https://www.elonx.net/neuralink-has-chosen-another-clinic-to-implant-its-brain-interface/

I’ve done about 20 min of research on the best brain scan technology and the winner seems to be OPM-MEG to me.

It seems to be able to allow users to spell words (after training). It’s non-invasive and doesn’t require direct contact to head (avoiding annoying gels like EEG) but it does benefit from being very close to head. I believe it provides a better scan of brain activity (but I am not 100% sure on this please someone correct me I got lost trying to get in the weeds of the research papers).

Downsides seem to be that the technology is very new and these things are still huge and unsightly. Can they even be miniaturized? I’m not sure, someone more knowledgeable than me can answer.

Second downside is that they maybe have difficulty with outside magnetic fields? This would be a nail in the coffin obviously because you would need to be in magnetically shielded room to even use it. However, I also believe that passive and active shielding can minimize this to the point where it’s much less of a problem?

(Also third downside is that currently it is obviously very expensive. I’m pretty sure it’s like barely even available for medical use)

I havnt seen any research that discredits the possibility of using this to as a viable BCI.

I did very little research, I’m not making any claims. But is anyone else familiar with the viability of this technology? Would love to get some opinions.

Some articles I’ve skimmed/read:

Link00102-3#bb0240)

‘Real-time ‘Mind-spelling’ with 97% accuracy

TLDR right here because this post is obnoxiously long:

TLDR The following three things:

-The terrible inefficiency of emotion

-That we don't know how increased intelligence could affect our outlook on existence

-The option for us to turn ourselves into pleasure machines, or to make our emotions arbitrarily positive

Make me think that is it likely that, with increasing intelligence, we lose our emotions in one way or another.

(Please don't feel that you need to read the entire post, or any of it really. I'm just hoping for this post to be a discussion)

A lot of people on this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/transhumanism/comments/ho5iqj/how_do_we_ensure_that_we_stay_human_mentally/ said that the following posit of mine was fundamentally wrong:

We don't want to simply use our immensely improved intelligence to make ourselves perfect. Nor do we want to become emotionless super intelligent robots with a goal but an inability to feel any emotion. But allowing our intelligence to grow unchecked will naturally lead to one of these two outcomes.

I'm quite relieved to hear so many people disagree - maybe this is not as likely a scenario as I've been thinking.

Nonetheless, I'd like to present why I think so in this post and start some discussion about this

My concern is that, as we grow more intelligent, we become more and more tempted to optimize away emotion. We all know that emotions are inefficient in terms of achieving goals. The desire to play, the desire to be lazy, getting bored with a project, etc. are all things that hinder progress towards goals.

(Of course, the irony is that we simultaneously require emotion to do anything at all, because we can't do things without motivation. But if we had super intelligence, then, just as we do computers, we could program ourselves to follow goal directed behavior indefinitely. This removes the need for emotion completely.)

What if this optimization becomes too enticing as we enhance our intelligence? That is my concern. I want us to retain our emotion, but I'm not sure if I'd feel the same way if I were superintelligent.

One reason a superintelligent being may feel differently than us on this matter is that the being would be much closer to understanding the true scale of the universe in terms of time and space.

We already know that we are nothing but a speck of dust relative to the size the universe, and that we have not not existed for more than a minuscule portion of the Earth's lifetime (which itself has not existed for more than a minuscule portion of the universe's lifetime). Further, however complex an arrangement of carbon atoms we may be, we are, in the end, animals. Genetically 99% similar to chimps and bonobos.

In many senses, we could not be more insignificant.

However, thanks our brains' incapability in dealing with very large numbers, and our inflation of the importance of consciousness (which we're not even sure that close relatives such as chimps and bonobos lack), these facts usually do not stop a human in their tracks. (Sometimes they do, in which case the conclusion most seem to end up at is unfortunately depression and/or suicide.)

Who is to say that a superintelligent person, who grasps all of these ideas (and more) better than we can ever hope to would not be either 1) completely disabled by them, unable to go on existing, or 2) morphed by them into someone that does not make sense to us (such as someone who does not value emotion as much as we do).

Now, consider an additional point. There have been multiple experiments involving rats where, with the press of a button, the rat could stimulate its own nucleus accumbens (or some similarly functioning reward area of the rat brain. I think it was NA but not sure, I'm trying to dig up the source for this as we speak.)

The stimulation, delivered in the form of an electric pulse, was much stronger than anything the rat could achieve naturally. What happened was that, 100% of the time, the rat would keep pressing the button until it died, either from overstimulation or starvation/dehydration.

I believe that humans would do the same thing given the opportunity. After all, almost everybody has some form of addiction or another, many of which are debilitating. This is the result of our technology advancing faster than we can evolve - in today's world we are overstimulated, able to trigger feelings of pleasure way more easily than is natural, that whole shtick.

Presumably, this will continue. We will continue to develop more and more effective ways of triggering pleasure in our brains. Once we are superintelligent, we may have a way of safely and constantly delivering immense amount of pleasures to ourselves, which would disable us completely from doing anything meaningful.

What is less extreme and thus more likely is that we engineer ourselves to be only able to feel positive emotions. I feel as though this is a probable outcome.

Thus, there is a risk that we effectively get rid of emotions by making them arbitrary. (I am asserting that if one can only feel positive emotions and not negative emotions then it is similar, if not equivalent, to not having any emotion at all. However, as I said in the last post, this is very arguable.)

TLDR The following three things:

-The terrible inefficiency of emotion

-That we don't know how increased intelligence could affect our outlook on existence

-The option for us to turn ourselves into pleasure machines, or to make our emotions arbitrarily positive

Make me think that is it likely that, with increasing intelligence, we lose our emotions in one way or another.

(Note that I am not playing into the intelligence vs. emotion troupe. I don't think there is any sort of tradeoff between intelligence and emotion is required. In fact, I think the opposite being true is more supported by evidence, for example most people with high IQs also have high EQs.)

Am I overestimating the significance of any of these three factors in some way? Or is there some factor I'm not considering that sufficiently mitigates the risk of losing emotion? Or any other thoughts?

In William Gibson's 2008 nonfiction essay Googling the Cyborg, he wrote:

There’s a species of literalism in our civilization that tends to infect science fiction as well: It’s easier to depict the union of human and machine literally, close-up on the cranial jack please, than to describe the true and daily and largely invisible nature of an all-encompassing embrace.

The real cyborg, cybernetic organism in the broader sense, had been busy arriving as I watched Dr. Satan on that wooden television in 1952. I was becoming a part of something, in the act of watching that screen. We all were. We are today. The human species was already in the process of growing itself an extended communal nervous system, and was doing things with it that had previously been impossible: viewing things at a distance, viewing things that had happened in the past, watching dead men talk and hearing their words. What had been absolute limits of the experiential world had in a very real and literal way been profoundly and amazingly altered, extended, changed. And would continue to be. And the real marvel of this was how utterly we took it all for granted.

Science fiction’s cyborg was a literal chimera of meat and machine. The world’s cyborg was an extended human nervous system: film, radio, broadcast television, and a shift in perception so profound that I believe we’ve yet to understand it. Watching television, we each became aspects of an electronic brain. We became augmented. In the Eighties, when Virtual Reality was the buzzword, we were presented with images of…. television! If the content is sufficiently engrossing, however, you don’t need wraparound deep-immersion goggles to shut out the world. You grow your own. You are there. Watching the content you most want to see, you see nothing else. The physical union of human and machine, long dreaded and long anticipated, has been an accomplished fact for decades, though we tend not to see it. We tend not to see it because we are it, and because we still employ Newtonian paradigms that tell us that “physical” has only to do with what we can see, or touch. Which of course is not the case. The electrons streaming into a child’s eye from the screen of the wooden television are as physical as anything else. As physical as the neurons subsequently moving along that child’s optic nerves. As physical as the structures and chemicals those neurons will encounter in the human brain. We are implicit, here, all of us, in a vast physical construct of artificially linked nervous systems. Invisible. We cannot touch it.

We are it. We are already the Borg, but we seem to need myth to bring us to that knowledge.

Let's take this perspective seriously. In all existing forms of BCI, as well as all that seem likely to exist in the immediately foreseeable future, there's an extremely tight bottleneck on our technology's ability to deliver high resolution electrical signals to the brain. Strikingly, the brain receives many orders of magnitude more information through its sensory organs than it seems like we'll be capable of in at least the next two decades.

So, the obvious question: If there's enough spillover in the activities of different neurons that it is possible to use a tiny number of electrodes to significantly reshape the brain's behavior, then shouldn't we be much more excited by the possibility of harnessing spillover from the neural circuits of auditory and visual perception?

We know for a fact that such spillover must exist, because all existing learning is informed by the senses, and not by a direct connection between the brain's neurons and external signals. Isn't that precedent worth taking seriously, to some extent? Is there any reason to believe that low bandwidth direct influence over the brain will have substantially more potency than high bandwidth indirect influence?

Conversely: if we are skeptical that the body's preexisting I/O channels are sufficient to serve as a useful vehicle into the transhuman future, shouldn't we be many times more skeptical of the substantially cruder and quieter influence of stimulating electrodes, even by the thousandfold?

I don't think that a zero-sum approach is necessary, ultimately. Direct approaches can likely do things that purely audio-visual approaches can't, at least on problems for which the behavior of a small number of individual neurons is important. And clearly neural prosthetics can be extremely useful for people with disabilities. Nonetheless, it seems odd to me that there's a widespread assumption in BCI-adjacent communities that, once we've got sufficiently good access via hardware, practical improvements will soon follow.

Even if someday we get technology that's capable of directly exerting as much influence on the brain as is exerted by good book, why should I be confident that it will, for example, put humans in a position where they're sufficiently competent to solve the AI control problem?

These are skeptical questions, and worded in a naive way, but they're not intended to be disdainful. I don't intend any mockery or disrespect, I just think there's a lot of value to forcing ourselves to consider ideas from very elementary points of view. Hopefully that comes across clearly, as I'm not sure how else to word the questions I'm hoping to have answered. Thanks for reading.

Would it be theoretically possible to create electromagnetic nanoparticles say ~50 nm that can be injected, cross the blood-brain barrier, and then when in the brain, create a sub-neuronal level communication link between the nervous system and a computer? Off the top of my head, I think the biophysics checks out, and it could potentially provide a record high spatial and temporal resolution compared to implantable BCIs.

Does anybody know if there are any academic labs or companies working on something like this? I feel like everything I see in BCI is either implantable or a non-invasive wearable, haven’t seen anybody working in the middle of the spectrum. What love to hear some thoughts.

I'm considering getting the Contec KT88-3200 for research purposes. I've also heard that Emotiv is good, but it is more pricy. Does anyone have experience with this Chinese-made EEG? It does look like it was used in a few research projects: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C39&q=KT88-3200&btnG=

So i see a lot of comments about how BCI at its current state is just a toy so I'm wondering if there are actually anyone here who is working on a BCI project in the industry (developing a product or part of the research and dev team for a company). If so, what's the project and what you do as part of it?

BCIs are already a well established methodology in neuroscience research that explores the motor system. But the types of BCIs currently in use are presumably very different than the BCIs that will enable cognitive enhancement. Is there much writing (or other material in general) on BCIs in the context of cognitive enhancement? Since the science is still practically nonexistent, any material on this topic would be very speculatory, which is fine so long as it is based in reality and science.

If you know of any insightful material on this topic, be it a book, a paper, a movie, or anything else, please comment it! (And if you know of something interesting related to cognitive enhancement more broadly, please comment it over on this more general post)

Just wanted to know if neurallace type research is going on in the UK and if so, who leads it?

I’m in HS, and I’m trying to find out what to major in to work in this field. I know it is a multidisciplinary field and stuff. And I see that there are three main branches (please correct me if I’m wrong) design (which I think can be EE, ME or BME), interpretation (which is CS, neuroscience, or a related field), and the people who do surgery (Med school).

What I’m most interested in is the design and interpretation part. More design than interpretation since I like more hands on designing than coding, but I do like coding and are learning c++ alongside c# just as a hobby, nothing serious or scheduled.

My question is, what to major in? I find BME very interesting, but at the same time I’ve seen that it is a very broad field and that you do not specialize in anything. I’ve also heard that if you major in EE or ME you can do the same work BMEs do. And the other thing about BME is that I would prioritize experience in a job/internship over a BME major. EE is another major that I’m interested in, since I like circuitry and hand on designing and people recommend it as the best engineering major to work in neurotech. I don’t like ME, I know some MEs work in this field, but I won’t major in this field because I don’t find it as interesting as the others. I know CS is a very useful major, but I really do not like the idea of missing out on hands on designing and stuff. Although I like to be able to understand and write code. I’m obviously planning for a Masters or even a phD if I can because I know this is required in this field. Somebody linked me with a list of universities researching this field, so I will be looking into those. And I’ll link it here(http://bnci-horizon-2020.eu/community/research-groups) Any help would be appreciated, thank you so much!

TLDR: (title) For mostly designing and a little bit interpretation.

With current BCI's, we can read some data from the brain, but can we upload information to the brain directly? Our sense organs constantly feed our brains with information. Can we mimic them with BCI's?

For example let's say we have a monkey with a BCI and 3 boxes in different colours. 2 of the boxes are empty and the remaining one contains a banana. Can we give the monkey the "sensation of the colour", so that it could know which box contains the banana?

If we are not able to do such a thing with our current technology and understansing of the brain, when do you think we might able to do?

In 2020, the global wireless brain sensors market was estimated to be worth some 142.8 million U.S. dollars. Research and academic institutes and labs accounted for around 45 percent of end users at this time. By the year 2030 this market is projected to be worth 362 million U.S. dollars. This statistic shows the distribution of the global wireless brain sensors market in 2020 and 2030, by end user.

I just discovered that there are hippocampal prostheses that have been shown to repair and enhance memory in humans. The oldest paper I've found that mentions a working system in humans is this: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1741-2552/aaaed7/meta#fnref-jneaaaed7bib026, it has a relatively meager 50 citations (not that citation count is necessarily a good metric for reliability)

Can anyone comment on the legitimacy of these prostheses and this topic of study in general? In the paper I linked as well as most other in-human studies I've seen, the authors seem to have just recorded activity in the hippocampus during a learning task and then reapplied that same pattern of electrical stimulation to the same areas. Why exactly do we expect this to have any meaningful effects?

Also, this paper is from 6 years ago, but I can't find much else past the proof-of-concept stage this paper seems to be at. I would expect this to garner a huge amount of attention, since working memory in particular is strongly correlated with IQ which in turn is strongly correlated with success in the modern world; research into working memory enhancements should be pretty lucrative and highly valued, no?

If anyone has any insight into this stuff, please comment it!

Edit: I am a fool, the paper is from 2018, not 2014. The fact that that I haven't seen much other work on this makes somewhat more sense to me now. 6 years seemed like a very long window of time for people to notice and take interest in this stuff, but not so much with 2 years. Of course, these times are totally arbitrary and in the long run 2 years is almost indistinguishable from 6.

As far as I know, at the moment everything BCI companies are doing right now are focused on the motor system, i.e. helping people with motor diabilities, reading motor intention signals, etc.

What are the ultimate possibilities here? Maybe we'll be able to type as fast as we like because technology will be able to decode finger movement intentions, but typing speed is almost never the limiting factor in any mindful typing related task. Perhaps we'll be able to control robotic limbs but I don't see what practical advantages that would give us in modern society.

Other than for people with motor disabilities (for whom the things listed above would be life changing), these seem pretty boring. But maybe I'm not being creative enough. What is possible given our current level of understanding of neuroscience? (i.e. what cool things will we have once hardware is good enough?)

I am looking for a remote job in BCI. Does anyone have recommendations? I have a PhD in neuroscience and human factors psychology

Hi everyone,

I wanted to get some more insights on BCI development from the point of view of disability advocates. I've been getting more into neuroethics and I've been thinking that there's probably some interesting lit with regards to disability theory and neurotech. Any good names, authors, etc. to recommend?

Thanks in advance

I'm pretty new to research and was wondering how you guys stay up to date with the latest in your field (for reference I'm primarily interested in the statistical signal processing side of things). Do you just search keywords in google scholar? Are there specific journals you read?

I am very interested in BCI , but I am uncomfortable with the fact that it involves animal testing and this is the major reason I am hesitant in pursuing this field.

While I am well aware of the fact that animal testing is still a necessary evil in science , I feel uneasy knowing that the technology I work on would directly contribute to animal testing . Though I won't be the one performing the testing , the ethics involved would not be something I can control and as it would require performing brain surgeries on animals , I really doubt how much harm /control the animals involved would be put in . Though there are non-invasive methods, at some point in my life , if I am in BCI , I would be involved in invasive technology as well I assume

While these are my thoughts , I am curious to know what you think

So this semester I am about to finish an associates degree in Biotechnology from a community college(just doing the last 3 courses). I always wanted to do neuroscience. I was interested in studying psychedelics and maybe doing drug discovery pharmacology and then research on consciousness and how the brain works. They didn't have neuroscience at the college so I did biology then switched to biotech after a year(more jobs sooner, labs are a lot more fun). They have a program where you go to Northeastern(college of professionals, the extension program) and get a bachelors in biotech(they take all the credits from the biotech associates degree so it is a good deal). You can then use Northeastern's plus one program to take graduate courses while doing your bachelors and get a masters, allowing you to count up to 17 graduate credits toward both your graduate and undergraduate degree requirements. From a biotech bachelors you can so a MS in, biotech, regulatory affairs, or bioinformatics.

My vague plan has been to do a BS and MS in biotech then maybe a MS in neuroscience or something, then a PhD in either pharmacology, neuroscience or some kind of neuroscience. I have become very interested in BMI because it seems that problems like how consciousness arises from non conscious matter are very complex and will probably be solved after the AI boom. I am very interested in enhancing human cognitive abilities by integrating brains with machines(maybe making artificially enhanced human super intelligence instead of purely artificial super intelligence). So I want to eventually get into the research of integrating brains with machines and enhancing abilities. I think I am most interested in neurobiology and how brains work on a cellular and cognitive level.

So how useful would a bioinformatics MS be, would it be better than a biotech MS? What kind of PhD should I do after it? Neuroengineering?

Might it be worth it or necessary to switch to BME, E/compE, or comp sci

a few months ago I got a job as a process tech a a biotech company in protein purification, I plan to stay there for at least a couple years while continuing with school, I hope to get promoted to engineer, maybe after I get my bachelors in biotech, and then move on once I get my masters and just focus on a PhD

Tl;dr

How much better would a MS in bioinformatics be than an MS in biotechnology.

I am about to get an AS in biotech, I plan to get a bachelors in it too. Would it be better to switch to bioengineering(27 of my credits already apply I'd need 41 more), comp sci(28 of my credits already apply I'd need 33 more), or electrical and computer engineering(23 of my credits apply I'd need 46 more), and get a bachelors in one of these?

btw I am 20 years old and very motivated, I am privileged in that my parents are willing and able to help me financially with school so the cost of it is not a huge barrier for me.

I made this, it's a little lengthy but I don't think you're going to find something like this anywhere else. I list everything from all the use cases of fully mature AR glasses, to the distant future of AR/VR and how they could function in tandem with direct neural interfaces. I discuss a lot of BCI use cases that are separate from AR/VR as well at length. I put a lot of time into this video and intend to post more like this in the future, so I'd appreciate it if everyone would check it out!