Being Human

Billionaire philanthropist Paul Allen unveiled on Tuesday a $41 million computerized atlas of the 20,000 genes that animate the brain of the common mouse.

As the first of its kind, the privately funded atlas encompasses 85 million photos, 250,000 slides and a gigabyte of laboratory data on each gene.

A mouse brain, weighing little more than a teaspoon of sugar, may be hundreds of times smaller than the human brain, yet both require the activity of thousands of genes. Mice and men share almost 90 percent of their genes.

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If you are interested in this work, you should check out the website for the Allen Institute for Brain Science. There is a nice little video on the site that quickly explains what they are doing and why they are doing it. There is also a link to the brain atlas.

The thing I find the most interesting is that Paul Allen funded this project mainly out of an interest in determining the difference between organic brains and computers. It will have meaning that far exceeds abstractly comparing computer function to organic brain function, however.

The first thing I personally thought of while reading about this project is how computers and brains are now starting to act together more than ever.

An example of this would be brain implants.

While the EEG contacts the only the patient's scalp, brain implants are surgically implanted directly into brain tissue. Most implants are used in patients with Parkinson's disease or other movement disorders. They work by sending electrical shocks to the brain that result in improved muscle control.

But with a new implant called Braingate, communication moves in the opposite direction. An implanted sensor transmits the brain's electrical signals out to a computer-interface, allowing the patient to operate the computer with thought commands. (See "Hardwired with Braingate" sidebar for information on the first patient.)

Other neuroscientists are developing microchip brain implants to ease the distress of patients with Alzheimer's, strokes and other memory-impairment disorders. While use in human patients is probably 15 years off, the researchers are confident that their chips already accurately mimic the activity of neurons in the hippocampus (a part of the brain that re-encodes short-term into long-term memory).

Like the fMRI and the EEG/computer interface, it's likely that the brain-computer interface will have non-medical applications in future, especially when the wireless technology is perfected.

Read more from this article here.

Treating mental illness, neurological disorders, and such often involves some sort of drug intervention at this time. The problem with that is that using drugs to help relieve symptoms of the problem is often like taking shots in the dark and hoping one of the bullets happens to strike the target. Drug therapy has undeniably helped many (myself and my daughter included), but it is dangerous and can impact people in very random and counterproductive fashions. As a person with a diagnosis of bipolar -mixed mood, I can tell you that once you are diagnosed with such a thing you are placed on a rollercoaster of drug therapy that often makes you wonder whether the "cure" is worse than the "sickness".

One is left to wonder how the synthesis of brain mapping technology and brain implant/computer intelligence technology might all come together?

I have no answers, but I have lots of questions. I also have lots of concerns about how this not only might, but will most predictably, go wrong in some.

Will mistakes be less deadly and permanent with mechanical intervention than chemical intervention?

Will this technology spread beyond treating those with issues, and instead be applied more universally (or to people of the financial status to afford an unneeded perceived enhancement of certain abilities)?

How will the mapping of genes and their expression, and the ability to make mechanical adjustments to areas of the brain change how humans develop and what they will be able to think/do/accomplish in the future?

Will we lose some of our wisdom on the road to (for the lack of another word) external control of the mind? Might wisdom be the product of having to make the best of what you have, and the struggle to push to the top of your capacity using self regulation and self analysis?

If people could improve functioning of certain aspects of the mind, would we find that it made little difference if they didn't have the connections between those areas built over time and personal experience? Would it all be potential without context (such as extraordinary data collection/recollection ability with no ability to apply it or synthesize new thoughts by crossing elements to come up with something new)?

How would we decide who "must" undergo alteration?

Science fiction has definitely confronted such issues before, but these issues will be serious and immediate in a few decades in regard to the issue of computer aided thought and thought aided computers.

Patty