Tag Archives: Brain chipping

Implantable recording device "hugs the brain"

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Photo: Sarah G/Flickr CC

Silk-based implants that stretch, and stick to the brain’s contours and folds like shrink wrap, will monitor patient’s brains and other organs, without damaging sensitive tissues.

Tufts University biomedical engineering professors David Kaplan and Fiorenzo Omenetto created the silk substrate, which causes less inflammation than one with sharp edges.

“The implants contain metal electrodes that are 500 microns thick, or about five times the thickness of a human hair. The absence of sharp electrodes and rigid surfaces should improve safety, with less damage to brain tissue. Also, the implants’ ability to mold to the brain's surface could provide better stability; the brain sometimes shifts in the skull and the implant could move with it. Finally, by spreading across the brain, the implants have the potential to capture the activity of large networks of brain cells, Dr. Litt said.”

via A Brain-Recording Device that Melts into Place, April 18, 2010 News Release – National Institutes of Health (NIH).

"Brain on a plate" bosses robot

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Scientists say they’ve cultivated a brain in the laboratory, which they’ve connected wirelessly to a robot.

The rat neurons, according to New Scientist, process sensor data from the robot’s sensors, and direct the machine to avoid obstacles. — mb

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-0eZytv6Qk]

Scientists prep mind reading device

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Screaming to be heard: Boston University claims its mind-reading device can get inside the heads of paralyzed patients.

by Mark Baard

New Scientist magazine, cited by the Beeb in this report (link and excerpt, below), often exaggerates the nature of scientific findings and discoveries.

That’s why I am just a bit dubious of the claim that electrodes implanted in the brain of a speechless man are unlocking his thoughts, and relaying them to a voice synthesizer.

But if the scientists at Boston University can indeed guess the guy’s thoughts accurately 80 percent of the time, that would be impressive.

Once they take this technology wireless, calling our thoughts our own might prove impossible.

news.bbc.co.uk
Scientists say they may be on the brink of translating the thoughts of a man who can no longer speak into words after a pioneering experiment.

Electrodes have been implanted in the brain of Eric Ramsay, who has been “locked in” – conscious but paralysed – since a car crash eight years ago.

These have been recording pulses in the areas of the brain involved in speech.

Now, New Scientist magazine reports, they are to use the signals he generates to create speech software.

Although the data is still being analysed, researchers at Boston University believe they can correctly identify the sound Mr Ramsay’s brain is imagining some 80% of the time
In the next few weeks, a computer will start the task of translating his thoughts into sounds.
“It’s very exciting that we are starting to be able to translate some basic thoughts, but we are lot further away from a universal mind reading machine than some people hoped – or feared – we may be five years ago.”

Is transhumanism a religion?

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Movement promises “an end run around mortality”


A real beauty, or virtually so. (Image: from the transhumanist book, The Perfect World Tour, by “A.R. Teest.”)

Natasha Vita-More does not appreciate being called a religious leader. (See her reply to a recent parallelnormal post here.) Vita-More and her husband, Max More, are leaders of the transhumanist and extropian movements, which advocate for the use of technology to transform the human into a “posthuman,” which they believe will be better than the originals.

But the movements, which have ties to the United Nations, and to Oxford and Yale universities, do offer hope to those who long for life “beyond our current biological limitations,” and for greater security in a dangerous world.

Transhumanism also has its share of famous followers, drawn largely from the fields of science, engineering and biology.

The transhumanists, after all, will need the help of scientists to realize their dream of creating a life form to supplant mankind.

Posthumans will replace ordinary, biological, humans with “completely synthetic artificial intelligence,” according to one scenario described by the Extropian Institute, Max More’s think-tank.

Such virtual life might arise from human brains being downloaded to computers, or humans being modified with multiple computer implants, the extropians add.

The inventor Ray Kurzweil and MIT artificial intelligence guru Marvin Minsky are transhumanists.

Kurzweil is not a religious man. But he does believe science might help him “live long enough to live forever.” He takes dozens of supplements daily, and spends a full day each month at a Massachusetts clinic, where he receives massive vitamin doses intravenously.

“The promise of eternal life through continuous upgrades obviously satisfies one of the chief needs of religious personalities — an end run around mortality,” my brother, Erik, told me last week.

Erik covered a meeting of the World Transhumanist Association at Yale for the Village Voice in 2003.

Erik does not share my belief that transhumanism might meet the deifinition of a cult. “But,” he said, “some vulnerable people attracted to it might be ripe for such exploitation.”

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More information:

Red Ice Creations special report

Alan Watt’s Cutting Through the Matrix

Chips are for kids: Failing tech rag reaches for RFID dollars

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Hate arphids? Then you must hate babies, according to PC magazine columnist Lance Ulanoff.

Ulanoff made it clear this week to potential RFID advertisers that he is in their camp. In a short piece, he decries arfid opponents as “moaning about privacy and First Amendment implications” associated with the VeriChip subcutaneous arfid implant for humans.

Ulanoff says that America’s 4 million newborns each year should be chipped, so they can be tracked by Homeland Security and the Department of Justice. And he parrots VeriChip’s bogus argument that the chip will prevent tragic child abductions.

The truth is that hospitals are doing an excellent job preventing abductions without the use of permanent, implantable chips that have not undergone longterm testing in humans.

The American Academy of Pediatrics calls the risk of any newborn being abducted virtually nonexistent.

As a parent myself, I find it difficult to imagine another parent being a sucker for VeriChip’s “someone might steal your baby” pitch.

Ziff-Davis has a long history shilling for technology advertisers. For a time, the company was owned by the Japanese computer catalogue publisher Softbank.

And many years before that, in 1938, Ziff-Davis purchased the early science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, which is credited with “inventing” flying saucers in its pages. William B. Ziff, Jr. inherited the company from his father in 1953. Many Ziff-Davis executives joked that Ziff, Jr., who abandoned his philosophical studies in Germany to run the company, “could see the future.”

I quite writing product reviews for several Ziff Davis publications a decade ago, after telling editors there that I refused to delete my criticisms of products from potential advertisers.

clipped from www.pcmag.com
RFID has been a boon to corporations with large retail outlets, inventory rooms, warehouses, and more.
Yet it seems all I hear is moaning about the privacy and First Amendment implications. This is growing tiresome, and it’s time to set people straight.
RFID chips are a good idea. RFID chips that can help locate people and objects are a better idea. RFID chips implanted in pets and people are the best idea of all. Let me illustrate how committed I am to this idea.

Urban wireless to serve intel and PSYOP forces

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The government needs more nodes: Various agencies want to seed cities with wireless networking devices (image from a DOD document).

Despite the high costs and unproven social benefits for municipal broadband, dozens of U.S. cities are ignoring laws banning anti-competitive practices and getting into the internet business.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Defense is planning to build robots that configure themselves into ad hoc wireless networks within urban areas.

City mayors claim they want to provide free and low-cost Wi-Fi access to the poor and attract business travelers. Defense planners say they need to have broadband capabilities in urban war zones.

But rather than closing the “digital divide” (which many academics admit is being exaggerated), or providing a redundant service to traveling salesmen, it appears that officials aim to seize control of internet communications and track individuals in urban areas.

Military and law enforcement agencies will also use the wireless networks to stage “hard PSYOP” attacks against a brain-chipped populace, according to historian and commentator Alan Watt, who specializes in secret societies and government intelligence operations.

Philadelphia, San Francisco, Houston, and Providence, R.I. are among the cities partnering with private companies and the federal government to set up public broadband internet access. Providence used Homeland Security funds to construct a network for police, which may be made available to the public at a later date.

None of the cities are expected to turn a profit anytime soon. Nor are the poor likely to benefit from the projects.

Subscribers to Philly’s “Wireless Philadelphia” service, for example, will pay up to 73 percent more than the rate promised to them two years ago.

“(Philadelphia) presented dangerously inaccurate estimates and figures for the costs and revenue” for its wireless network, according to a recent analysis by students at Harvard Law School. Continue reading →

Think tank: depopulation, brain-chipping on the horizon

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One of the lucky ones, according to futurists.

An organization headed by a former World Bank president the author of “Future Shock” predicts a dismal future for Americans.

24 million disabled Americans, most suffering from diseases caused by excess consumption, will require special public transportation to go to treatment centers, according to the World Future Society.

The WFS, whose directors include former World Bank president and U.S Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, and the futurist author Alvin Toffler, also predicts that the able-bodied will flee to other parts of the world, such as China and India, for work.

And healthy or not, young or old, most can look forward to being brain-chipped, and connected permanently to a global computer network, according to the WFS.

The WFS portrays the brain-chipping scenario as one of the few pluses on its list.

More of the WFS’s grim forecasts for the next 25 years: China’s drinking water supply will be virtually depleted, and global warming-generated super storms will cost hundreds of billions of dollars in damages annually.

Link and excerpt, to some of the predictions, are below.

clipped from www.wfs.org
WFS Image

Forecast #1: Generation Y will migrate heavily overseas.
#2: Dwindling supplies of water in China will impact the global economy.
#3: Workers will increasingly choose more time over more money.
#4: We’ll incorporate wireless technology into our thought processing by 2030.
#5: Children’s “nature deficit disorder” will grow as a health threat.