Startup Aims To Commercialize a Brain Implant To Improve Memory (ieee.org) 85
the_newsbeagle writes: Neuroscientist Ted Berger has achieved some remarkable feats in his work on an implanted brain prosthetic to boost memory. Working with rats, he recorded the electrical signals associated with a specific memory from one animal's brain, then inserted that signal -- and thus the memory -- into another animal's brain. Working with monkeys, the implanted device enhanced the animals' recall in difficult memory tasks.
Still, it's startling to learn that a startup is ready to commercialize Berger's work, and is trying to build a memory prosthetic for humans suffering from Alzheimer's, brain injuries, and stroke. The new company, named Kernel, will fund human trials and develop electrodes that can record from and stimulate more brain cells. "An implanted memory prosthetic would have electrodes to record signals during learning, a microprocessor to do the computations, and electrodes that stimulate neurons to encode the information as a memory," writes Eliza Strickland via IEEE Spectrum.
Still, it's startling to learn that a startup is ready to commercialize Berger's work, and is trying to build a memory prosthetic for humans suffering from Alzheimer's, brain injuries, and stroke. The new company, named Kernel, will fund human trials and develop electrodes that can record from and stimulate more brain cells. "An implanted memory prosthetic would have electrodes to record signals during learning, a microprocessor to do the computations, and electrodes that stimulate neurons to encode the information as a memory," writes Eliza Strickland via IEEE Spectrum.
Someone else's Memory of a password. (Score:2)
Welcome to the world of David Drake (Score:2)
Read the RCN series of books starting with With the Lightnings [wikipedia.org].
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Which is nice. Made me think "Tank, I need a pilot program for a V-212 helicopter."
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Won't work.
Think: How long does it take you to fill up a new hard disk with random crap until it's just as full as the old one was?
A week or so, max...after that you need another upgrade.
Exponent vs. constant (Score:2)
And yet, hardware capacities grow exponentially, whereas the brain's storage demand, though initially very high, remains unchanged from generation to generation.
If the hardware has not caught up yet, it soon will. Exponents are inevitable, if I may try to coin a phrase...
And so it starts... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:And so it starts... (Score:5, Funny)
Tell me more about the process of having a computer mind-control me.
Re:And so it starts... (Score:4, Insightful)
For some people it will be a trade-off between being unable to function or even stay alive, and trusting a medical device manufacturer and the government not to screw with your implants.
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For some people it will be a trade-off between being unable to function or even stay alive, and trusting a medical device manufacturer and the government not to screw with your implants.
If we were to say, use these devices on an Alzheimer's patient - assuming they actually worked - the device would not prevent the continued deterioration the sufferers experience. Because that's what eventually does them in. The parts of the body that need the brain to regulate them stop working.
Having watched loved ones slowly die and the surge of drugs to "slow the progression" of end stage dementia, I'm kind of fearful that the people who are in charge of Grandma will move from memory implants to orga
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There are actual "cures" being tested right now that are showing amazing progress. They are not true cures since they are not permanent since whatever caused the damage in the first place would still go on and solve the problem again so you would need a treatment again in another 40 or 50 years if you last that long.
The basic problem is that misfolded proteins cause other proteins to misfold also. These misfolded proteins aggregate together into inclusion bodies that are very hard for your cells to get rid
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There are actual "cures" being tested right now that are showing amazing progress. They are not true cures since they are not permanent since
You know, if the "cures" gave you another 20 years as a a 20 or 30 year old, that might be something. But you'll be a physically failing person in a nursing home, often confined to bed or a wheelchair. Fine life, the penultimate goal. It isn't like Alzheimers is the single point of failure for the aging.
Perhaps spending an extra 15 years in advanced care is an acceptable thing to you. I'd much prefer to be dead. And I still haven't changed my mind.
And although I hadn't noted it before in this thread,
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You know, you say that now, and you may be serious... but when you speak to people who are in their advanced years many of them report that they would give anything for another year or two.
I am 56, when I was in my late teens/early 20's I used to refer to this age as 'almost dead'. Today I do not feel 'almost dead'.
Maybe when you are 77, you'll feel differently? Maybe not, I guess it depends, this is a HIGHLY PERSONAL DECISION and I would hate for one person to be empowered to make it for everyone ELSE.
I never grant anything as impossible. But my thoughts on lifespan evolved in a different direction. They have gone form a live forever outlook while young, to a "Okay, I've lived a productive life, anytime will do." outlook as I aged. I can't think of any reason that I would revert back to earlier outlook. If I croaked today, I wouldn't have to worry about my chores tomorrow. Ultimate Moon shadow outlook.
I have no problem with a person wanting to be hooked to machinery ala Terry Schaivo, to eke out the la
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No the "cure" I am talking about is dissolving the inclusion bodies and allowing the cells to function normally again.
Lets says you have a condition that for whatever reason is forming these bodies in your cells at a certain rate and as you age your cells get worse at running correctly so at 60 your cells are damaged enough you are diagnosed with alzheimers. We could give you the treatment and completely restore the cells to full functioning. The problem is you still have the condition and will still make m
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No the "cure" I am talking about is dissolving the inclusion bodies and allowing the cells to function normally again.
Lets says you have a condition that for whatever reason is forming these bodies in your cells at a certain rate and as you age your cells get worse at running correctly so at 60 your cells are damaged enough you are diagnosed with alzheimers. We could give you the treatment and completely restore the cells to full functioning.
To be certain, by the time any of the effects show up, the damage is long done. Any plausible fix/repair for Alzheimers would require very early intervention. As in early 30's http://www.medpagetoday.com/ne... [medpagetoday.com] , or perhaps even childhood: http://www.wsj.com/articles/al... [wsj.com]
The problem is you still have the condition and will still make more of these inclusion bodies but the process is very slow. At 80 you would probably need another treatment to restore full function and another at 100 etc. That is why these are not permanent cures but there is also no reason not to just use it again.
I can see from your post that you are sort of confusing some of the telltale clues and assuming that removing the aluminum containing plaques will restore a person's mental facilities. This is probably a false lead for many. It is the sort
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I don't want to come out and name companies or anything and I am not really sure how much has been released to the public so far.
My understanding is that the primary cause of the problems is the formation of inclusion bodies inside neural cells that interfere with cell functioning. There are some molecules that can dissolve these bodies without harming the cells but it has been almost impossible to get those molecules into peoples brains and then into the cells where it could work and so the stuff only work
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To each his own... I, for one, am hoping to some day be able to have my personality "run" inside a computer. And if that computer is some day given a body — mechanical, biological, or hybrid — well, so much the better!
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To each his own... I, for one, am hoping to some day be able to have my personality "run" inside a computer. And if that computer is some day given a body — mechanical, biological, or hybrid — well, so much the better!
Of course. The desire to somehow be alive forever is the 21st century version of religion, the electronic version of "the immortal soul"
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I sense your vague disapproval... But consider, how "unnatural" it is for humans to live beyond 40 — which the already existing improvements in medicine, diet, work, government are giving us.
Why can't future improvements extend the lifespan further? If one can have a new heart or kidney implanted already, why not the entire body some time in the (near) future? We have a galaxy
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I sense your vague disapproval... But consider, how "unnatural" it is for humans to live beyond 40 — which the already existing improvements in medicine, diet, work, government are giving us.
Certainly. There is some plausible argument for some evolutionary advantage of grandparents in helping their offspring to raise their grandchildren more successfully. But that's just a hypothesis.
Why can't future improvements extend the lifespan further?
Maybe. but as a point of clarification, we have raised the average lifespan. We have not lengthened the maximum lifespan. A long time ago, there were the few who reached ages pretty much the same as are some times reached now. And that is a real limit. For all of the interest in geriatrics, we might have more pe
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Come, come, humanity, probably, already has some such mechanisms built in. For example, many more boys are born during war-time [popsci.com]. Also, a better-off society has lower fertility rate, than a poor one [nih.gov] — that is, the "need" for new people affects fertility rates.
On the other hand, the planet remains largely unsettled — vast expanses of Siberia, Canada, Alaska, American Midwest, Australian
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By the time they could build a "good enough" body, you wouldn't want it. For a brain in a computer virtual reality could be better than any actual reality could be. For one thing the "actual reality" signals that were fed into your brain would be via the exact same channels that the virtual reality signals would use.
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Maybe. Maybe I would. Maybe, I'll "go out" in a body (or one of the bodies) and come back into the virtual reality of mine...
The body does not have to be human, BTW. It could be an interstellar ship, for example...
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Interesting that Eliza [manifestation.com] have that capability considering that it was written so many years ago.
Re:Johnny Mnemonic (Score:4, Insightful)
Just 'cause he used an illegal compressor, there's a reason such things ain't approved by the FDA!
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Will we have to load the Stacker driver before accessing our memory?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Cargo cult science (Score:3, Insightful)
This is a crock of such dimensions that I don't know where to even start. It's like recording the electrical signals of an Intel FPU while doing square roots and injecting an AMD FPU with them in order to teach it to be faster.
Those guys have been reading too much science fiction.
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And yet actual research seems to suggest it works to at least a degree. Of course, the leap from rat to human is HUGE. We have no idea of the quality of the memory since we can't really ask the rats.
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Nope. "Electrical stimulation aids learning" is the basic essence here and it is not all that surprising since you destroy the existing function of neurons making them more susceptible to become part of new patterns. It's even imaginable that the erase patterns from one learning experience are more likely to be effective than just insertion of a needle and random signals, just like you have different levels of likelihood for visual patterns to trigger epilepsy.
But the "actual research" does not at all ind
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Someone didn't read the links.
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And yet actual research seems to suggest it works to at least a degree. Of course, the leap from rat to human is HUGE. We have no idea of the quality of the memory since we can't really ask the rats.
Yeah, quite the jump from a rat to Grandma. And let's not forget that Grandma will need an internet connection to get Windows 10 Alzheimer's edition mandatory updates, and won't be able to talk when tehy mess up their tongue driver with their Golden anniversary edition.
But think of all the ads that can be served - no doubt ad blockers will be disallowed.
There is a whole potential industry here as we take the Internet of Things to it's unlimate goal - humans.
Just imagine, GPS to make certain Grams d
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The memory tests were in primates, not rats. Rhesus.
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That is indeed a crock. It's also not what was actually done - it got mangled in the process of translating from paper to snappy headline clickbait.
"The MIMO model verified that specific CA3-to-CA1 firing patterns were critical for successful encoding of Sample phase information on more difficult DMS trials. This was validated by delivery of successful MIMO-derived encoding patterns via electrical stimulation to the same CA1 recording locations during the Sample phase which facilitated task performance in t
Submitter should read his own links (Score:4, Informative)
That paper he links to doesn't say anything like "he recorded the electrical signals associated with a specific memory from one animal's brain, then inserted that signal -- and thus the memory -- into another animal's brain".
Submitter is describing some kind of futuristic Total Recall system. The actual paper describes a system for enhancing performance on unfamiliar tasks - that's a teeny tiny bit like that, but not actually that at all.
Let me guess... (Score:2)
Nice name (Score:1)
I can already see the future in 20 years:
Bob: Did you hear Dave died?
Jim: Holy shit, no, what happened?
Bob: He went skydiving and his Kernel segfaulted on the way down.
Jim: Well... damn. That's a real shame.
Bob: Yeah.
Jim: Yeah. Seems like a core dump always happens at a bad time.
Bob: Like during sex?
Jim: Haha... ha... yeah that would be, um, funny...
Bob: Wait... is that why you and that Cathy chick broke u-
Jim: HEY wanna come over and watch Game of Drones tonight? McVitro Burgers too, my treat.
Bob: Sure!
Bookworm, Run! (Score:2)
Existed in the 60's (Score:2)
Re:Existed in the 60's (Score:4, Funny)
This already existed in the 60's. There was a documentary series on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ [wikipedia.org]...
I thought that *this* was the '60s documentary you meant!
https://youtu.be/uUa3np4CKC4 [youtu.be]
Strat
Software Updates... (Score:5, Funny)
>> Software Update In Progress ...
>> Software Update Complete
I know Kung Fu...
Please hold caller (Score:2)
While I reboot your memory banks. Thank you for waiting.
Funny AND scary but what if you had Alzheimer's?
improving an SSD drive (Score:2)
That's sort of like saying that you're improving the memory of an SSD drive by disabling its garbage collection logic.
Misread the title (Score:2)
Misread the title as "to remove memory" and though that the CIA was outsourcing again.
DoS Attack (Score:2)
Do not think about elephants.
Would you install brain-cyberware (brainware)? (Score:5, Insightful)
I wouldn't.
Just think of the implications. Imagine some evil terrorist hacker or just some bored teen with to much time on his hands messing with your brain and turning you into a suicide bomber or having you running around naked downtown on a saturday morning, screeming, singing and cussing at the top of your voice, just for the kicks of it.
The fight with brain-hacked loser [youtube.com] scene in GitS [wikipedia.org] is cool, but the interrogation scene that follows is pretty emotional and scary. In my opinion though it pretty precisely shows what a society with brainware is in for.
No f*cking way would I have such a thing installed.
Check with the experts (Score:2)
BrainPal! (Score:2)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
I can't be bothered to remember this, I'll just store it in my BrainPal!
Though if you think about it, we're already offloading memory into our phones, both in storage and as a search tool. I know I don't bother to remember anyones actual phone number anymore, and trivia is essentially only a quick google away!