One of my favorite books as a kid was?Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. It tells the story of a group of rodents who were experimented on in a lab and gained profound intelligence and physical gifts. These rats can read and build machines, and they live much longer than the rest of their kind. They, of course, escape the lab that created them and go on to build a flourishing, human-like society underground in the countryside.
If Max Hodak and the researchers at Science Corp. have their way, these types of clever rats – or perhaps something along the lines of monkeys playing poker - might be brought into existence. Oh, and also, Hodak thinks humans could be heading toward an?Inception-like future. Let’s get real weird.
Near the end of last year, Science revealed?its work?on technology that makes it possible to fuse large quantities of lab-grown neurons with an animal’s brain. To do this, Science has built a device that preserves the manufactured neurons in a gel. It then takes out part of an animal’s skull and places its device atop the animal’s brain. In the days that follow, the neurons in the device begin to develop wiring that stretches out from Science’s hardware and into the brain, giving the animal access to extra stores of mental horsepower.
Hodak bills the technology as a new kind of brain interface that builds on what the public has been reading about for the past few years from the likes of Neuralink, Synchron, Precision Neuroscience, and Science itself. Unlike many of these existing brain interfaces, though, Science’s latest technology would not require an implant being placed deep into brain tissue or genetic modifications to a brain to work. To that end, Hodak sees these “biohybrid neural interfaces” as less damaging to brains than current technology. He also contends that Science’s technology will be more general-purpose and reach many areas of the brain, as opposed to current implants that target specific regions like the motor cortex or visual cortex to augment specific mental functions and combat injuries and illness.
“You could place electrodes into the brain and get more bandwidth,” Hodak says. “You could place electrodes in the blood vessels and get less bandwidth. You could do things in between. You could use ultrasound, but that requires genetic modifications to get very high functional resolution. All of these things have complex trade-offs.
“You're going to come out with a motor prosthesis, or a visual prosthesis, or an auditory prosthesis. Or you're going to do modulation for epilepsy, or depression. And obviously, there's a lot of progress that's been made on these things, which I'm all for. But I contend that this is not the promise of BCIs (brain-computer interfaces).”
The rest of the story is on Core Memory - https://lnkd.in/gimZsPj9
