the hippocampus didn't grant any kind of help in understanding memory formation. Put another way, 1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_yaQTR3KHI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_yaQTR3KHI 2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWoPI-VoFV0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWoPI-VoFV0 3) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fs2GDSYYCoA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fs2GDSYYCoA

tsimionescu 6y ago

That's not necessarily useful. Trying to understand the brain starting from the neuron level is arbitrary and certain to be an extremely difficult problem, because of the incredible scale of the brain. However, computation doesn't happen solely at the inter-neuron communication level, but also inside each neuron itself. Finally, trying all of this in mammals and even humans, instead of trying to first do it on something like a nematode or even simpler organism is such an obvious way of putting the cart before the horse that I can't take it seriously. There is 0 chance that this approach will have any kind of success in understanding memory and thought. I am extremely hopeful they will do some extremely good work in helping give people with various spinal chord injuries some amount of control over their limbs, including the ability to sense, which would be a tremendous life improvement and would make the whole thing worth it. But it's much, much easier to reach half the speed of light with chemical rockets than it is to understand software by studying individual transistors in a running processor.

cromwellian 6y ago
"There is 0 chance that this approach will have any kind of success in understanding memory and thought" You don't need to understand it, you just need to be able to derive a correlation. Look, we've already been able to do this in a crude fashion with both brainwaves and PEM and fMRI. What you're saying is that you'll never understand biology without studying DNA, and molecular biology, but you can "understand" a complex system at many different levels. Or locating say, the language center of the brain at a gross anatomy level is useless. All of these coarse grained high level scientific discoveries have advanced the state of the art. Neuralink isn't try to decode the bits in your neurons. They're trying to construct a broad association between spike patterns and thought processes. We've already had success doing this, they're just upping the resolution. And to say that this can't grant your more than 0 insight into how memory works is as silly as saying that brain injuries to things like the hippocampus didn't grant any kind of help in understanding memory formation. Put another way, 1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_yaQTR3KHI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_yaQTR3KHI 2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWoPI-VoFV0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWoPI-VoFV0 3) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fs2GDSYYCoA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fs2GDSYYCoA