Neuroscience  

Optogenetics pioneer, Ed Boyden recently sat down for a discussion on the importance of neuroscience research on the Singularity 1 on 1 podcast.

One of the main presenters at last year’s Global Future 2045 Conference in New York was neuroscientist, Dr. Ed Boyden. Boyden’s impressive work in neuroscience in general and optogenetics in particular, may have profound implications it would have on our ability to understand and manipulate the brain.

Recently Nikola Danaylov interviewed Boyden on the podcast Singularity 1 on 1.

"Our approach is very much focused on the technologies that will allow us to numerate, and describe the mechanistic processes through which neural circuits interact."

During the conversation with Boyden, the pair covered a variety of topics such as: his interesting career path from chemistry to physics to electrical engineering and into neuroscience; the loop of understanding and why the brain is where we need to go; and the importance of philosophy.

Boyden also covers his work in optogenetics and whether the brain is a classical computer or not. A major goal of Boyden’s current work is to manipulate individual nerve cells using light. To do this, he takes advantage of naturally occurring light-sensitive proteins from various microorganisms, which can be artificially expressed in brain cells using genetic technology. By controlling these proteins with an implanted fiber-optic device, Boyden is developing on/off switches for brain activity. This will be a powerful way to test theories of brain function in experimental animals, and could also open the door to new clinical therapies for conditions such as epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease, or blindness.

The pair discuss the Penrose-Hameroff theory of consciousness; and the Human Brain Project.

Boyden and Danaylov also touch on Randal Koene's Whole Brain Emulation project; the definition and importance of consciousness; neuroplasticity and Norman Doidge’s The Brain That Changes Itself. They also talk about free will and mind-uploading.

Related articles Energy Efficient Brain Simulator Outperforms Supercomputers  Optogenetic Infrared Light Offers New Method for Brain Mapping  Miguel Nicolelis Explains Brain-to-Brain Interfaces

Boyden is Associate Professor of Biological Engineering and Brain and Cognitive Sciences, at the MIT Media Lab and the MIT McGovern Institute. He leads the Synthetic Neurobiology Group, which develops tools for analyzing and engineering the circuits of the brain. These technologies, created often in interdisciplinary collaborations, include ‘optogenetic’ tools, which enable the activation and silencing of neural circuit elements with light, 3-D microfabricated neural interfaces that enable control and readout of neural activity, and robotic methods for automatically recording intracellular neural activity and performing single-cell analyses in the living brain. He has launched an award-winning series of classes at MIT that teach principles of neuroengineering, starting with basic principles of how to control and observe neural functions, and culminating with strategies for launching companies in the nascent neurotechnology space. He also co-directs the MIT Center for Neurobiological Engineering, which aims to develop new tools to accelerate neuroscience progress.

Amongst other recognitions, he has received the Jacob Heskel Gabbay Award (2013), the Grete Lundbeck European “Brain” Prize, the largest brain research prize in the world (2013), the Perl/UNC Neuroscience Prize (2011), the A F Harvey Prize (2011), and the Society for Neuroscience Research Award for Innovation in Neuroscience (RAIN) Prize (2007). He has also received the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award (2013), the NIH Director’s Transformative Research Award (twice, 2012 and 2013), and the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award (2007), as well as the New York Stem Cell Foundation-Robertson Investigator Award (2011) and the the Paul Allen Distinguished Investigator Award in Neuroscience (2010). He was also named to the World Economic Forum Young Scientist list (2013), the Wired Smart List “50 People Who Will Change the World” (2012), the Technology Review World’s “Top 35 Innovators under Age 35″ list (2006), and his work was included in Nature Methods “Method of the Year” in 2010.

His group has hosted hundreds of visitors to learn how to use neurotechnologies, and he also regularly teaches at summer courses and workshops in neuroscience, as well as delivering lectures to the broader public at TED and at the World Economic Forum. Ed received his Ph.D. in neurosciences from Stanford University as a Hertz Fellow, where he discovered that the molecular mechanisms used to store a memory are determined by the content to be learned. Before that, he received three degrees in electrical engineering, computer science, and physics from MIT. He has contributed to over 300 peer-reviewed papers, current or pending patents, and articles, and has given over 240 invited talks on his group’s work.



SOURCE  Singularity Weblog

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 Mind Uploading  

In the short film Temma, a neuro-programmer tries to complete a computational model of her own mind while her body succumbs to a degenerative disease.

Temma is a short science fiction film about a neuro-programmer who tries to complete a computational model of her own mind before her body succumbs to a degenerative disease.

Related articles Stephen Hawking Thinks Mind Uploading Possible  The Transhumanist Reader  The Final Moments of Karl Brant

When Temma Baumgarten's condition takes a sudden turn for the worse, her husband Phillip and daughter Alyssa must come to terms with an incomplete electronic version of herself that Temma leaves behind.

With a plot that looks to be similar to the upcoming major release Transcendence, Temma looks at the possibilities for and consequences of mind uploading and the creation of a substrate independent mind.

The entire film recently was released to YouTube.

Temma recently won Best Science Fiction Short at the Berlin Independent Film Festival

The film won the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Grant and Faculty Selects at Columbia University Graduate Film Program.

Temma stars Karen Young, Richard Bekins, Samantha Bilinkas and was directed by Anya Meksin. Meksin also co-wrote the film with William Gerrard.

Robot Hands was responsible for the visual effects.

Do you think the risks of creating an incomplete upload of a consciousness are worth the risks?

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 Movies  

The upcoming science fiction movie Transcendence, starring Johnny Depp looks to examine how uploading may pose a great existential threat to human life.

The new trailer for Transcendence reveals that uploading  a brain may be fraught with danger. In a scenario akin to James Barrat's Busy Child scenario, an uploaded super-intelligent entity wants to get out of the box, and onto the internet.

In Transcendence Dr. Will Caster (Johnny Depp) is the foremost researcher in the field of artificial intelligence, working to create a sentient machine that combines the collective intelligence of everything ever known with the full range of human emotions.  His highly controversial experiments have made him famous, but they have also made him the prime target of anti-technology extremists who will do whatever it takes to stop him.

Related articles The Transhumanist Reader  Ken Hayworth In Depth on Uploading and Brain Preservation  Gary Marcus Urges People To Think About The Threat of Artificial Intelligence

However, in their attempt to destroy Will, they inadvertently become the catalyst for him to succeed—to be a participant in his own transcendence.  For his wife Evelyn (Rebecca Hall) and best friend Max Waters (Paul Bettany), both fellow researchers, the question is not if they can…but if they should.

Their worst fears are realized as Will’s thirst for knowledge evolves into a seemingly omnipresent quest for power, to what end is unknown.  The only thing that is becoming terrifyingly clear is there may be no way to stop him.

Transcendence will open in theaters on April 18th.

SOURCE  Transcendence

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 Neurosciene  

Recently the Science Channel program Futurescape looked at the possibilities of uploading memories directly to the brain, as may be possible with the work of Theodore Berger.

One day in the near future, you'll plug a cable into your brain and upload information.  In a video from the Science Channel, Michio Kaku says that such technology does not yet exist, but is physically possible.

Memory formation in the brain starts in the prefrontal cortex, but then transfers to the hypocampus, where the memories are stored for the long term.

Related articles Mind-Reading Devices May Be On the Horizon According to Stanford Scientists  Theodore Berger On Neuro Engineering  Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Technology May Be Possible

Theodore Berger describes in the video how neural-interface technology, like the ones he is developing could dramatically augment human ability.

"We found that we can not only restore long-term memories, we can enhance the animals ability to remember," states Berger.  "You can think about using devices like this to greatly enhance human memory and to shorten the cycle for learning, in terms of downloading huge quantities of memory at a single time."

Image Source: Theodore Berger

Berger and his team have used silicon-based, multi-site electrode arrays and tissue culture methods for implantation of hardware models into the brain to replace damaged or dysfunctional nerve tissue.  A presentation of the research is available here.

The chip's function is to communicate within the brain is a dramatic first step, he believes, toward an implantable machine that fluently speaks the language of the brain-a machine that could restore memories in people with brain damage or help them make new ones.

SOURCE  Science Channel

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 Transhumanism  

TRANSHUMAN is a short documentary film by director Titus Nachbauer. It is about radical life extension and future technology that might change the human condition.

Philosopher Anders Sandberg does not accept death as a foregone conclusion. According to him it will become possible this century to upload your mind into a computer. He is a member of a small group that calls itself the transhumanists.

TRANSHUMAN is a short documentary film by director Titus Nachbauer. It is about radical life extension and future technology that might change the human condition.

Related articles A Brilliant Introduction To Transhumanism  Anders Sandberg on Knowing The Unknowable  The Transhumanist Reader

According to Humanity+, transhumanism is:

(1) The intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities.

(2) The study of the ramifications, promises, and potential dangers of technologies that will enable us to overcome fundamental human limitations, and the related study of the ethical matters involved in developing and using such technologies.

Along with Sandberg, TRANSHUMAN features Nick Bostrom, Arjen Kamphuis, and Natasha Vita-More.



SOURCE  Titus Nachbauer

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 Brain Uploading  

Adam Ford recently uploaded an in depth interview in two parts with Dr. Ken Hayworth. Hayworth is the connectomics pioneer behind the innovative mouse brain connectome observatory. He is also the founding president of the Brain Preservation Foundation.

Recently Adam Ford uploaded an in depth interview in two parts with Dr. Ken Hayworth.  Hayworth is the connectomics pioneer behind the innovative mouse brain connectome observatory.  He is also the founding president of the Brain Preservation Foundation.

Currently, Hayworth is continuing his neuroscience research as a senior scientist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Farm Research Campus.

Neuroscientists today can preserve small volumes of animal brain tissue immediately after death with incredible precision -- the features and structure of every synapse within these volumes is well-protected down to the nanometer scale, using an inexpensive, room-temperature process of chemical fixation and plastic embedding, or "plastination."

The image above is an example of plastination and local circuit tracing, occurring in leading neuroscience labs around the world today. This work immediately raises the question:

"Can the standard chemical fixation and plastic embedding technique used for electron microscopic investigation of brain circuitry be adapted to preserve the synaptic connectivity of an entire human brain?"

Related articles Ray Kurzweil On The Computers That Will Live In Our Brains  Human Memory Implants May Soon Be Tested  Karl Deisseroth Explains CLARITY, The Method That Allows Brains To Become Transparent For Analysis

According to Hayworth, This is a well-defined scientific question, and we now have the tools necessary to answer this question definitively.  Moreover, his Brain Preservation Foundation has put up a $100,000 prize for the technology that is able to make this work.

"The human race is on a beeline to mind uploading: We will preserve a brain, slice it up, simulate it on a computer, and hook it up to a robot body," says Hayworth.

Hayworth proposes a protocol where when a patent in hospital has run out of medican options, he or she will be placed under anesthesia, then a cocktail of toxic chemicals will be perfused through their vascular system, fixing every protein and lipid in their brain into place, preventing any decay, and causing instantaneous death.  

This method of plastination differs from the cryonics procedure offered by organizations such as Alcor, but Hayworth does not suggest at this stage one method is head and shoulders above the other.  "Competition in science is healthy," he says.

After death through the plastination process, the patient's brain will be injected with heavy-metal staining solutions to make the cell membranes visible under a microscope. All of the water will then be drained from his brain and spinal cord, replaced by pure plastic resin.

With this method, every neuron and synapse in his central nervous system will be protected down to the nanometer level, Hayworth says, “the most perfectly preserved fossil imaginable.”

Using a ultramicrotome, a plastic-embedded preserved brain will eventually be cut into strips, and then imaged in an electron microscope. The physical brain can then be destroyed, but in its place will be a precise map of the patient's connectome.

Hayworth states that this method, unlike the potential of cryonics will mean that the uploaded brain will not be re-established in the patient's own body (presumably cleared of all disease and aging signs).  Rather, he suggests that the process will be better suited for robotic replacement of the body, or a substate independant mind.  

In 100 years or so, Hayworth suggests, scientists will be able to determine the function of each neuron and synapse and build a complete computer simulation of the mind bases on the wiring diagram connectome collected. 

“This isn’t cryonics, where maybe you have a .001 percent chance of surviving,” he said. “We’ve got a good scientific case for brain preservation and mind uploading.”

In the lenghty interview embedded below, Ford and Hayworth also cover the topics of artificial intelligence, the Singularity, President Obama's BRAIN project, the work of Henry Markram and other aspects of mind uploading.  

SOURCE  Adam Ford

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 The Singularity  

Miguel Nicolelis, the neuroscientist whose team was responsible for recently giving rats the ability to sense infrared wavelengths, and for wiring monkeys to play video games and control robots with their minds says computers will never replicate the human brain and that the Singularity is “a bunch of hot air.”

Miguel Nicolelis, the neuroscientist at Duke University, whose team was responsible for recently giving rats the ability to sense infrared wavelengths says computers will never replicate the human brain and that the technological Singularity is “a bunch of hot air.”

It is interesting that the man, who in some respects is helping make the Singularity a reality, does not subscribe to the idea; or at  least the mind uploading elements.

"The brain is not computable and no engineering can reproduce it," says Nicolelis, a long-time researcher into brain-machine interfaces.

The Singularity, as 33rd Square readers know, is that moment predicted in the not-to-distant future where exponential technology leads to a greater-than-human self-improving artificial intelligence.

Ray Kurzweil, recently hired on at Google as a director of engineering, is the greatest promoter of the Singularity and believes that once machine intelligence exceed our own people will also be able to upload their thoughts and memories into computers.

Nicolelis calls that idea total bunk. “Downloads will never happen,” Nicolelis said during remarks made at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston recently.

“There are a lot of people selling the idea that you can mimic the brain with a computer.” The debate over whether the brain is a kind of computer has been running for decades.

Although many scientists remain in the camp that mind uploading will not be possible, there has been a growing scientific and academic acceptance of the possibility.  Last year, the International Journal of Machine Consciousness, put out a special issue on the subject.

Also, neuroscientist Sebastian Seung does not discount the idea in his book, Connectome: How the Brain's Wiring Makes Us Who We Are.  He writes that we are our connectomes. Our unique selves—the way we think, act, feel—is etched into the wiring of our brains. Capturing the connectome and simulating it in a computer might therefore be an avenue to mind uploading.

Kurzweil delves into the idea of “reverse-engineering” the brain in his latest book, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed, in which he writes that even though the human brain may be immensely complex, “the fact that it contains many billions of cells and trillions of connections does not necessarily make its primary method complex.”

However, Nicolelis thinks that human consciousness simply can’t be replicated in silicon. That’s because its most important features are the result of unpredictable, non-linear interactions between billions of cells, Nicolelis says.

“You can’t predict whether the stock market will go up or down because you can’t compute it,” he says. “You could have all the computer chips ever in the world and you won’t create a consciousness.”

The neuroscientist, originally from Brazil, instead thinks that humans will increasingly subsume machines (an idea, incidentally, that’s also part of Kurzweil’s predictions). His study giving rats the extra sense is one example of this.

• Researcher Rewires Rat Brains To Sense Infrared Spectrum and Promises Much More

SOURCE  TEDxTalks, MIT Technology Review

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Professor of Computational Neuroscience at MIT Sebastian Seung discusses how the study of "connectomes", a comprehensive map of neural connections in the brain, can help turn science fiction into reality. Seung proposes that through the study of the connectome we can test whether ideas such as freezing ourselves or uploading our brains on to computers are even possible.

Seung has found what he calls the nexus of nature and nurture: the "Connectome", or the network of connections between neurons in the human brain. He will take you inside his ambitious quest to model the Connectome, which, if successful, would uncover the basis of personality, intelligence, memory and disorders such as autism and schizophrenia.

Dr. Seung is Professor of Computational Neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the Department of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Adjunct Assistant Neurobiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston. He studied theoretical physics with David Nelson at Harvard University, and completed postdoctoral training with Haim Sompolinsky at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Before joining the MIT faculty, he was a member of the Theoretical Physics Department at Bell Laboratories. Dr. Seung has been a Sloan Research Fellow, a Packard Fellow, and a McKnight Scholar. 

He is also author of the recent book, Connectome: How the Brain's Wiring Makes Us Who We Are, and creator of the Eyewire project.  McGill University Professor of Psychology and Neurosciences Daniel Levitin wrote in The Wall Street Journal that Connectome is "the best lay book on brain science I've ever read."

View the complete video at: http://fora.tv/2012/02/13/Sebastian_Seung_Connectome 

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In our own Top Ten Innovations of 2011, we named the Mouse Connectome Observatory as our number one innovation.  In February, neuroscientist Sebastian Seung's book, Connectome is to be released, and it promises to delve into some of the key issues around whole brain scanning.


The excitement of studying the complete circuit diagram of the brain for which the book is named was clearly evident in Seung's TED talk last year. A full connectome might provide telling insight into what goes goes awry, for instance, in an autistic child or an Alzheimer’s patient (definitely worth reading for these bits alone).

We know that each of us is unique, but science has struggled to pinpoint where, precisely, our uniqueness resides. Is it in our genes? The structure of our brains? Our genome may determine our eye color and even aspects of our personality. But our friendships, failures, and passions also shape who we are. The question is how?

Seung believes it lies in the pattern of connections between the brain’s neurons, which change slowly over time as we learn and grow. The connectome, as it’s called, is where our genetic inheritance intersects with our life experience. It’s where nature meets nurture.  Seung introduces us to the dedicated researchers who are mapping the brain’s connections, neuron by neuron, synapse by synapse. It is a monumental undertaking—the scientific equivalent of climbing Mount Everest—but if they succeed, it could reveal the basis of personality, intelligence, memory, and perhaps even mental disorders. Many scientists speculate that people with anorexia, autism, and schizophrenia are “wired differently,” but nobody knows for sure. The brain’s wiring has never been clearly seen.

In the last chapters, though he takes up the claims of the transhumanists who desperately would like to get their hands on a full connectome for the ultimate upload into binary immortality.

Seung tries to come to grips with the controversial assertion that someday you might be able to transfer the equivalent of a connectome mind file to computer hardware, software or any robot or avatar.

Scientific American received an advanced copy and reviewed some of the concepts within Connectome.

“In his book Live Long Enough to Live Forever, the inventor Ray Kurzweil predicts that immortality will be attained in the next few decades,” Seung writes. “If you can manage to live long enough to survive to that point, you will live forever. Personally, I feel quite confident that you, dear readers, will die, and so will I.”

But Seung remains intrigued by the notion that a unifying mechanism drives the workings of the brain and its mechanics might be decipherable and reproducible. And he is at least willing to cast a critical eye on  the prospect of a 2.0 version of the self that, when transferred into a supercomputer, laptop, or software avatar, might then live on as an electronic ghost.

The central question for Seung—and the one that also keeps the transhumanists on tenterhooks—is whether you are your connectome. If you could deduce every connection point of every brain cell, the strength with which each neuron fires, and the way these firing patterns change as the cells interact with each other, would, in fact, you be left with a copy of you?

In a chapter called “To Freeze or to Pickle,” Seung undertakes, from multiple perspectives, an earnest and unsmirking analysis of the connectome as a pathway to immortality. All of his conclusions point to obstacles that could very well prove insurmountable.

The Human Brain Project is intended as an exploration of basic science, not a preparation for eternal life. But Seung points out that even an impressive endeavor of its magnitude might fail to capture all the necessary information.

One potential flaw: The model of the brain might have to take into account the way neurons communicate outside known channels—foregoing the transmission of chemical and electrical signals across the small gaps, called synapses, between brain cells. To overcome this hitch, it might be necessary to create a simulation of each atom in the brain, an undertaking of such unimaginable complexity that it would verge on the impossible. “It seems absurd to even consider the enormous computational power required, and is completely out of the question unless your remote descendants survive for galactic time scales,” he writes.

Seung ends his book with an epilogue that calls for a “return to reality”—a recognition that “grand challenges” remain, beyond quixotic quests for eternal life. A 10-year effort to find the connectome of a mouse brain is on his wish list. Such a quest lacks the box-office appeal of contemplating eternity as a file on a flash drive. In the end, though, Seung believes a project of this more modest scale would, like The Human Genome Project push researchers to the limit but vastly deepen our knowledge about an organ that remains largely a mystery.

Seung undoubtedly retains a lingering fascination with the possibility of an intersection between connectomics and transhumanism. At a TED talk given last year, he commented that connectomics might eventually put to the test whether a technology like cryonics will eventually be feasible. And Seung is a member of an advisory board to the Brain Preservation Foundation, which is offering a prize for technologies that would successfully preserve the structure of either a mouse or large animal brain after death for “science,” “memory donation” or “continued life.”

Sebastian Seung

http://connectomethebook.com/
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