Your Brain on Machines

 

In Jacking into the Brain--Is the Brain the Ultimate Computer Interface? Scientific American asks: How far can science advance brain-machine interface technology? Will we one day pipe the latest blog entry or NASCAR highlights directly into the human brain as if the organ were an outsize flash drive?

Comments

[Nathan Zeldes]

"Will we one day pipe the latest blog entry or NASCAR highlights directly into the human brain?" - it pains me, as a SciFi fan, to say so, but I wouldn't hold my breath. The SciAm article, to its credit, repeatedly puts honesty before sensationalism with caveats to the effect that jerking a prosthetic arm around is a very far cry from pushing high-level language information into the brain. The prosthetic work is incredibly useful and commendable, mind you, but it is simply not even remotely comparable to the degree of complexity required for the latter task - even if we had the slightest understanding of how the brain codes blog entries or NASCAR highlights...

[Joel]

Nathan, I suspect you are right. Even if that level of technology is fascinating from a sci-fi perspective that level if neurotech is decades if not hundreds of years away. At this point in time we have a very limited understanding of how the brain processes and stores information. The brain may be like a computer, but neurons are not like a hard drive.

We may have success sending signals from the brain to our technology (like with the prosthetics), but there are great technological (and biological) hurdles to be cleared in sending information from our technology directly to our brain.