The impending cognitive revolution

Discussion in 'Human Science' started by francois, Jan 9, 2011.

  1. francois Schwat? Registered Senior Member

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    I think it's likely we're going to see things begin to get really crazy in the next five years. I'm talking about changes which will result from a vastly increased knowledge set about how our brain works.

    The brain is that one object, which hangs in space, that we forget about, but is always there whether we sleep or not, silently churning out calculations. Our experience of life--our thoughts, feelings, perceptions, whims, everything--is caused by our brain. Its availability is so high and the continuity of our perception is so great that we forget how fragile we actually are. That is until we experience a neurodegenerative disease or serious head trauma. As brain subsystems fail and our perception of reality distorts, the illusion of continuity goes away. It becomes clear that the grotesque, smushy organ floating in space really is in the center of everything. As humans, it is undeniably what makes or breaks us.

    Technology is continually getting closer to us. It is a pretty clear trend. We're at the point now that we have tiny wireless computers tethered to our bodies at all times. We can now communicate with our computers via natural hand gestures. There is no need for a mouse or keyboard any more. We're very close to having a lab-on-a-chip technology which will allow us to gather all kinds of statistics about our body processes in realtime. We now have cochlear implants, which interface with the auditory nerve in order to restore hearing. We now have retinal implants--an array of photoreceptors that are implanted directly on the retina, which interface with the optic nerve--to restore vision.

    It is my argument that the closer technology gets to the brain, the more disruptive it will be. In the coming years, technology will not just get closer to the brain. It will be involved in engineering the processes of the brain itself. There's no way we can know how disruptive this will be, because we've only ever been able to change our brain processes in coarse, ineffective ways. By altering our brains, we will not be the same people as before. We'll see things and hear things differently. We may even suddenly be able to have thoughts that were not before possible. Then what?

    The reason this is on my mind is because we are now on the cusp of a revolution in cognition. For a long time, the brain has been "hands off." We could only understand it in pretty simple terms, as in "Well, this part of the guy's brain is damaged, and now he can't move his left hand, so I guess we kinda know what this section of the brain does." It's a difficult subject to learn about, compared to something like, say, genetics. The reason we've had so much success in understanding genetics compared to cognition is because the information is easier to put into computers for analysis.

    But now we've got pretty sophisticated brain imaging techniques that we didn't have before, such as Diffusion Tensor Imaging, a new type of fMRI, which allows us to glean more information from neuronal activity via detecting water diffusion in the cell.

    With DTI and other brain imaging techniques, information about the brain is becoming easier to parse with computers. Now it's possible to advance the field by feeding that information into today's massively powerful computers. That is what the National Institutes of Health is doing with their Human Connectome Project, whose name has a similar ring to the Human Genome Project of the 90's.

    The goal of the Human Genome Project was to identify all of the human genes and their place on the chromosomes. The goal of the Human Connectome Project is to map the connections of the brain and figure out how it's all connected. This will be a potentially computationally intensive task because the brain contains about a quadrillion connections between brain cells. That's a high number.

    My own feeling is that this project has a massive amount of potential because progress depends on the speed of our computers. There are three new technologies which promise to increase the speed of current computers dramatically: graphene, memristor, and nanophotonics. According to IBM, nanophotonics is going to enable exaflop supercomputing, whereas right now, our best supercomputer is at three petaflops. Nanophotonics by itself could increase computer power by a thousand times. Graphene is supposed to increase computer speed by about a thousand times. I have no idea what the hell memristor is going to do, but I like saying the word. When all of these technologies are combined, we may well see a violation of Moore's Law and processors will get faster at a much higher rate than we expected.

    This will enable great progress in connectomics in the same way that increased computer power enabled the Human Genome Project to be completed ahead of schedule. When we understand the brain, new technologies will be conjured and weird, unpredictable things will happen. This may happen within five years.
     
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  3. NMSquirrel OCD ADHD THC IMO UR12 Valued Senior Member

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    i have always wished i could have a camera in my brain to take pictures of things i have seen/experienced in the moment..by the time i went and booted up a real camera the moment would be gone any any attempt to reproduce it would miss some things...

    like yesterday when i moved my foot and the cat darn near hit the ceiling..
    or when my granddaughter says something cute or funny..

    then i could network my brain to photobucket to share..
    do you think they will have the knowledge to program a registry cleaner for the brain?

    i'm not worried about someone hacking into my brain to look for stuff..that requires them knowing where to look..and my filing system is pretty strange..
     
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  5. francois Schwat? Registered Senior Member

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    I think it's possible.

    I know there's been a recent development with fMRIs in which it is possible to reconstruct an image a person saw, by looking at brain activity--specifically the flow of blood. Isn't that crazy? By tracking the flow of blood in the brain, it's possible to construct an image of what a person is seeing, completely bypassing the eyes. If that's possible, it may be possible to see what people are seeing during dream states, or when recalling images.
     
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  7. jmpet Valued Senior Member

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    I am more interested in stem cell reserarch to ultimately make a unique serum we take which makes us 18 years old again. If you're cutting all the brakes on technology, might as well throw that in as well.

    I think immortality is within our grasp. I think the youth of today will be able to save a portion of their mental capacity forever digitally.

    Guess that makes me "the intermediate generation": I grew up before computers and will die before they take over- perhaps I am the last of my kind to have to actually TYPE OUT my words- maybe there's a way to do it 100 times faster. (But then again, I am a fast typer and believe the process of coherent writing has merit over the non-stop babble of a farting brain, but I digress.)

    Maybe I am the last "lost generation" in a future history where everyone knows their great-great grandparents intimately through digital technology... maybe I am the last generation we only have pictures to look back upon.

    I agree the future holds many wonders and most of them are digitally based, but I don't believe "they're coming to take us away".
     
  8. NMSquirrel OCD ADHD THC IMO UR12 Valued Senior Member

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    LOL..i just read this as we can store part of our self on a computer that interacts with us (like a smart house that you can talk to)..so when we get old and senile we can argue with ourselves..
    (Who said that!? where are you?!)

    hmm..idea for new thread..Do you want to be Immortal?
     

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