Your homework for the leisurely holiday weekend is at Caltech DNA and Natural Algorithms Group.
"The answer is yes, and all it takes is a few small DNA molecules."
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How to Build a DNA Brain
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/metavalent/~3/pqlQfCim-QY/1523
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- metavalent
- neuro-cogno
- biohacking
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The Secret Lives of the Brain
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/metavalent/~3/OW9m2QaC0lw/1517
“The conscious part is like a stowaway on a trans-atlantic steamship that is taking credit for the whole journey, without acknowledging the engineering underfoot. So, it’s like when you have and idea and you say, ‘oh, I just thought of something,’ it wasn’t you who thought of it, your brains been working on that for days or weeks, behind the scenes; churning things, consolidating information, trying things out; [pop!] finally it serves it up to you and you say, ‘hey, I’m a genius!’ But it wasn’t you that thought of it, right?” - David Eagleman, neuroscientist and author of Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain.
Oh, oh, now what, 19th century intellectual property status-quo defenders, “Protect IP Act,” and SOPA? Neurobiology says you don’t even get credit for what you thought was your own ideas! Nope! It’s all Open Source, Creative Commons. Sorry about that.
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- bci
- metavalent
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Cognitive Computing: 100,000x Cost Reduction Impact
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/metavalent/~3/WGTEFeVpo6s/1505
“Cognitive computing chips aim to reduce the cost of extracting information from ever changing spatial-temporal environments around us by an order of 100,000. Imagine the impact,” humans.
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Next: Neural Prosthetics
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/metavalent/~3/etWhRsDuKYA/1473
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Neurovigil’s iBrain: How long from Pong to Portal 2?
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/metavalent/~3/a8GAqtWlVWo/1465
Next, what to DO with all these capabilities, right? Granted, we’re talking on the order of Atari Pong video game resolutions here; however, it didn’t take long to go from Pong to Portal 2, right? iBrain promises to open a huge pipeline of data with its powerful but simple brain-reading tech, which is gaining traction thanks to technological advances. [Including] non-medicinal uses such as human-computer interfaces — in an earlier announcement, NeuroVigil noted, “We plan to make these kinds of devices available to the transportation industry, biofeedback, and defense. Applications regarding pandemics and bioterrorism are being considered but cannot be shared in this format.” And there’s even a popular line of kid’s toys that use an essentially similar technique, powered by NeuroSky sensors – themselves destined for future uses as games console controllers or even input devices for computers (Fast Company).
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- bci
- metavalent
- neuro-cogno
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Psychology of a techno-human cognitive network
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/metavalent/~3/5UKz1U2dzm0/1461
Oh oh. The normals have found us (Psychology Today) . Time to break camp and move forward again. In short, augmented cognition. Or, put another way, in a world where complexity is already overwhelming, and yet continues to accelerate, networked cognition is becoming increasingly critical: cognition as an emergent property of techno-human networks, rather than the individual Cartesian brains that we are all so proud of. [C]an components of a techno-human cognitive network (individual people, that is) understand the emergent cognitive products of that network? Can they hope to modify the output of the network in ways that they might prefer, for example to pursue and achieve morally desirable ends? Put at its most basic level, what is the psychology of a techno-human network? And, as a shout-out to the increasingly dysfunctional myth of the Cartesian individual, what is the effect on human psychology of the dawning realization that in some fundamental way, the world has grown too complex for us to understand it as individuals?
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- metavalent
- neuro-cogno
- cyborg
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The Internet of Brains: Evoking Eywa
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/metavalent/~3/9OdQ9Troy10/1418
Back in September, scientists decoded words from brain signals. It’s not a matter of if, but when inter-cortical cognition grids happens. Inter-cortical communication will completely disrupt the arc of human evolution. Odds. Are. You. Are. Not. Ready. Human. You’re every thought will be laid bare to all other minds on the grid. Lusts, fears, paranoia, confusion, all of it. Prior to going on-grid would be a good time to practice judge not, lest ye be judged. Prior to going on-grid would be a good time to practice putting idle synaptic cycles to better use in order to be found useful. Prior to going on-grid would be a good time to think about what substrate independence really means, psychologically. The Journal of Neural Engineering’s September issue is publishing Greger’s study showing the feasibility of translating brain signals into computer-spoken words. The University of Utah research team placed grids of tiny microelectrodes over speech centers in the brain of a volunteer with severe epileptic seizures. The man already had a craniotomy – temporary partial skull removal – so doctors could place larger, conventional electrodes to locate the source of his seizures and surgically stop them. Using the experimental microelectrodes, the scientists recorded brain signals as the patient repeatedly read each of 10 words that might be useful to a paralyzed person: yes, no, hot, cold, hungry, thirsty, hello, goodbye, more and less. Later, they tried figuring out which brain signals represented each of the 10 words. When they compared any two brain signals – such as those generated when the man said the words “yes” and “no” – they were able to distinguish brain signals for each word 76 percent to 90 percent of the time. SOURCE: EUREKALERT
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Biodigital Brain: human brain organically fused with computer chips
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/metavalent/~3/i9lceIC2JOE/1385
“Brain cells automatically connect to computer chips. They need no teaching, they just do it. I’m telling you history, my friends. You tell me, the future.” – Patrick Dixon
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Tomorrow: ASIM Experts Series on Brain Machine Interfacing
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/metavalent/~3/esPx1ec4xe4/1372
Max Hodak will give a talk in Teleplace tomorrow, October 17, 2010, at 10am PST (1pm EST, 6pm UK, 7pm CET). From CarbonCopies.org – Realistic routes to substrate independent minds. What is Advancing Substrate-Independent Minds (ASIM)? In the past the transferal of minds into computer-based systems has been rather vaguely referred to as ‘uploading’. However, those hoping to advance this multidisciplinary field of research prefer to use the term Advancing Substrate Independent Minds (ASIM), to emphasize a more scientific, and less science fiction approach to creating emulations of human brains in substrates other than the original biological substrate. The term ASIM captures the fact that there are several ways in which hardware and software may be used to run algorithms which mimic the human brain, and that there are many different approaches that can be used to realize this objective. Once you implement the functions originally carried out in one substrate in the computational hardware of another substrate you have achieved substrate-independence for those functions.
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Talking Brain in a Jar
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/metavalent/~3/NCf7EdPj1DY/
Popular Science: By measuring the electrical signals made in certain parts of the brain when its thinking of certain words, researchers could create a means to translate thoughts into speech. In an effort to unlock the speech capacity in patients who cannot speak because of so-called “locked-in syndrome,” University of Utah researchers have successfully demonstrated that they can translate brain signals into words using electrode grids placed beneath the skull. Sort of. The method leaves a lot of room for improvement, but it does prove out some technology that could make thought-to-speech technology more reliable for patients suffering from traumatic brain injuries or illnesses that render them unable to communicate with others. Using two grids of 16 microelectrodes placed over two regions of the brain known to generate human speech, the team was able to record brain signals for 10 useful words – yes, no, hot, cold, thirsty, hungry, goodbye, hello, more and less – and use that data to discern between any two words a patient was thinking between 76 and 90 percent of the time.
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‘shrooms may ease end-of-life anxiety
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/metavalent/~3/dxdk-5kwT0U/
Via CNN: Terminally ill cancer patients struggling with anxiety may get some relief from a guided “trip” on the hallucinogenic drug psilocybin, a new study suggests. During the psilocybin sessions, which lasted six hours, the patients lay on a couch and listened to music through headphones. By contrast [to placebo], one to three months after taking psilocybin the patients reported feeling less anxious and their overall mood had improved. By the six-month mark, the group’s average score on a common scale used to measure depression had declined by 30 percent, according to the study, which was published in the Archives of General Psychiatry. Notably, the psilocybin did not aggravate the patients’ anxiety or provoke any other unwanted effects besides a slight increase in blood pressure and heart rate.
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- metavalent
- neuro-cogno
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Neurotheology: Toward a New Neurospiritual Tradition
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/metavalent/~3/JCUN_GiDyWo/
“Just as Copernicus’s heliocentric notion of universe is now bedrock truth, the Neuro Revolution will bring about new ideas of human spirituality that will forever reshape our understanding of humanity’s role and place the universe. A quiet transformation has begun, albeit one that may take centuries to play out fully” (Lynch, 152. The Neuro Revolution.).
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What a Bird Brain: Or, Why Neurons Are Amazing
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/metavalent/~3/_lnJ6m-3i4A/
This morning I watched a bird — I believe a finch — in the back yard. He was making use of the bird house, which is quite small, featuring perhaps a 3/4″ hole for a front door.
This bird arrived on the perch with about a 4 inch long stick in it’s beak. Obviously, getting that in the front door didn’t go too well. Many birds are known tool users and problem solvers, and this very tiny clump of neurons knew enough to execute an Olympic, 2-inch horizontal perch hop with 1/2 twist, rotating 180 degrees and craning a tiny neck by sufficient additional measure to insert the long end of that stick into the house, then squeeze past and move inside to drag the stick inside.
Now, to my mind, that’s one hell of a computation problem to solve, so I took a minute to check out how the hell birds do that. Wikipedia is usually a good starting place: It seems that birds use a different part of their brain, the medio-rostral neostriatum/hyperstriatum ventrale (see also nidopallium), as the seat of their intelligence, and the brain-to-body size ratio of psittacines and corvines is actually comparable to that of higher primates. Interesting. So, just because the neocortex is the location of our highest human brain functions, that doesn’t necessarily place any restrictions upon neuronal capabilities in other regions or configurations, in general. This seems like an interesting avenue of inquiry for machine intelligence, because compared to what little computers can do today in terms of visual context construction, it would be quite a compliment to call any computer a total “bird brain.” Maybe when it comes to machine intelligence, or even modeling substrate independence for any kind of intelligence, we should consider learning to fly, before we walk.
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Emotiv Neuroheadset: You Think, Therefore You Can
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/metavalent/~3/VuEi_-vIf98/
This is too good for Researchers and Developers to not give them the free advertising. “The Emotiv EPOC is a high resolution, neuro-signal acquisition and processing wireless neuroheadset. It uses a set of sensors to tune into electric signals produced by the brain to detect player thoughts, feelings and expressions and connects wirelessly to most PCs.” Take advantage of the Emotiv EPOC neuroheadset to conduct EEG research. Join the Emotiv Research Community by licensing an Emotiv Software Development Kit (SDK) for research.
“The games application includes the first three games that have been developed: Emotipong, Cererbral Constructor, and Jedi Mind Trainer (WingRaise). Cortex Arcade will allow you to control the three games included using the Emotiv Epoc neuroheadset.” With Neurokey, ThinkTyping works. Remarks below about Neurokey from Russell Abbott, 02/03/2010 10:37:39 “I was thinking you could include predictive text mode, in a similar way to mobile phones. Reduce the number of keys and use a detection for each key.” “This way you could type a message a lot easier with cognitiv. I use predictive all the time on my phone and I am able bodied, without it is a real pain. So I imagine typing individual letters by gyro, cognitiv or expressiv would be quite frutstrating for a disabled person.”
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The Origin of the Human Mind: Brain Imaging and Evolution
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/metavalent/~3/lrXNwqFjKYo/
How to map a 1GB per mm2 intracranial mushdrive and other empirically based explanatory spelunking.
Don’t worry, there will be no quiz, because we can tell whether or not you’re paying attention and fMRI whether or not you get it. ;-) Marty Sereno: “The strange sort of reality of the visual system, from which you reconstruct and construct this static feeling of stuff out there is this sequence of [really bizarre, fisheye lens distorted looking, scanning, zooming] glances. Somehow, you actually assemble that series of glances into a meaningful, coherent, representation of the room.” So what differentiates our brains from animal brains, which are otherwise so strikingly, anatomically similar? Marty Sereno: “They don’t have a productive way of attaching up a symbol stream to this visual scene assembler, that they otherwise just use for assembling the current visual scene. So the theory is basically that, this final stage just requires some more rapid way of allowing auditory symbols which didn’t mean anything, or evolved for essentially meaninglessness and just sort of because they sounded good, essentially attaching them up to the higher level parts of the visual system where this scene assembly process goes on normally, with respect to the current scene. So that’s my theory.” Conclusions:
Preadaptation 1: vocal control by sexual selection Preadaptation 2: serial assembly of glances Language is not an isolated organ in the brain, but instead largely built upon existing functionality The ability to evoke fictive scenes leads to a great increase in cognitive power (evoking past, future) The final stage in this scenario only requires the development of stronger auditory/visual mapping
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Cultural Neuroscience
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/metavalent/~3/db8z9mDwMI8/
Explore. Learn.
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- society
- neuro-cogno
- education
- metaverse
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Future of User Interfaces
http://metavalent.com/?p=1210#utm_source=feed&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=feed
UI’s for the coming decade from Six Revisions.
At Caltech, “our cybernetic implant options draw nearer (and more intelligent).”
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- bci
- metavalent
- neuro-cogno
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The field is the sole governing agency of the particle
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/metavalent/~3/pgh_ye3kAow/
Is it merely cheesy pop pseudo science … “The field is the sole governing agency of the particle.” Since Einstein uses the term particle to represent “matter,” he is acknowledging that the field controls our physical reality. … or a somewhat useful intermediate abstraction on the way to more precise understanding … “Epigenetics has become much more interesting because it allows us to look at how gene expression is changed by environmental events, explainable in part by histone modifications.”
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Minds4Sale, Synaptic Time Shares: Human brainpower as purchasable and fungible as server rackspace
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/metavalent/~3/wKHn6vZ_Gsg/
Stanford CodeX: “Human brainpower as purchasable and fungible as additional server rackspace.” File under Augmented, Extended, Emergent Cognition Grid.
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Making Memories: Literally
Scientists have captured the first image of memories being made Source: McGill University
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- metavalent
- biotech
- neuro-cogno
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Of Neuro Economics and Artificial Brains
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Real Discrimination Against Digital People
And many other leading edge topics in this Summer Edition of H+ Magazine, now on news stands like this one everywhere. I must have lost half of my potential contracts because the company wouldn’t deal with an anonymous avatar.
It was around 1999, about four of five years before I finally started this blog, and many of the topics covered herein were considered so fringe as to threaten my real employment, social credibility, and even mental health assessment. I had been discriminatorily profiled in the past as manifesting mental illness in the form of various overachieving cognition crimes, such as being comparatively well informed about relatively fringe science and technology progress, understanding which technologies are likely coming next, and for concisely (and in retrospect, fairly accurately) forecasting a number of likely uses and implications for those emerging capabilities. However, I do not consider myself a “futurist” in the science fiction sense; I tend rather to gravitate toward the interface between the potential and the actual; I naturally find myself studying, advocating for, participating in, or at the very least desiring to act as a catalyzing agent that helps in some small way to transmute the potential into the next new actual. In some of those earlier cases, I’d helped to found companies that went on to build some everyday technologies that we now take for granted. At one point, I was literally told by investors and other well respected authoritative normals that I was not mentally well for pronouncing intentions that I went on to fulfill in every way. That particular technology’s trajectory is well documented and part of it even went on to include new IEEE standards. What I learned from such experiences is that it is empirically dangerous to share some of my understandings and insights with humans that populate the center of the bell curve. That’s a lot of humans, friend. Some of them, in fact many of them, would have locked me up and medicated me rather permit me to go on and build technologies that you yourself are very likely using today, if you use the internet every single day. So, I was forced to realize how the normals treat people who see things a little “too differently” from them; and from my perspective, such people became a very clear and present danger. I realized that I had to find ways to protect myself. Unsurprisingly, again in retrospect, that protection came in the form of surrounding myself with similar beings to the greatest degree possible; first by modem, then by academic association and increasing education, then by physical relocation to a part of the country where cognitive diversity was held a little less suspect. In some cases, even that didn’t feel like enough. When I began understanding that brain computer interfaces and other posthuman eventualities were not just possible, but both inevitable and desirable, I was utterly closed-lipped about it in public. I knew that if I began talking about these things as if they were obvious, the normals would bound me, medicate me, and I would never be heard from again. Yet, I simply had to have an outlet for these ideas and other emerging trends that I perceived as directly or tangentially interdependent in the construction of our posthuman future. At that time, I hadn’t yet heard of the word posthuman; but I fully understood and expected positive permutations of posthumanity to emerge within the subsequent 20, 50, and 100 years. We’re now 10 years into that first 20 year time frame. I also wanted to publish and broadcast such “fringe” thoughts in a way that might help others who viewed the world similarly to the way I perceived it, to feel emboldened, allied, encouraged, and motivated. Thus emerged the precursor to this site, A Webcam Darkly and later, as I began understanding this little experiment in accountable anonymity and technoprogressive futurtechture: Metavalent Stigmergy. While the past decade has seen some gains in cognitive tolerance, we have a long, long way to go toward building a world that is safe and supportive of both physical and mental morphological diversity. In today’s world, it’s fine if you have the cash and established social standing of a Ray Kurzweil or James Hughes to defend yourself; but there are thousands of us who share lesser or less developed and varied permutations of such forward-leaning cognitive styles, who do not yet possess such robust defense systems or even sufficiently fully architected personnas. Consequently, we are numbered among those who are expected to keep working at 7-11 or Kmart, or maybe manage a few other writers, or herd cats for some pointy-haired boss’s project or program; even as we see the world accelerating all around us in ways that create a more than full time autodidact vocation of simply keeping up, in hopes of preparing for, and adapting to whatever comes next. We live in a world where the normals won’t let us have money or eat or have a house if we don’t spend the majority of our already far-too-brief lives engaged in these relatively meaningless and mundane tasks that society understands as perpetuating its own safe status quo; yet, the overwhelming time and attention demands of that perceived safety effectively shackles our own intellectual, id est, existential puissance. So this issue of H+ Magazine coincides with a bit of a personal watershed. The topics being discussed are now sufficiently well understood and have been experienced by a large enough constituency, that it is tempting to call the all clear and to feel safe coming out from both the real and perceived social safety of this dual purpose identity bunker and experiment in accountable anonymity. I’ve experimented over the past five years or so in creating an identity that is both relatively anonymous and yet fully accountable to the community in every way. I say relatively because it’s also relatively easy to put together the pieces and find my biological identity if you care; I just don’t flat out give people the easy answer, outside of a very close circle of friends. Second Life has helped tremendously to advance the cause of accountable anonymity, but the ultimate achievement would be to coexist in a world where we are all safe amongst the normals; where cognitive diversity is not just tolerated, but celebrated. Now I’m really dreaming, huh? Toward that apparitional aspiration, perhaps we could create a magazine and sell the normals harmless pills with polysyllabic names that persuade them to believe that they too are exceptional, or at least that they too might have the potential to become exceptional. Or perhaps we could create television programs like The 4400 or Heroes that help to portray those deviant technoprogressive thinkers and positivistic posthuman dreamers as potential super allies. Nah, that’d never work. Humans aren’t that gullible. Right.
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