28-01-2016, 05:59 PM
[size=12]Neural lace has been invented to organically connect your brain with a computer - http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/neural-lace-has-been-invented-organically-connect-your-brain-computer-1506481[/SIZE]By Mary-Ann Russon June 16, 2015 18:04 BST [This is similar to what I'd previously assumed to be inside my head, an aerial/receiver/reflector type device' working on locally targeted and/or background radio-frequency transmissions].
![[Image: attachment.php?attachmentid=7976&stc=1]](https://deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=7976&stc=1)
This tiny electronic mesh sensor is thin and flexible enough to be injected into the brain and gentle enough to integrate fully with brain cells, making human cyborgs a possibilityLieber Research Group, Harvard University
Scientists from China and the US have found a pioneering way to inject a tiny electronic mesh sensor into the brain that fully integrates with cerebral matter and enables computers to monitor brain activity.
Researchers from Harvard and the National Center for Nanoscience and Technology in Beijing have succeeded in inventing a flexible electrical circuit that fits inside a 0.1mm-diameter glass syringe in a water-based solution.
When injected into the brains of mice, the mesh unfurled to 30 times its size and mouse brain cells grew around the mesh, forming connections with the wires in the flexible mesh circuit. The biochemical mouse brain completely accepted the mechanical component and integrated with it without any damage being caused to the mouse.
The mice who received the implants are thriving and while today they need to be connected by a wire to the computer so their brain activity can be monitored, in the future this could be wireless, and the same technique could be used to integrate an electric mesh with a human brain.
The research, entitled Syringe-injectable electronics, is published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. [surely not easy to covertly surgically implant devices'; aside from the oddly straight 18"-2' horizontal line of a blood smear on my mattress one morning in 2012, I've noticed nothing]
What is neural lace?
Neural lace is a concept first coined in The Culture, a series of sci-fi books written by Iain M Banks [old frequent ref, bank/banks], where humans living on another planet install genetically engineered glands in their brains that can secrete stimulants, psychedelics and sedatives any time they like.
The concept has proved so popular that even the Halo video game plotlines feature soldiers who have had neural lace implanted into the base of their skulls, so they show up on radar as friends or foes. [I've had pipsqueak' refs, ie. old Battle of Britain era, term for IFF transponder several times, closely followed by a copper walking passed and a single beep' being emitted from him]
At the moment, electric shock treatment is available for patients suffering from severe muscle spasms, whereby long wires are inserted deep into the brain, but this approach is only used in worst case scenarios, as any type of incision risks damaging the brain. [a lot of this research claims Parkinsons disease as a motive; I get a lot of muscle spasms as per apophenic references]
But if the neural lace is able to completely integrate with the human brain, this would enable doctors to treat all sorts of neurodegenerative diseases that are currently difficult to cure.
The beginning of the true human cyborgs
But there's also the sci-fi element of cyborgs humans that have electronic parts in them becoming a reality, as well as the concept of humans having brains that can instantly tap into infinite knowledge, such as the plot in the Scarlett Johansson film Lucy.
So-called cyborgs do exist in the world, but only to the extent of being patients fitted with bionic limbs or people who choose to have microchips implanted into their bodies, whereas an electronic mesh in the brain connected to a computer would be another ballpark completely. [Seems likely]
According to The Smithsonian, the US Air Force has funded part of the study as part of its Cyborgcell programme, which wants to create small-scale electronics for the "performance enhancement" of cells.
Charles Lieber [both refs], a nanotechnologist at Harvard University and co-author of the study, said: "We're trying to blur the distinction between electronic circuits and neural circuits."
More about neural-machine research
· Electric dreams: If we download our knowledge and neural connections to a computer will that be us?
· Paralysed woman flies F-35 fighter jet using only her mind
· User Intention Decoding: £20 Camera System Lets You Control a Wheelchair With Your Eyes
· DARPA Cortical Modem connects brain directly to computer for 'electronic telepathy and telekinesis'
· BrainGate brings wireless computer mind control to paralysed people
DARPA dreams: cortical modems and neural RAMplants for restoring active memory - http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:afI1Q6FWJh4J:http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/20371...=1&vwsrc=0
The solicitation is for a two-year research program to develop what they are calling RAM Replay, or implants for Restoring Active Memory'. This concept has not been hatched in full form out of thin air, but rather builds on a succession of recent projects to build an interface that is active at the level of the conscious mind a cognitive implant, if you will. Just this February DARPA sponsored a meeting in the Silicon Valley area where they discussed futuristic conceptions for what they call a cortical modem.
In its rawest form, they imagine such a cortical modem might be a $10 device the size of a couple of coins. It would enable a visual impression to be perceived by appropriate stimulation of the visual cortex. [I had this in late 2011/early 2012, at night, eyes shut, and the fractured, shard-like fractal' across my right eye in the colours of oil on water that I've mentioned, I suspect was the same, daylight eyes open; they seem to have this thing' about coercing people into gouging-out their own eyes] That's a tall order, but perhaps a bit more modest then their previous REMIND (Restorative Encoding Memory Integration Neural Device) project, which would be nothing short of a full-blown memory prosthesis that jacks into the hippocampus.
For various reasons, the idea of an implant to restore memories in the sense of actually reconstructing lost memories is not just premature, but downright preposterous. Once a memory is gone, anything put back could hardly be reliable. The more modest goal restoring the ability to store memories would be difficult enough even if one had access to the entire brain, to say nothing of the difficulty of trying to do it just from the hippocampus alone. [Oddly enough, they' seem more intent on destruction, not creation or restoration. All the masses of PTSD' refs I've had, seem to be about creating it, presumably under the guise of curing' it, which has a certain logic]
On the other hand, a mere replay of some event, in the form of a visual overlay with the resolution of, say, a digital alarm clock, might be something one could work with. At this point we would need a more descriptive term for exactly what it is we are talking about. If we restrict ourselves out of convenience to deal with vision alone, and reserve the term virtual reality to mean those artificially presented external simulations that replace our normal visual world, then the combination of normal vision and virtual reality is already something we are familiar with. That would simply be a visual overlay or a HUD' [ref "the mirror has two faces"], a heads up display.
But here we are not talking about an overlay for the eye, but rather an internal display manufactured from the wetware of the brain itself. That totality, i.e. normal vision, plus any virtual reality overlay, plus internally generated visual perceptions, we would propose for our purposes here to call the visuosphere'. How does one then create a visuosphere, and do it safely, reversibly, and in a way that retains some measure of coherence with reality? Furthermore, how does one localize that window to a specific place in the mind's eye, like one would a toast' or notification on their smartphone? Those are the questions I think DARPA is asking.
Optic
Our purpose here is to describe something that is no less than an open-ended solicitation for an impossibly futuristic transhumanist device. What better way to do that then to submit such a proposal ourselves? To that end, we would start with the premise that any implant with the capability to generate part or all of a visuosphere should first and foremost do no harm' to the user. [on the contrary, use these things to completely & wholistically destroy thru' pain, fear & trauma, direct psyche and phys torture] To be consistent with that ideal, one would have to be crazy to use anything like the currently-envisioned devices that are simply plunged into the cortex proper itself.
The most advanced cortex implants money can now buy are made by a company called Blackrock [that would be ironic one of my favourite films, Bad Day at Black Rock'; don't remember any unusual' refs tho' when I've watched it]. Their devices are behind some of the most successful brain-computer interfaces that have been used to date. They can do once-fantastical things like get paralyzed people to command a robotic arm to give them food or drink. But at the end of the day, these are not forever devices; when these pincushion arrays are eventually removed from the cortex, they leave their mark.
What we would propose instead is not to stimulate the cortical gray matter, but rather the white matter, the axons that project out of the cortex. The reasons for this would be as follows:
1. Safety. Axonal overstimulation is more survivable for the cell. You may kill the axon, or just that axon branch, but generally not the whole neuron. In principle and practice, the so-called initial segments and periodically spaced nodes of axons are much more excitable and therefore controlled by lower currents. The new optocapacitance' technique we recently discussed is a good example of a way to stimulate axons without high currents or questionable optogenetic manipulations.
Lateralventricle
2. Access. A neuron's activity is accessible at each point along the axon, rather than just at one point near the cell body. That means you can potentially get two or more redundant reads on a cell to determine the direction and potential connectivity of its projection. To actually target axons relevant for vision, the place you want to put your hardware is inside the lateral ventricles of the brain. The axons that bring information from the thalamus (and ultimately the retina) to the visual cortex line the walls of this area. Furthermore, the return projections, which is what you may really want to target to keep the primary visual inputs unmolested, is actually 10x numerically enriched relative to the upstream projection.
optic radiations
3. Reversibility. If companies have learned anything in the neural implant business, it's that there is no real market for brain implants for just the few handicapped persons that need them most. Just ask anyone walking around today with a useless orphan brain implant manufactured by a now-defunct company. A successful implant business needs to make implants that are for everyman. That means that when they are taken out, it's back to business as usual for the brain. An implant that targets white matter axons from inside the ventricles can not only be easily removed, but also the cell it accesses doesn't even have to know it is there when it is being used. The neuron can go on integrating local visual cortex information on its dendrites and sending out its own pulses. But the implant can intercept them, commandeer them, and change them to whatever it desires all with the cell body being no worse for the wear.
Obviously we have made several simplifying assumptions in all this. But the idea of a white-matter access point for visual, memory, or any other implants is an idea whose time has come [audio, visual, video, cognitive', read and feed/feed and read, wi-fi, hi-fi bullshit bingo']. The return visual projections we mentioned specifically above do have their own important unique role in the visual system that would need to be taken into consideration in the design of any implant. However, when compared with the alternative of blasting away at the visual cortex itself, targeting these anatomically defined byways first would seem like a good initial strategy. We would claim that any research effort that does not recognize and begin with these obvious truths, is devoid of any real focus, and ultimately, perhaps even bogus.
[And the fantacists say "People have to be responsible for their actions" - would that it were so]
This tiny electronic mesh sensor is thin and flexible enough to be injected into the brain and gentle enough to integrate fully with brain cells, making human cyborgs a possibilityLieber Research Group, Harvard University
Scientists from China and the US have found a pioneering way to inject a tiny electronic mesh sensor into the brain that fully integrates with cerebral matter and enables computers to monitor brain activity.
Researchers from Harvard and the National Center for Nanoscience and Technology in Beijing have succeeded in inventing a flexible electrical circuit that fits inside a 0.1mm-diameter glass syringe in a water-based solution.
When injected into the brains of mice, the mesh unfurled to 30 times its size and mouse brain cells grew around the mesh, forming connections with the wires in the flexible mesh circuit. The biochemical mouse brain completely accepted the mechanical component and integrated with it without any damage being caused to the mouse.
The mice who received the implants are thriving and while today they need to be connected by a wire to the computer so their brain activity can be monitored, in the future this could be wireless, and the same technique could be used to integrate an electric mesh with a human brain.
The research, entitled Syringe-injectable electronics, is published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. [surely not easy to covertly surgically implant devices'; aside from the oddly straight 18"-2' horizontal line of a blood smear on my mattress one morning in 2012, I've noticed nothing]
What is neural lace?
Neural lace is a concept first coined in The Culture, a series of sci-fi books written by Iain M Banks [old frequent ref, bank/banks], where humans living on another planet install genetically engineered glands in their brains that can secrete stimulants, psychedelics and sedatives any time they like.
The concept has proved so popular that even the Halo video game plotlines feature soldiers who have had neural lace implanted into the base of their skulls, so they show up on radar as friends or foes. [I've had pipsqueak' refs, ie. old Battle of Britain era, term for IFF transponder several times, closely followed by a copper walking passed and a single beep' being emitted from him]
At the moment, electric shock treatment is available for patients suffering from severe muscle spasms, whereby long wires are inserted deep into the brain, but this approach is only used in worst case scenarios, as any type of incision risks damaging the brain. [a lot of this research claims Parkinsons disease as a motive; I get a lot of muscle spasms as per apophenic references]
But if the neural lace is able to completely integrate with the human brain, this would enable doctors to treat all sorts of neurodegenerative diseases that are currently difficult to cure.
The beginning of the true human cyborgs
But there's also the sci-fi element of cyborgs humans that have electronic parts in them becoming a reality, as well as the concept of humans having brains that can instantly tap into infinite knowledge, such as the plot in the Scarlett Johansson film Lucy.
So-called cyborgs do exist in the world, but only to the extent of being patients fitted with bionic limbs or people who choose to have microchips implanted into their bodies, whereas an electronic mesh in the brain connected to a computer would be another ballpark completely. [Seems likely]
According to The Smithsonian, the US Air Force has funded part of the study as part of its Cyborgcell programme, which wants to create small-scale electronics for the "performance enhancement" of cells.
Charles Lieber [both refs], a nanotechnologist at Harvard University and co-author of the study, said: "We're trying to blur the distinction between electronic circuits and neural circuits."
More about neural-machine research
· Electric dreams: If we download our knowledge and neural connections to a computer will that be us?
· Paralysed woman flies F-35 fighter jet using only her mind
· User Intention Decoding: £20 Camera System Lets You Control a Wheelchair With Your Eyes
· DARPA Cortical Modem connects brain directly to computer for 'electronic telepathy and telekinesis'
· BrainGate brings wireless computer mind control to paralysed people
DARPA dreams: cortical modems and neural RAMplants for restoring active memory - http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:afI1Q6FWJh4J:http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/20371...=1&vwsrc=0
- By John Hewitt on April 28, 2015 at 1:53 pm
The solicitation is for a two-year research program to develop what they are calling RAM Replay, or implants for Restoring Active Memory'. This concept has not been hatched in full form out of thin air, but rather builds on a succession of recent projects to build an interface that is active at the level of the conscious mind a cognitive implant, if you will. Just this February DARPA sponsored a meeting in the Silicon Valley area where they discussed futuristic conceptions for what they call a cortical modem.
In its rawest form, they imagine such a cortical modem might be a $10 device the size of a couple of coins. It would enable a visual impression to be perceived by appropriate stimulation of the visual cortex. [I had this in late 2011/early 2012, at night, eyes shut, and the fractured, shard-like fractal' across my right eye in the colours of oil on water that I've mentioned, I suspect was the same, daylight eyes open; they seem to have this thing' about coercing people into gouging-out their own eyes] That's a tall order, but perhaps a bit more modest then their previous REMIND (Restorative Encoding Memory Integration Neural Device) project, which would be nothing short of a full-blown memory prosthesis that jacks into the hippocampus.
For various reasons, the idea of an implant to restore memories in the sense of actually reconstructing lost memories is not just premature, but downright preposterous. Once a memory is gone, anything put back could hardly be reliable. The more modest goal restoring the ability to store memories would be difficult enough even if one had access to the entire brain, to say nothing of the difficulty of trying to do it just from the hippocampus alone. [Oddly enough, they' seem more intent on destruction, not creation or restoration. All the masses of PTSD' refs I've had, seem to be about creating it, presumably under the guise of curing' it, which has a certain logic]
On the other hand, a mere replay of some event, in the form of a visual overlay with the resolution of, say, a digital alarm clock, might be something one could work with. At this point we would need a more descriptive term for exactly what it is we are talking about. If we restrict ourselves out of convenience to deal with vision alone, and reserve the term virtual reality to mean those artificially presented external simulations that replace our normal visual world, then the combination of normal vision and virtual reality is already something we are familiar with. That would simply be a visual overlay or a HUD' [ref "the mirror has two faces"], a heads up display.
But here we are not talking about an overlay for the eye, but rather an internal display manufactured from the wetware of the brain itself. That totality, i.e. normal vision, plus any virtual reality overlay, plus internally generated visual perceptions, we would propose for our purposes here to call the visuosphere'. How does one then create a visuosphere, and do it safely, reversibly, and in a way that retains some measure of coherence with reality? Furthermore, how does one localize that window to a specific place in the mind's eye, like one would a toast' or notification on their smartphone? Those are the questions I think DARPA is asking.
Optic
Our purpose here is to describe something that is no less than an open-ended solicitation for an impossibly futuristic transhumanist device. What better way to do that then to submit such a proposal ourselves? To that end, we would start with the premise that any implant with the capability to generate part or all of a visuosphere should first and foremost do no harm' to the user. [on the contrary, use these things to completely & wholistically destroy thru' pain, fear & trauma, direct psyche and phys torture] To be consistent with that ideal, one would have to be crazy to use anything like the currently-envisioned devices that are simply plunged into the cortex proper itself.
The most advanced cortex implants money can now buy are made by a company called Blackrock [that would be ironic one of my favourite films, Bad Day at Black Rock'; don't remember any unusual' refs tho' when I've watched it]. Their devices are behind some of the most successful brain-computer interfaces that have been used to date. They can do once-fantastical things like get paralyzed people to command a robotic arm to give them food or drink. But at the end of the day, these are not forever devices; when these pincushion arrays are eventually removed from the cortex, they leave their mark.
What we would propose instead is not to stimulate the cortical gray matter, but rather the white matter, the axons that project out of the cortex. The reasons for this would be as follows:
1. Safety. Axonal overstimulation is more survivable for the cell. You may kill the axon, or just that axon branch, but generally not the whole neuron. In principle and practice, the so-called initial segments and periodically spaced nodes of axons are much more excitable and therefore controlled by lower currents. The new optocapacitance' technique we recently discussed is a good example of a way to stimulate axons without high currents or questionable optogenetic manipulations.
Lateralventricle
2. Access. A neuron's activity is accessible at each point along the axon, rather than just at one point near the cell body. That means you can potentially get two or more redundant reads on a cell to determine the direction and potential connectivity of its projection. To actually target axons relevant for vision, the place you want to put your hardware is inside the lateral ventricles of the brain. The axons that bring information from the thalamus (and ultimately the retina) to the visual cortex line the walls of this area. Furthermore, the return projections, which is what you may really want to target to keep the primary visual inputs unmolested, is actually 10x numerically enriched relative to the upstream projection.
optic radiations
3. Reversibility. If companies have learned anything in the neural implant business, it's that there is no real market for brain implants for just the few handicapped persons that need them most. Just ask anyone walking around today with a useless orphan brain implant manufactured by a now-defunct company. A successful implant business needs to make implants that are for everyman. That means that when they are taken out, it's back to business as usual for the brain. An implant that targets white matter axons from inside the ventricles can not only be easily removed, but also the cell it accesses doesn't even have to know it is there when it is being used. The neuron can go on integrating local visual cortex information on its dendrites and sending out its own pulses. But the implant can intercept them, commandeer them, and change them to whatever it desires all with the cell body being no worse for the wear.
Obviously we have made several simplifying assumptions in all this. But the idea of a white-matter access point for visual, memory, or any other implants is an idea whose time has come [audio, visual, video, cognitive', read and feed/feed and read, wi-fi, hi-fi bullshit bingo']. The return visual projections we mentioned specifically above do have their own important unique role in the visual system that would need to be taken into consideration in the design of any implant. However, when compared with the alternative of blasting away at the visual cortex itself, targeting these anatomically defined byways first would seem like a good initial strategy. We would claim that any research effort that does not recognize and begin with these obvious truths, is devoid of any real focus, and ultimately, perhaps even bogus.
[And the fantacists say "People have to be responsible for their actions" - would that it were so]
Martin Luther King - "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
Albert Camus - "The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion".
Douglas MacArthur — "Whoever said the pen is mightier than the sword obviously never encountered automatic weapons."
Albert Camus - "Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear."
Albert Camus - "The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion".
Douglas MacArthur — "Whoever said the pen is mightier than the sword obviously never encountered automatic weapons."
Albert Camus - "Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear."