It happened to me several time as I took questions after a talk on the future of technology to answer the question: “will we ever be able to insert a chip in our brain to increase our intelligence, to know things without having to study them…?”. And I always replied that no, that will remain impossible.

There are many reasons for this claim, and I should say some are rooted in the (false) preconception that “thoughts” are something different from matter. Although scientists are now convinced that thoughts are the phenotype of a connection network of neurones it remains a difficult step to take and digest. Most reasons, though, are technical and they related to the sheer complexity of our brain and of the huge diversity of brains (that is you cannot pin point a set of neurones and say: “those are the one containing the concept of -apple-” and even go farther saying that those same neurones will be present in any other brain having the concept of “apple”.

What we have been able to do, through brain-computer-interfaces, BCI, is to provide stimuli to a brain to activate it in a certain direction (it is something that substitute our sensorial system in creating inputs, it does not substitute brain functions). We have also been able, more so in these last years, to interpret some brain outputs and activate artificial limbs. Again, it is not substituting parts of the brain but work at the edges of the motor system.

I remember the words of a country song saying “you can lead a heart to love but you can’t make it fall”. Well, it compares pretty well with the state of our capabilities with brains….

Are we going to end up with a tattoo on our front saying "Intel Inside"?

But now I read a news that is forcing me to reconsider the boundary of impossibility. Progress in these last few years has indeed started to fuzzy those boundaries. There are several technical advances that are blurring the limits of what can be done:

- connectomics is progressing towards a complete mapping of neural circuits. A full brain connectivity map can be expected within this decade

- protonics has found a way for direct communications between chips and cells

- fMRI is making clearer what is going on in the brain

- nano-instruments (nanoelectrodes) can now pinpoint the activity of single neurones.

- progress in computational capacity and in the management of trillion of data

The paper reports on an experiment done by researchers at the Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. They have managed to implant a chip to retrieve information from one part of the brain of a monkey and pass it on to another part overcoming a broken link. A little bit like retrieving a memory of something to act on it.

Sam Deadwyler, one of the team researchers, is speculating that in just a few years this kind of chips may find application in patients having brain disorders. The chip would encode some reasoning engine derived from healthy brains that could be used to overcome the disability of that brain. Patients suffering from a variety of disorders may benefit from this.
And looking down the lane, think about  those times when you had that name on the tip of your tongue and just couldn’t come to grasp it. Well, may be a chip of this kind, in the future, may come to your help.

This is something completely new, with respect to what has been done so far in terms of brain chip interactions. Although we are still very far from the day when one will go on the web to download the history of the Roman empire to upload it on his brain for that school test coming up tomorrow it is getting just a bit more difficult to declare that such a day will never ever come!

Yesterday I posted a news with progress towards a symbiotic eye. Today let me point you to the capability to implant a chip on the brain to detect “thoughts” and actuate them through a robot.

The news is on Wired and it is surely worth taking a look since it represents the completion of the interaction from the brain to the machine.

The news reports of a patient that suffers from a paralyses since 1998. She has become part of a team of researcher in 2005, trying to create a link from her brain to a robot. A chip was implanted on her brain to capture the electrical waves generated by her thoughts. These waves are decoded by a computer into signals to a robot that will act according to the patient thoughts. The diagram shows the various steps involved in this feat. Never before scientist have managed to move directly from a thought to its implementation by a robot.

Clearly, it is an encounter at a middle point between Cathy and the robot. She had to learn to think in a certain way to generate waves that can be recognized by the computer, but still it is an amazing result. It will be a very long time before we will be able to read your mind, and may be this is just too scaring to be desirable. But for people like Cathy, having this kind of disabilities, technology evolution means a lot.

Science fiction has imagined a time when our brains will be “on the web” wirelessly connected and has shown the various twists that may result. I remember a book from Hofstadter, Mind’s I, dealing with this subject. But that was just science fiction, nothing to be concerned about.

However, I just read a news from Technology Review reporting on a device created by Kendall Research, a tiny, 3 grams, device that can be implanted in the brain and that generates a last beam to stimulate, selectively, cells. It receives signals wirelessly as well as the power it needs to work. This latter is provided by super capacitors that are embedded in the lower part o the cage where the animal is placed.

Biotech is providing tools to insert in a cell proteins that can be triggered by a beam of light at a given frequency (as it is the case in the eye retina where rhodopsin intercepts photons and sends a signal). This is what is being done by researchers. Specific brain cells are conditioned to respond to light and through this device they can be triggered.

There is expectation to be able to use this device to learn more, first, about the inner working of the brain, and then to be able to provide very specific signal to the brain to counterbalance trauma or disease effects on the brain. This latter may take several more years but it is a very exciting perspective. Using a beam of light can provide for very precise control of the brain, contrary to using electrical probes, since the electrical signal spreads to billions of brain cells at a time.

There is a fundamental difference between us, humans, and a computer. We understand, and want to understand, what is going on. You can spend your entire life time punching 2+2 on a computer keyboard and any time it will come back to you with “4″. Try that on a person, or a kid, and after the 2nd time you will probably get as answer: Hey didn’t you hear me? Not to mention what you would get if you choose to keep on asking…

Researchers are trying to inject this sense of understanding in computers as well and they call this “cognitive computing”.

The Golden Gate chip announced by IBM

IBM has just announced the availability of a chip that is supposed to do just that.

It mimics the behavior of neurons and synapses in an animal neural system (that is also our brain) and has the goal of being able to learn and behave differently depending on its “experience”.

They are not programmed to execute but to formulate hypotheses and behave accordingly.

The work involves quite a bit of researchers both in the software and in the hardware areas and has been funded by the DARPA that is now funding further research with 21 million $.

The goal is not just to mimic animal neural system in terms of behavior but also in terms of low energy consumption. Our brain performs trillion of operations using a few W of power. A computer needs thousands, millions more times that power.

The creation of an electronic brain is still in the future and still has some science fiction connotation. But for sure we are making progress and, more important, these progresses allows the development of more applications  and transform our ambient into a more responsive one.

The Internet of Thing and with Things will make use of this progress.

Get a better feeling by watching the IBM video:

Well, it is not exactly like that but headlines have to be catchy, don’t they?

Brain Implant Chip (rats only!)

Researchers at the Wake Forest University have developed a custom chip that can improve memory in rats. Although it is nothing like an extra storage for the brain it is indeed an interesting development since it points out that we are really starting to have a clearer view on how the brain works and we are starting to interact with its processes.

The researchers monitored the hippocampus, the area of the brain responsible for converting short term memory into long term one, of several rats and learned the mechanisms used by their brain to remember certain action, in the specific the pushing of one of two levers.

The implanted chip is able to pick up signals from the short term memory and through an algorithm stimulate the hippocampus so that such memories are stored in the long term area. There is not, at least so far, an understanding of the “language” used to store information in the short and long term memory but, as the researchers are pointing out, it does not matter since the chip acts like a translator from Chinese to Russian without understanding what it is translating.

Although this experiment demonstrates the progress we have been able to make both in the understanding of the brain and in the creation of algorithms that can mimic the brain internal communications we are extremely far for a clinical application. We can today monitor a single neuron but we know that a single memory, like the flavor of the ice cream I ate yesterday, involves millions of neurons (that are also involved in hundreds of thousands of other memories).

Hence, it will be quite some time before we can plug in some extra Gigs in our brain. Some scientists are arguing that it will never be possible to have a machine thinking like a human because human thinking is different from what can be created in silicon at a fundamental level. This goes back to the critique of Artificial Intelligence, a theme that was hot in the past and that is now being rediscussed.

However, never say never….

I participate today in a group aiming at looking at various aspects with a 20 years horizon.

I’ll jot down some of the ideas that are offered here to discussion.

Moore’s law seems to remain valid, with some technological twists, for the next 20 years with storage going down to the molecule level (using benzene molecules, thus ensuring a 100 fold increase in storage density) and processing getting boosted by quantum computing and molecular computing. Cloud computing will make up for any slow down in processing growth at the single processor level. Brain like chips are also on the horizon, the present prototype sporting 384 neurons and 100,000 connections will be improved to reach 200,000 neurons and 50 million connections by 2011 and reach 1 billion neurons and 100,000 billion connections (synapses) by 2013. Brain equivalent chips are expected by 2040 but brain like capacity through clouds is expected by 2020.

All this evolution is coming from interactions in an open ecosystem and in turns generate opportunities for many (new) players.

As Kurzweil said, the singularity is near.