Scientists Watch Thoughts Form in the Brain

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mind-aglow-scientists-watch-thoughts-form-in-the-brain/

by Cozumel • 10 years ago

165 85 10 years ago

scientificamerican.com

mhuffman2• 10 years ago

I expect this to be streamlined and used by law enforcement as an alternative for polygraphs.

visarga• 10 years ago

Or it could be used to create brain computer interfaces. Or for "uploading".

vinceguidry• 10 years ago

By 'streamlined' you mean hastily developed, badly tested, (on purpose) rushed to market, and then hailed as the 'new DNA testing'?

By the time anyone questions its efficacy it will be too late.

mhuffman2• 10 years ago

I can tell by your antagonistic language that you are hiding something!

To the thought-extractor citizen -- we'll get to the bottom of this!

happyslobro4• 10 years ago

I expect someone to figure out a way to exfiltrate upcoming passwords by analyzing the EM radiation of these aptly named CNiFERs. Imagine, an attacker knowing your next password before you begin to type it for the first time }:)

happyslobro4• 10 years ago

Or, more practically, an interrogator could just remind you of a time when you logged in to a particular account, and then try to capture a password as you relive the memory.

cubano• 10 years ago

There seems to be a huge push against using any type of nuero-tech to build "ultimate" lie detectors, which I often find puzzling.

tim3332• 10 years ago

Lie detectors do not have a good track record for making things better. If you want to catch criminals there are many other ways. If there was a murder near you would you want people trying nuero-tech on you?

Lawtonfogle• 10 years ago

Imagine this being used on homosexuals in the middle east. Or imagine it being used on the modern day equivalents who most view similar to how homosexuals are viewed in the middle east. To take away the ability to pass is extremely dangerous for at risk minorities.

And everyone should fear because such tech could also be abused to falsely accuse you of being in some hated group. Police lie about drugs often enough to be a threat to liberty; they need less tools they can lie about, not more.

throwanem• 10 years ago

Yours must be a terrifying world in which to live. I'm sorry.

BurningFrog• 10 years ago

I don't want to sound alarmist, but if mind reading can be made to work reasonably well, it could be a golden age for dictators.

"Law enforcement" in most of the world is not on the side of regular citizens.

_Wintermute• 10 years ago

Article on the CNiFER method: http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v13/n1/full/nn.2469.html

danielmorozoff• 10 years ago

Nature write up: http://www.nature.com/news/brain-s-chemical-signals-seen-in-...

And paper without paywall from kleinfelds lab: http://physics.ucsd.edu/neurophysics/publications/nmeth.3151...

bsbechtel3• 10 years ago

For all the hype surrounding AI, virtual reality, and augmented reality as being the next big trends in tech, I really feel like brain/computer interfaces are what is really going to change our world in unprecedented ways. The technology is still a long, long ways from having a visible impact for most people, but I am more interested/excited/scared about this technology than anything else going on in the tech world right now.

happyslobro4• 10 years ago

This is what will make the difference between us becoming the cybernetic overlords, and us getting crushed underneath of them. Whatever powers we grant to the machines, it is critical that we also take these powers for ourselves.

ythl3• 10 years ago

I'm still not convinced thinking, living, conscious machines are possible anytime soon, if ever. Until we understand the hard problem of consciousness and other fundamental mechanisms of the brain, we will never build true AI.

Increasing system complexity and hoping for a "singularity" event is cargo cult science[1]. It's like building runways on your private island and hoping airplanes will spontaneously land and produce wondrous treasures to trade.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_science

Balgair4• 10 years ago

The disease and safety aspects alone are pretty cool. Blindness and deafness will be cured, as will vertigo and a host of other diseases and malformations. Think Stephen Hawking, but actually walking around and talking again, having a totally normal life again. Also, imagine having IR vision for firefighters in a house fire, or a surgeon having basically X-Ray vision, or being able to see the elements in your tap water with the aid of an inbuilt spectrometer. Really cool stuff.

bsbechtel3• 10 years ago

Absolutely, although I've always been interested in the aspect it can have on internal corporate communication. This is the #1 challenge/cost driver in every company today. Maybe I'm thinking in the realm of science fiction still, but to be able to effortlessly communicate the precise info every individual in an organization needs at the instant they need it would unleash an unprecedented explosion of economic growth around the world.

abstractbeliefs2• 10 years ago

While the first part of this comment alone is compelling, what excites me is that the second half was already in our hands before slipping away.

The idea of IR vision firefighting, being able to see the elements in your water, etc, these are all basically ubiquitous computing, and we're kind of getting there with IoT putting sensors in everything. What is missing is a way of intuitively accessing and building it into our thought processes in a manner less clunky than fetching a phone, unlocking, launching an app.

What we need is Google Glass, or equivalent. The real place where Google Glass fell down was not in it's handling of privacy concerns, strictly, it was there attempt to try and make it exclusive and elite, like they did with the Google Mail launch, where you needed invites.

I can't help but feel that if Google had made the "explorer" program humbler and quieter, followed by an accessible general release, we'd have access to so much more today.

jshevek3• 10 years ago

I am excited by this, and would gladly augment my senses today if it were available.

However, I have known deaf people who say they have no interest in "curing" their deafness, and who suggest that the development and widespread use of such a complete cure would destroy a culture.

rimantas• 10 years ago

Watch "Black Mirror" for some of the possible ways.

randomdrake• 10 years ago

I'm really interested in those interfaces as well.

Some posit that one of the big advantages of the ways our brains evolved were in the increased size of our frontal lobe. They say this ultimately led to increased processing power by allowing our brains to have access to more data for making decisions or analyzing thoughts.

I feel like we've continued this growth in some ways. Low bandwidth access to information that doesn't reside in our brains, allowing us to further our capacity for thought and understanding.

Ray Kurzweil is an interesting fellow who's very much into this as well and sees our extension as an inevitability in the next few decades. Direct interfaces between the brain and the Internet (or some other network) to allow for even lower bandwidth access to information.

Since you said you were interested: there was an episode of Star Talk[1] a few months back where he dives into this stuff along with Dr. Tyson and a neuroscientist. Definitely recommend it as a fun primer for where we are, what we're doing, and where some people think we're going to go.

[1] http://www.startalkradio.net/show/gazing-into-the-future-wit...

ekianjo• 10 years ago

Ray Kurzweil is an interesting fellow

Are we talking about the same guy who sells supplements and takes hundreds of vitamins everyday, despite there being no evidence of positive effect ? (http://www.rayandterry.com/)

tlow3• 10 years ago

I think that one of the major hurdles to BCI is the mechanism of connection. When electrodes are connected to neurons they have a tendency to be destroyed. However, one might imagine the development of sophisticated electromagnetic equipment which might suitable focus and modulate "receptor pathways" in the brain. This seems far off. Eyes are convenient sensory organs to utilize for input. Getting directly to the brain seems more like trying to manipulate electron flow in a PCB without removing the external enclosure. (not to say that's impossible, just not as easy as cutting a trace and soldering in a connection)

selectiveshift• 10 years ago

The great thing about our brains is how malleable they are. We should be creating as low tech a mechanism as possible and then train our brains to use it.

ericjang3• 10 years ago

There are some very difficult challenges in brain-computer interfaces (BCI), some of which involve huge barriers presented by human biology. It's rather depressing.

Presently, there is no good way to read data from the brain to a device. You can drill a hole in your head and patch-clamp some electrodes to your brain tissue, but this procedure is only recommended for treating debilitating diseases like Parkinson's. Furthermore, there is the issue of scar tissue developing over time as a small region of your brain is being bombarded with electricity / contact with foreign metals that trigger immune response.

I do think a spinal tap of some sort might make more sense (rather than patching directly into brain tissue like in the Matrix), but you still get scar tissue.

Non-invasive methods don't have scar tissue, but it's unclear whether measuring the surface activity of the brain yields sufficient information. Furthermore, they are highly noisy due to ambient static and muscle activity. You shouldn't move much if you want o.k. readings.

The BCI dream is to have a lightweight headset that you put behind your ears like in Iron Man 3 or Big Hero 6 (and then you control robots with your mere thoughts). However, I think that kind of technology is really far away, short of some huge breakthroughs in compressed sensing and possibly superconductor physics.

Even more difficult than reading data is writing it back in. There have been very early results with getting monkeys to telepathically control each other's muscle movements, but my understanding is that it's not very reliable.

A reasonable survey can be found here: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1110866515...

andrewjl• 10 years ago

What about circuits / probes made from biological materials rather than metal/silicon?

avz• 10 years ago

There are some very difficult challenges in brain-computer interfaces (BCI), some of which involve huge barriers presented by human biology. It's rather depressing.

Completely agree. I don't think BCI is likely to take off seriously until we assert more confident control over our own biology. In particular, techniques like CRISPR may eventually open the door to temporary, local and reversible genetic manipulation of body tissues that would allow human body to grow and shed tiny BCI connectors with desired specs.

This is probably a few hundreds of years of development (and political and moral arguments) away though.

Depressing indeed.

aperrien4• 10 years ago

Optogenetics possibly provides a solution to the interface problem. When you can use light to read from and send signals to neurons, you don't have to worry about scar tissue at all, as far as I know.

nbadg2• 10 years ago

On the other hand, going in the other direction (from machine to brain) is actually surprisingly easy. It turns out that, when you take what is possibly the best general-purpose signal and pattern interpretation and recognition engine in the entirety of our observable[1] universe (aka the human brain), and combine it with any kind of consistent, interpretable feedback from the outside world, after a little while it just kinda figures it out and goes along with it [2]. From stimulation under the tongue producing sight in the blind to a vibrating belt compass giving people a subcognitive sense of north vs south, the brain is really damn good at doing this. So in that sense, it's looking incredibly promising.

The success of innervated prosthetics[3] suggests that the peripheral nervous system is a viable point of access as well. And, what's more, these interfaces are already bidirectional.

This is absolutely wild conjecture, but I've had the thought for a while that you could conceivably induce (or externally grow and then graft) a new peripheral nervous "port" somewhere. It'd be a bit like teeing off of a plumbing line (understatement of difficulty level: over 9000), and then you'd have a dedicated cluster of new nerves you could start to "play" with, sending and receiving arbitrary signals. But there are some very difficult ethical questions involved for anyone who were hypothetically interested in pursuing this approach.

Ultimately, that's what I think (rightly) holds us back for BCI: invasive procedures are just too ethically questionable for anything other than self-modification, which is okay in the body-hacking community, but still decidedly un-mainstream.

[1] At this point in time, since we've yet to find extraterrestrial life, caveat emptor, etc etc etc

[2] Points-of-entry for googling and wiki'ing: "neural plasticity" and "sensory substitution"

[3] Terms to search for: "innervated prosthetics" and "targeted reinnervation"

Houshalter3• 10 years ago

Even if you solve the scarring issue, the invasive option seems impractical. They might use it on patients that are locked out or missing senses. But what doctor would let a healthy person get brain surgery so they can use a computer slightly faster? Would the FDA ever approve something like that?

However there are other options. People have figured out how to hijack existing senses. There was a plate you could put on your tongue that would let you see images through the nerves on your tongue. There was a project that converted video to sound waves, so you could learn to see through your ears. And there was a guy who made a vibrating suit which could let deaf people hear again by converting sound to more noticeable vibration frequencies.

It's unclear what these extra inputs actually add over just presenting information on a computer monitor or HUD and using vision. I think brain interfaces are massively overhyped. Our brain is already super flexible and can learn to process info from existing interfaces just as well.

sebringj2• 10 years ago

I recall in a sci-fi Asimov book, it was related to the 2001 series, there was a skull cap that everyone wore in the 3000's that once placed on your head was permanent as its tendrils weaved its way into your scalp. They were like nano-scale. That idea, although completely sci-fi, seems pretty awesome as there would be more direct input if the entire surface area of your brain was a read-write interface. Also that is scary in terms of abuse.

roscoebeezie• 10 years ago

I had thoughts for some bci product. I have no clue about the feasibility.

Take an EEG like the emotiv Epoch. Get lucky and hope you can still get the raw data via emokit or something like that. Construct some sort of low level two character alphabet representation. I'd imagine something similar to EBCDIC cause I'm a tortured mainframe soul, so C1 is A and so on. Using some fancy ML (deep learning?), train for your alphabet representation using EEG data while loudly subvocaling "C" or something.

Once you get lucky and train a model, use your alphabet as some sort of string of consciousness recording/ instant note taking. Some how tag your thought notes so you can come back later or do some fancy searches. Do some fancy NLP on your notes or some conceptual blending or whatever is cool. Sell the software, but keep the notes "open" somehow.

I'd go on but that's my idea. Steal it and hire me.

36bydesign• 10 years ago

The direct problem would be that we don't think in letters, but I like the idea.

dschiptsov2• 10 years ago

I think it should be called "digital hallucinations" - non-reproducible (but not totally random either) visualizations, renderings of some data gained from a device build according some biased and grossly oversimplified models. It might have strong correlation with micro changes in blood flow or biochemistry, etc. but obviously have nothing to do with thoughts.

Balgair4• 10 years ago

Did you read the same paper?

dschiptsov2• 10 years ago

I have got some rather superficial knowledge of how the state-of-the-art brain imaging works from a couple of free MIT courses.)

mhneu• 10 years ago

Calcium imaging is currently a better method for realtime imaging of neural activity.

http://www.nature.com/nmeth/journal/v6/n12/full/nmeth.1398.h...

The CNiFER innovation is the ability to visualize neurotransmitter activity.

kevinalexbrown2• 10 years ago

strictly speaking, this is calcium imaging

nacc• 10 years ago

Just to clarify, optically recording neural activity from ensamble of cells ("thoughts") has been done in neuroscience for many years using voltage / glutamate / calcium indicators + imaging. CNiFER is a breakthrough is because it provide ways to measure the "hormone" of brain, these are often molecules in tiny amount that modulate how cells in an area fire.

A not-so-good analogy is before we can measure electrical current in wires, now CNiFER allows us to measure electromagnetic field. This will help to explain why some headphones nearby will beep when your cellphone received a message.

saintPirelli• 10 years ago

While reading I was distracted by that awesome scrolly thingy at the bottom.

bantunes• 10 years ago

I'm scared. The Valley is gonna "disrupt" stuff in a lot of nasty ways armed with a more developed version of this...

importantbrian• 10 years ago

This makes me think of John Scalzi's The Ghost Brigades. I wonder how far it is between mapping thoughts to being able to map someone's memories and consciousness. If such a thing is even possible at all.

wang_li• 10 years ago

In current MRI images of the brain, a million different data points are reduced to a single pixel in the image. Absent some kind of dramatic breakthrough in science, we are a long ways from being able to resolve individual data points inside of a person's brain.

rasz_pl• 10 years ago

Did they test this method on a dead fish just to be sure?

JackFr• 10 years ago

The technique described here -- that of the CNiFERs is impressive. But the hype is way over the top.

When many [neurons] fire together, they form a thought.

Is that a definition, an observation, a hypothesis or a result?

aperrien4• 10 years ago

I think that depends on where you believe thoughts originate. If they originate within the brain, the ensemble firing together (in some sort of organized manner) is a thought. If you believe that they don't originate from within the brain, then the answer is unclear. More of a philosophy problem at that point, I think.

habitue• 10 years ago

If you don't believe thoughts arise in the brain, then you're ignoring thousand year old results in basic physiology

astazangasta• 10 years ago

I've never understood how these guys managed to get a billion dollars to fund this horseshit Brain Initiative in a time when NIH funding has been declining for decades. There is probably some serious graft/nepotism behind this.

edmundhuber• 10 years ago

To add to ericjang's comments elsewhere in this thread, here are my thoughts on the two most popular BCI (although I'm used to seeing BMI -- brain-machine interface) technologies:

* Optogenetics advantages: don't need to insert things into tissue. Disadvantages: requires genetic engineering that is not approved for human use. Difficulty reaching deep brain targets. To image many neurons, might need to pump lots of light into an area, causing heat and cell death. Bulky.

* Microelectrode arrays (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multielectrode_array) like the Utah or Michigan array advantages: direct electrical recordings, relatively compact. Disadvantages: low density, invasiveness.

It is worth noting that most behavioral studies are done with MEAs are due to their convenience/form factor.

It is also important to note that these two technologies measure different things: an MEA can record extracellular voltages, so it's a relatively direct measurement of neural activity, compared to optogenetics, which relies on ion channels fluorescing, which is not exactly what most people really want to measure.

A word about invasiveness: when you insert large (>1um) things into tissue, you elicit a foreign body response, starting with inflammation and ending with scar tissue or gliosis. The issue with invasive probes like MEAs is that even if you manage to avoid major blood vessels and you control bleeding and inflammation, ultimately scar tissue forms around your probes. Scar tissue is a much worse electrical interface than plain tissue, and thus the effectiveness of your BCI/BMI implant diminishes.

Disclosure: I run a company (Paradromics, www.paradromics.com) developing next-generation microwire technology for brain-machine interfaces. Also, my strength is in software so while the gist of what I'm saying is probably mostly correct, I can't give details as well as others can.

djoshea• 10 years ago

Just to add clarification points, the term optogenetics is generally supposed to refer to any gene transfection that involves optical access, but in practice there are two separate categories:

* optogenetic stimulation: using light-activated ion channels to modulate neural activity

* optical imaging: using genetically targeted fluorescent proteins (mainly GCaMP) to observe the activity of neurons

This article is more the second kind, and the novel aspect is that this technology couples dopamine release to calcium rises, enabling imaging of the calcium signal to be used as a proxy for the neurotransmitter's release. It's more likely to be quite useful for investigating specific scientific questions about neurotransmitter signaling than a general purpose readout for BMI.

Multielectrode arrays pick up spikes or action potentials from individual neurons directly, so you get high temporal resolution but from a sparse sample of cells. This sample turns out to be enough to do a lot of interesting things, such as controlling a mouse cursor or a robotic arm. This is already in clinical trials at a few sites, including (my lab at) Stanford.

Imaging approaches are really powerful, but the signals are often slower. This has to do with the kinetics of the proteins themselves and the signal that is being detected (calcium is slower than voltage transients). But you get to see the activity of lots of neurons. There are voltage sensitive channels that you can image, although the signal to noise ratio isn't nearly as high as yet. It's not immediately clear how this could be used for a BMI in humans, mainly because you would absolutely need optical access to the brain to image, so you'd either be opening up a window or implanting some kind of imaging sensor. The less invasive approaches you were hinting at are mostly in the first category (stimulation), where for longer wavelengths of light you wouldn't need something as invasive.

ommunist• 10 years ago

I wonder how they distinguish thoughts from feelings?

Scientists Watch Thoughts Form in the Brain

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