| shenakfsvu | Date: Friday, 28 Jun 2013, 04:28:54 | Message # 1 |
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Today's clinical applications of braincomputer interfaces include those based on electroencephalography (EEG), which can be used to enable severely paralysed people to operate a computer with their thoughts, and deepbrain stimulators, used to treat the motor symptoms in Parkinson's disease and dystonia.
In fact, Chorost knows firsthand what it means to wire your brain directly to an electronic device. In his first book, Rebuilt: How becoming part computer made me more human (Souvenir Press, 2006), Chorost related his own experience of receiving a cochlear implant after becoming deaf. In World Wide Mind, he once again offers an impressively vivid story, and it is a pleasure to follow him into his envisioned future of human beings with directly connected brains a scenario that would render webbased social networks like Facebook obsolete, as information would flow directly through social networks of brains. The World Wide Web would be supplanted by the world wide mind.
Jens Clausen is an assistant professor at the Institute for Ethics and History in Medicine in T Germany
锘緼 future of socially networked neurons
World Wide Mind is a thoughtprovoking story about how technology will connect with the brain ever more intimately, merging humanity and the internet, providing technologically shared experiences and emotions. It forces the reader to think again not just about neurotechnology but also about communication, about how important eyetoeye and bodytobody contact is. Setting aside the risks of surgery, less technophilic readers may nevertheless ask, why should we want to establish a global emotional network? But this may just be a daft question from an oldfashioned mind that has yet to sign up for a Facebook account.
These sophisticated technologies appear outdated by comparison with what is in Chorost's book. What Chorost needs to achieve total telempathy are nanowires snaking through the brain's capillaries, sending and receiving information, and optogenetics laser beams that can activate and deactivate single neurons according to the light's wavelength. Nanowires have already been shown to grow in rodent brains, and optogenetics has been used in rodents to trigger individual memories and generate specific behaviours.
It seems to me that the eventuality of all matter forming a single conscious entity is, so far as physics permits it to be possible, an inevitability. Even as human beings it is possible for parts of our brains to operate unconsciously, or for our brains to maintain more than one conscious 'thread' simultaneously. It is arguable that there already is only one mind. This will be much easier to understand once our brains are wired together with such bandwidth and speed as to be comparable to the wiring inside our brains. This technology will so alter our understanding of being as to make society unrecognisable, perhaps even unrecognisable as a concept. Personally I can't wait for the day.
However, in his technophile mission Chorost sometimes overestimates technology. Optogenetics is presented not only as a promising tool for basic research but also as a roundthecorner therapy for Parkinson's disease, one without any side effects, and this is presented as mere "low hanging fruit". That would be great, but is at best highly optimistic. While there are therapies that utilise ldopa and deepbrain stimulation (DBS), there is currently no cure for Parkinson's, and unrealistic expectations of DBS are already a cause of postsurgical disappointment. The unknown impact of a highly investigational tool should be presented much more carefully.
There are also practical obstacles. For instance, while children are the likely early adopters of worldwidemind technology, how many parents will consent to elective openbrain surgery on their offspring, and how many physicians will provide it? Chorost argues that if these devices develop as quickly as cochlear implants did, they will likewise be viewed as routine. But that misses a crucial point: surgery for cochlear implants, which involves drilling into the skull, is not without risk, but it is justified by the therapeutic benefit. There is no comparable benefit in sight for elective brain surgery.
http://frlancelsac.webs.com/
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