BRAIN HACK

Gizmondo reports that rapid developments in brain-machine interfacing and neuroprosthetics are revolutionizing the way we treat paralyzed people, but the same technologies could eventually be put to more generalized use—a development that will turn many of us into veritable cyborgs. Before we get to that point, however, we’ll need to make sure these neural devices are safe, secure, and as hacker-proof as possible.

Researchers from the Wyss Center for Bio and Neuroengineering in Geneva Switzerland have published a new Policy Forum paper to raise awareness of this new breed of neurotechnologies, and the various ways they can be abused. Importantly, the researchers come up with some ways to mitigate potential problems before they arise.

No doubt, work in neurotech is proceeding apace. Researchers are developing brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) that are enabling quadriplegics to move prosthetic limbs by using their own thoughts to patients who cannot communicate normally to spell out messages from mental impulses. With each passing breakthrough, we’re learning a little bit more about the brain and how it works. Most importantly, these tools are giving agency and independence back to amputees and paralyzed individuals.

Ghost in the Shell is a anime that broke new science fiction ground by imagining a world where human beings routinely implanted cybernetic modules to enhance their physical limitations. An individual with a cyberbrain could connect to the world wide web easier than logging in your social media site.

Just as Star Trek spawned many 21st Century inventions (including the iPad and smart phone hand held communication devices), the concept of technology upgrades to human beings is driving medical research and development.

There were numerous theories about what LOST was about. A few believed that the entire program was a fantasy inside the head of an individual(s), whether it be a coma patient, a dying patient, a mentally ill person or a computer simulation (like Avatar immersion.)

If one can access the human brain (which still is the most complex organic "computer" known to man), then in theory it is possible to hack it. We hack the brain all the time. When we use simple aspirin, we are hacking the brain's pain receptors to shut down. When we use recreational drugs, we hack the brain's pleasure zones to produce highs.

So it is theoretically possible to hack a human brain to take over or control the human mind. And once that occurs, one could send messages, images, sensations to a person's conscious state that could include everything that we saw in LOST.

Would such a program have any therapeutic effect? Maybe. If you had an individual who was unable to move, communicate or in a vegetative state, some people (parents) may want to have them (their child) at least "experience" humanity even if it is not reality but an elaborate illusion. Even elaborate illusions can create strong memories. For example, people still fondly recall when they first saw the original Star Wars movie.

If LOST was merely a study in character development, then a computer simulation run through a normal or abnormal subject could lead to interesting results, like all the story lines in the show.

COMPUTER FUSION

Several theories describe the possibility that LOST was merely a technological construct of digital ties in the brain or brains of the main characters. A neuro-network fused together to share dreams, memories, fears and nightmares. The island story was merely the expunged data of a wired community in a bizarre experiment.

These theories may not be that far fetched after all. Science is continuing to press computer technology to new limits. Currently, it is trying to be integrated more into every person's daily life. From powerful hand held smart phones to wearable technology (like fit bracelets), humans are being merged into data collectors.

Google's Director of Engineering, Ray Kurzweil, who has made 147 predictions since the 1990s and has a success rate of 86 per cent, stated recently in a Daily Mail (UK) article that within the next 12 years the human brain will be directly connected to computers.

Kurzweil says when we live in a cybernetic society we will have computers in our brains and machines will be smarter than human beings.  He claims this is already happening with technology - especially with our addiction to our phones - and says the next step is to wire this technology into our brains.

Technological singularity is when carbon and silicon-based intelligence will merge to form a single global consciousness. "By 2029, computers will have human-level intelligence," Kurzweil said in the  interview with SXSW.

He believes that implanting computers in our brains will improve us."We're going to get more neocortex, we're going to be funnier, we're going to be better at music. We're going to be sexier," he said. 

But once computers are integrated directly into a person's brain, people can be networked like machines. The fantasy world of Ghost in the Shell seems to be the premise of this scientific research.  People will have the option of swapping their internal organs with sophisticated machine parts. 

But this begs to ultimate question: would this end our humanity?

BRAIN TO BRAIN CONNECTION

 Image Credit: Stocco et. al in PLOS One

Mental Floss had an interesting article on brain thought transfer research.

Imagine a future where you could transmit a unique feeling, a hard-to-translate thought process, or precise motor movements via a neural pattern from your brain to someone else’s brain, sharing what can’t otherwise be easily communicated. This is the goal of new research conducted at the University of Washington (UW).


In the UW experiment, test subjects played a 20 Questions–style game through a direct brain-to-brain connection, and accurately guessed what object was on the other person’s mind 72 percent of the time.


“We wanted to show that this brain-to-brain interface can be used to do something highly interactive and collaborative,” says lead author Andrea Stocco, an assistant professor of psychology and researcher at UW’s Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences.


"The function of the experiment is conceptually simple, Stocco says. Two people sit apart in different buildings. One, the respondent, is wearing a cap connected to electroencephalography machine (EEG) that records electrical brain activity. A magnetic coil is placed behind the head of the other participant, the inquirer. The coil delivers “transcranial magnetic stimulation.” The respondent is given an object to think of, much like in the game Twenty Questions. Then the inquirer chooses questions to send to the respondent via the Internet. The respondent answers the questions using only their brainwaves, by thinking the answer “yes” or “no.”


“Yes and no buttons are designed with lights around them to generate different visual signals, which we can pick up by analyzing brain waves in the visual part of the brain,” Stocco says.


These yes and no answers send a signal to the inquirer and activate the magnetic coil connected to the inquirer’s cap. Only a “yes” answer generates enough stimuli to activate the visual cortex, thus allowing the inquirer to see a subtle flash of light, or “phosphene.”


"We have a lot of control conditions to limit chance and use complicated math to measure the results," Stocco says. “After, we measured performance and found the rate of success was much higher than what would happen by chance."


Participants were able to guess the correct object 72 percent of the time, compared with just 18 percent in the control rounds.


Stocco hopes that this technology could one day be used to “transfer more complicated things” between brains, like emotions but also brain states, such as signals from an alert person to a sleepy one, and other forms of nonverbal communication. “There is an entire realm of things we have a hard time communicating,” Stocco says. He gives the example of one day taking an ADHD student who struggles to focus, and linking them up to the brain of a "neurotypical"person who has good focus. In theory, the calm neural pattern of the neurotypical student could perhaps be transmitted to the ADHD student to help him focus.


“Person-to-person transfer is a long way off, but you would be amazed by the progress,” he says, pointing out that wireless EEG headsets are already available for use in gaming. “We can record brain activity, but no one has been able to transfer it until now. In all kinds of different experiences, the neurosignals recorded could become a shortcut.”


This research has points associated with science fiction stories, such as Ghost in the Shell, where the human mind was linked to the world wide web to communicate directly with other minds.


In LOST, one theory had a "collective consciousness" between all of the main characters. The idea that the characters were not actually experiencing the island adventure but their minds were put into a virtual experiment was a viable explanation of why everyone survived a mid-plane crash and the unexplainable mysteries of the island as being made-up fictional thoughts, nightmares and fantasies.


A direct mental gateway from your mind to your friend's mind would eliminate the need for verbal and nonverbal communication. In some ways, our society is moving toward that direction as more and more young adults rely upon texting messages than actually talking to their friends. If you take away the the requirement of physical activity of texting, and place everyone in their own imaginations, the specter of LOST could come to life.

HARD WIRED BRAIN NET

A recent story in WIRED shows how close science is to science fiction. And the sci-fi is the Star Trek collective mind think called the Borg.

The premise is simple. Brains work better than computers. They’re faster, more creative, and can store a vast amount of accessible memory. So computer science has tried to emulate the brain to create faster, better and near human computers. One way to do this is to network brains.

Researchers at Duke University announced they have wired animal brains together so they could collaborate on simple tasks. Network monkeys displayed motor skills, and networked rats performed computations.


Lead researcher,  Miguel Nicolelis, is a neurobiologist who has been wiring animal brains to machines since 1999, when they connected a rat to a robot arm, says this is the first time that anybody has directly wired together multiple brains to complete a task—a so-called brain-to-brain interface.

To build the monkey network, Nicolelis’ team first implanted electrodes in rhesus macaque brains, positioned to pick up signals from a few hundred neurons. Then they connected two or three of the macaques to a computer with a display showing a CG monkey arm. The monkeys were supposed to control the arm, directing it toward a target like a boat crew rows forward. When the monkeys got the arm to hit the target, the researchers rewarded them with juice. The monkeys don’t think “move my arm” and the arm moves—they learn what kind of thinking makes the arm move and keep doing that—because monkeys want the juice reward.

The rat study was even weirder as it involved the transfer of data.  The neuroscientists directly wired four rats’ brains together—using the implants to both collect and transmit information about neural activity—so one rat that responded to touch, for example, could pass on their knowledge of that stimulus to another rat. Then the researchers set the rats to a bunch of different abstract tasks—guessing whether it might rain from temperature and air pressure data, for example, or telling the difference between different kinds of touch-stimuli. The brain collectives always did at least as well on those tests as an individual rat would have, and sometimes even better.

The goal of the research is see if networking brains might help accelerate medical rehab in people who have neurological damage such as relearning motor skills after a stroke or brain injury. Normally, this rehabilitation is a long, painstaking process. Nicolelis wants to learn if a healthy person’s brain could help a stroke patient re-learn how to move a paralyzed leg faster than current therapies do.

A few LOST theories speculated that the real premise of the show was a vast neuro-network linking various individuals together in a vivid, digital universe like Ghost in the Shell. Memories, emotions, experiences, goals, aspirations, fears and knowledge combine to be one's ghost in an alternative, cyber-reality.

If the main characters were not "real" in the sense of being humans surviving a plane crash on a mysterious island but virtual selves caught up in an illusion of surviving a plane crash on an island filled with the collective memories, emotions, experiences, goals, aspirations, and fears - - - that could create a very real looking, complex world. It would also explain how certain continuity errors, mistakes and criss crossed fantasy, science and sci-fi elements could co-exist in the same main story line.

The idea that the characters are actually institutionalized individuals connected by brain electrodes is not a new theory. Some speculated that this set up would be found in a mental institution (where Hurley went) or a medical research facility (like DHARMA) or even a prison hospital ward where illicit medical experimentation on mental patients used to be performed in secret. 

If this was the true premise, sedated or coma patients were linked together to share their dreams and nightmares in shared space, would this make the show experience any different to you? Would the ending make more sense to you?