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(disclaimer: I have no knowledge on the subject and purely reason based on naive grounds) I agree with you that language helps formalize and structure thoughts

(disclaimer: I have no knowledge on the subject and purely reason based on naive grounds) I agree with you that language helps formalize and structure thoughts in an intelligible manner, and I do also have reserves on the hypothesis that one can think much faster than it speaks. Though, is it completely wrong to assume that a neurolink interface would act like a language? I mean, you mentioned that it would not be possible to probe the whole brain, which makes sense, but I could imagine that to communicate easily with a neurolink interface, you would somehow need to convert your thoughts to _something_ that is probed and intelligible to the interface, just like you do when you articulate sounds to speak. For instance, if I just vaguely think of moving my hand, that's a pretty blurry and noisy thought. But when I focus, I can almost physically feel that I am at the very edge of moving it, my sensations in the hand increase, my muscles don't move but I feel like they are ready to at any time. Surely, thoughts that are the result of a specific focus like this could be more easily probed. In fact, it could also be that your brain would need to "learn" how to properly focus thoughts that work with the interface. That makes for a much less appealing interface though, because it's not "effortless" to articulate thoughts in a specific manner that an interface can probe.

swordsmith 6y ago
You are touching on the subject of attention, which is actually extremely important and has a whole field of research (see for example, the hillarious invisible monkey experiment: http://www.theinvisiblegorilla.com/gorilla_experiment.html http://www.theinvisiblegorilla.com/gorilla_experiment.html) There are a lot of things that we ignore or don't register consciously. It is possible to decode items in one's working memory in controlled situations (see for example: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28155212/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28155212/). So I suppose one possible approach would be to hold things in your working memory and have the Neuralink actively decode those. But in that case, as you've pointed out, requires a lot of attention and most likely would rely more heavily on contextual AI to narrow the decoder search space. The basic premise of my skepticism with the "we need higher bandwidth I/O" statement still stays though -- the bottleneck of human communication is how quickly coherent thoughts can be formed in a way someone else can understand it (output), and how quickly information can be understood (input). For the latter example, you can scan an entire page in less than second. With immense speed reading practice, you can get a "gist" of a page in around that time. But understanding the details in that time is not possible.

swordsmith 6y ago

You are touching on the subject of attention, which is actually extremely important and has a whole field of research (see for example, the hillarious invisible monkey experiment: http://www.theinvisiblegorilla.com/gorilla_experiment.html http://www.theinvisiblegorilla.com/gorilla_experiment.html) There are a lot of things that we ignore or don't register consciously. It is possible to decode items in one's working memory in controlled situations (see for example: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28155212/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28155212/). So I suppose one possible approach would be to hold things in your working memory and have the Neuralink actively decode those. But in that case, as you've pointed out, requires a lot of attention and most likely would rely more heavily on contextual AI to narrow the decoder search space. The basic premise of my skepticism with the "we need higher bandwidth I/O" statement still stays though -- the bottleneck of human communication is how quickly coherent thoughts can be formed in a way someone else can understand it (output), and how quickly information can be understood (input). For the latter example, you can scan an entire page in less than second. With immense speed reading practice, you can get a "gist" of a page in around that time. But understanding the details in that time is not possible.