Friday, March 7, 2008

Hack your brain(Re-engineered human brains could be in our future)

Your mind: it's just another piece of hardware. Make sure you download the latest patch and upgrade to the newest operating system.That, in so many words, is the fate of humankind described by David Pescovitz
"We always want to better ourselves. And we're always looking for shortcuts, easier ways to achieve our end goal," said Timo Hannay, the head of Web publishing of the Nature Publishing Group who used to work as a neurophysiologist studying the molecular mechanisms of memory.

Current research has enabled non-human primates to play the old video game Space Invaders using nothing but their own thoughts, said Daniel Marcus, director of the Neuroinformatics Research Group at Washington University School of Medicine. Scientists measure the activity of neurons while a monkey plays Space Invaders with a joystick, and then connect the monkey's brain signals to a device that performs the functions of a joystick without requiring any physical manipulation.

"Eventually, you can take the joystick away and the monkey learns to control the video game using its own neural signals," Marcus said.
The Space Invaders experiment has been performed in at least one human trial, Marcus said in an interview after the panel discussion. Marcus isn't involved in this research himself but is excited about its potential.
"I think it has a lot of potential for quadriplegics," Marcus said. "They just want to have some sort of interaction with their environment, to be able to feed themselves, to type something into a computer and communicate. That really seems realistic to me. The idea of being able to fully control a body is a long ways off, but these are steps in that direction."
In a separate project, one brain-controlled gaming system is already being demoed, with mixed results.
Experts doubts we'll all be cyborgs 50 years from now, but says even healthy people might benefit from some sort of brain interface that connects to – well, something.
Research is limited right now. Scientists are measuring the activity of only 100 neurons or so at a time, which means that while a monkey can use its head to play Space Invaders it still needs to use its hands to play a more complicated game such as the maze-like Pac-Man, according to Marcus.
Marcus's own research involves the brain scanning technology fMRI, which pinpoints the areas of the brain that light up in response to visual stimuli or other triggers. His work analyzing Alzheimer's disease illustrates some of the dangers that might accompany any attempt to re-engineer the human brain.
When we're not doing anything, our brains switch to a default mode, which appears to have major importance and perhaps has something to do with memory. The parts of the brain most involved in this default mode are also the ones most affected in the brains of people suffering from Alzheimer's.This seems to indicate that in some humans, the normal functioning of the brain is damaging itself, and is something that has to be considered when performing any future "mind hacks"
What does it mean for you? Probably not much for now, but Pescovitz looks forward to the day when businesses have brain fitness centers for their employees, complete with vending machines loaded with pharmaceuticals and kiosks that zap your mind with magnetic waves. Goodbye, Starbucks, hello Skynet.
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GiFi-Latest Research In Wireless Technology

Researchers of Melbourne University has come up with a wireless technology which promises high speed short range data transfers with speeds of upto 5 Gbps within a radius of 10 meters. The new wireless technology is named GiFi operates on the 60GHz frequency band, which is currently mostly unused. The GiFi Chip developed by the Australian researchers measures 5mm square and is manufactured using existing complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology, the same system that is currently used to print silicon chips.
The best part about this new technology is its cost effectiveness and power consumption, it only consumes 2 watts of power for its operation with antenna(1mm) included and the development of Gi-Fi chip costs approximately $10( Rs 380) to manufacture.
In theory this technology would transfers GB’s of your fav high definition movies in seconds. So GiFi can be considered as a challenger to Bluetooth rather than Wi-Fi and could find applications ranging from new mobile phones to consumer electronics.
Mass production of the technology might not start before 2009.

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