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We are approaching the moment of the global brain rapidly.

And these are not ideas about singularity or the rapture or even the much vaunted Artificial Intelligence surpassing native human intelligence.  What am speaking of is that the human brain is the engine that drives all of our species’ triumphs and shortcomings, our greatness and our most difficult issues, our wars and our lesser problems, and almost all of our immense possibilities.

Yet no one knows how it works, and neuroscientists are only just beginning to learn how to manipulate it to our benefit. How much potential  exists there is unfathomable.  Our potential in human conflict resolution, in solving environmental and energy problems, our solutions in medicine, educational progress, immeasurable communications, entertainment, and a million other industries and businesses can all be unlocked  from the inside of our neural networks emanating from our brains. Mind you this applies mainly to our interconnected brains…

 The fact is, advances in brain science are coming thick and fast on a number of fronts, promising new capabilities in coming years. With our vast computing powers and the ease of access to cheap imaging technology allows our generation to produce a transformation in the ability to look into the brain and extract useful information about our well being. Our brain is what makes us who we are and we need to take full measure of its capacities to help us even when we don’t understand it.

First we need to observe the inner workings of it…  Crucial to this shift are medical imaging technologies such as functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI. This system combines magnetic fields and radio waves to map the nuclei of atoms into images. Applied to the brain, fMRI can track blood flow over time, showing which areas are most active when the subject performs a specific task. These machines are already yielding powerful insights, and they will only get better as spatial and temporal resolution improves. Much like measuring telomeres in situ and all other DNA facilities the expected revolution in medicine is amazing.

The first step is to chart brain functions to see what various parts of the brain do and how they do it. Much of the neocortex, the seat of higher functions in humans, already has been explored to some degree. To the extent that we can figure out how these functional areas work — current understanding is primitive, but already useful — we can aid, augment, and simulate them. The approach need not be invasive; consider popular software packages that present puzzles to promote “brain fitness.”  Or as my favourite expression and my related book demonstrates, Brain Software.

The next step is to stimulate brain activity directly to send new information to those areas. This field is exploding as well, thanks to electronic neural implants that pipe aural sensations directly to the cortex (cochlear implants), halt involuntary motor tics in Parkinson’s patients (deep brain stimulation), and empower paraplegics or Multiple sclerosis sufferers and paralyzed victims of accidents to control computers using thoughts alone. Our new frontier in brain – computer interfaces will be far more useful in military applications and scientific frontiers of course but that is expected always.

And if we take the simplicity of emergence we are in a new territory. We can be stimulating the brain in ways analogous to programing data in a computer, and the next step is the equivalent of reading data from the brain… All of this is on the current horizon. When people acting as laboratory subjects look at a symbol while an imaging machine maps the activity in the brain’s visual center, the images on the fMRI monitor look amazingly like the original symbols. This result is tantamount to mind reading… No?

Take a moment for this to sink in: Can the imaging device see directly into the brains of the subject?  Could we perhaps go further and do this with mapping and copying our memories?  What of our mental imagery?  What about human desires?

Who knows. We certainly don’t know.

Yet.

The new frontier is around our inner space but our capacity to measure potential is far more immense. For example our capacity to measure the length of telomeres without extractive and invasive laboratory work is amazing and first available here through a new start up we ventured.

And the start ups, the people, the universities and the companies that effectively match emerging knowledge about the brain with profound human needs have a clear shot at building great solutions, functional cures and striking gold in the marketplace of ideas and useful products.

Yours,

Pano

PS:

The personalized medicine can easily benefit from this because we are certain that the brain much like the neck-top computer it is — it actually represents graphically and also projects, the health state or the illness state of the human being. It does this in full detail and allows us to use this option as the pathways and offers novel cures for the person.

If only we were able to receive the messages and read them fully…

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