If your brain could be made to operate 10-20% faster, if you could completely eliminate mental fatigue or a tendency to become distracted, if you could suddenly have a completely photographic memory and the ability to recall anything you see, hear, or read in perfect detail — wouldn’t you sign on with that?

Plus, boosting our intelligence is an enabler for anything else we want to accomplish. The smarter, the easier.

What’s the best boost currently available? Supplements? Electric currents? Discuss.

UPDATE: on FAcebook Jab suggests modafinil is already providing a boost to a lot of people, especially students. Then there’s transcranial magnetic stimulation.

Did I have any choice in naming this blog The Speculist?

There’s the liberating way of looking at it: every bad career, financial, relationship, or other move I ever made was hardwired in. The problem is, I don’t believe that.

Even if they can somehow prove that free will doesn’t exist, won’t we all continue to have an overwhelming subjective experience that tells us that it’s real?

The delusion that my choices shape my life — if it is, in fact, a delusion — is one I intend to hang on to.

The new neologism is “neurosecurity”, an excellent addition to the language (which has only been used in infinity-billion sci-fi stories already). If nothing else, you should be terrified of a cerebral SirCam – imagine a virus pulling a random thought from your head and telling everyone you know.

Scary!

The concept of a networked brain isn’t so different from the transportation grids used by cars and planes, says Martijn van den Heuvel, a neuroscientist at Utrecht University Medical Center who led the new study.

“If you’re flying from New York to Amsterdam, you can do it in a direct flight. It’s much more effective than going from New York, then to Washington, and then to Amsterdam. It’s exactly the same idea in the brain,” he says.

Per this model, intelligence is a factor not of the number of connections inside the brain, but the efficiency with which those connections are wired together. Apparently the arrangement of non-nueron-carrying white matter is also a major factor. Seeing as this basic plumbing ought to be reasonably reconfigurable — once we know how — this research begins to look like something that might push us towards greater than human intelligence in a fairly straightforward way.

But let’s not plan those The Singularity Is Here parties quite yet.

For one thing, as the article points out:

The first order of business will be to determine what physical and biochemical properties create more efficient brain network

Well, that’s a fairly tall first order of business, now isn’t it? First we have to figure out what those properties are, then we have to figure out how we can manipulate them. It may well all be doable, but a lot of heavy spade work lies ahead. And that’s not the only difficulty. Alvis Brigis argues pretty convincingly that we don’t yet have a precise and mutually agreed upon definition of what we mean by “intelligence.”

Back when I used to lead process improvement teams for the product engineering and development group at U S WEST Advanced Technologies, we had a saying — “You can’t improve what you can’t measure.” In retrospect, this is not entirely true. I believe something like “reliably” or “consistently” belongs in there between the “can’t” and the “improve.” And if we can’t reliably improve something that we can’t measure, it seems equally axiomatic that we can’t measure what we haven’t properly defined.

Not to be a buzzkill, I’m just saying that a little progress in this area is still a long way from any of us dropping by the clinic for a quick brain reconfiguration and an additional 60 IQ points. But still, it could very well be (early and embryonic) progress in exactly that direction.

Dispatches from a rapidly changing, rapidly improving world

Special Dispatch April 15, 2009

It’s tax day here in the good old US of A: as good a time as any to remember
that, whether your take is that it’s happening because of massive government
spending or in spite of massive government spending, life in this country
— and pretty much everywhere else — is improving.

Item:
Doctors confirm woman’s imaginary third arm

A 64-year-old woman has reported to doctors at Geneva University Hospital
the presence of a pale, milky-white and translucent third arm.

After examining the case, the woman’s neurologist, Asaid Khateb of the hospital’s
experimental neurophysiology laboratory, called the rare phenomenon credible.

The arm appeared to the woman a few days after suffering a stroke, doctors
said.

But this case of what is known as a supernumerary phantom limb (SPL) is a
genuine head-scratcher.

The upshot is that the woman can use the apparitional extremity to relieve
very real itches on the cheek. It cannot penetrate solid objects.

Khateb and his colleagues examined the patient’s brain using functional magnetic
resonance imaging (fMRI), a tool that allows doctors to see whether the brain
is truly stimulated, and to pinpoint where. In this case, the investigations
revealed that the woman actually experienced what she described.

Researchers instructed the woman to move her right hand. As expected, the
motor cortex and visual processing areas in the left side of her brain became
mobilised.

The same effects were observed to a lesser extent when the woman simply imagined
moving her right hand. Imaginary movements of the woman’s paralysed left hand
prompted the same activity in the brain, but on the right side.

But when doctors asked her to move her phantom arm, her brain reacted as
though the arm really existed and could be moved. In addition, the patient’s
visual cortex was also activated, indicating the she actually saw the imaginary
limb.

And when she was instructed to scratch her cheek, regions of the brain relating
to touch were activated

The Good News

Yes, this item is Better All the Time, not Astounding Science Facts (or Tales
of the Paranormal.)

Here’s why: it is extremely significant that the doctors treating this woman
were able to use an MRI to take a peek at what’s happening inside her brain
and confirm that it is sending signals that mean move the arm and receiving
signals that mean the hand is feeling something. Mapping brain activity
to physiological phenomena is one of the biggest breakthroughs of the past few
decades, and its promise is already being realized in a number of different
prevention and treatment options.

Consider this: earlier this week, my newborn
daughter was subjected to her first-ever hearing test. The pediatrician
hooked her up to an electroencephalograph, put headphones on her, and started
piping in sounds. In a matter of minutes, the brainwave scan confirmed that
she is hearing everything she should be hearing in each ear. Great news for
new parents when there is no problem, and extremely useful in the unfortunate
cases where there is a problem. Rather than waiting months or years for
a child’s behavior to reveal that something is amiss, these parents know what
they are up against from the very beginning.

Mapping the motions and sensations of a real limb to brain activity makes
it possible to treat paralysis by overriding existing damaged nerve connections
in order to return mobility to a paralyzed limb. Such mapping is also crucial
to developing a direct interface between the brain and electronically controlled
prosthetic limbs when there is no possibility of reviving the lost function,
as in the case of amputation. These kinds of treatments are already
under
development.

But that’s just the beginning. Understanding how a phantom limb is represented
within the brain gives us a glimpse of how one day — probably not that far
in the future — we will be able to have very real experiences in virtual worlds.
The woman described is experiencing something that seems perfectly real to her,
as real as the actual experience of her actual arms. Essentially, her brain
has written and is executing a "program" for a virtual arm. Seeing
as this came about as the result of a stroke, and the woman probably wasn’t
looking for an extra limb, we tend to view this new bit of mental software as
a bug. But that bit of spontaneous buggy "software code" embeds some
powerful capabilities. That her doctors are able to watch it in action is a
very good sign. In time, it’s reasonable to expect that someone will figure
out how to reverse engineer this program, and begin to improve on it.

Live to see it!

The argument that Stephen has made more than once is that Google vastly expands our ability to recall information — making it a tremendous memory aid. Philosophers Andy Clark of the University of Edinburgh and David Chalmers with the Australian National University agree — for those of us who use it, Google is now part of our “extended minds.”

But this isn’t exactly something new. A generation or two ago, one’s library card or set of encyclopedias — or even paper and something to write with — served to extend the capabilities of the human mind in perhaps slower, but still very effective ways. Google just has the advantage of being massive and more or less instantaneous.

Oh, and by the way (also covered in the linked article) texting actually helps to build literacy skills.

Yep.

Sure does.

Hack your brain

How to hallucinate with ping-pong balls and a radio

DO YOU EVER want to change the way you see the world? Wouldn’t it be fun to hallucinate on your lunch break? Although we typically associate such phenomena with powerful drugs like LSD or mescaline, it’s easy to fling open the doors of perception without them: All it takes is a basic understanding of how the mind works.

The first thing to know is that the mind isn’t a mirror, or even a passive observer of reality. Much of what we think of as being out there actually comes from in here, and is a byproduct of how the brain processes sensation. In recent years scientists have come up with a number of simple tricks that expose the artifice of our senses, so that we end up perceiving what we know isn’t real – tweaking the cortex to produce something uncannily like hallucinations. Perhaps we hear the voice of someone who is no longer alive, or feel as if our nose is suddenly 3 feet long.

I like the assumption that there’s an eager audience for quick, simple, and inexpensive ways to hallucinate.

The research cited is interesting, especially the the description of the Ganzfeld procedure. I remember reading a while back that this procedure was being used to test precognition and other paranormal phenomena. I didn’t know that it was also a means of getting a cheap — and presumably reasonably safe? — hallucinogenic high.

We were talking about how to teach and instill creativity on the most recent FastForward Radio. Well, here’s outside-the-box suggestion: perhaps the Ganzfeld procedure has a role to play. Once a month or so, maybe we should white out our visual field and pump white noise into our ears and see what kind of creative imagery our subconscious coughs up for us.

Granted, it would probably be a small part of a much larger overall program to instill creativity. But, who knows? Hallucinations may have an important role to play in helping us understand ourselves and our place in the world better.

Reporting on my trip to Arizona a couple of years ago, I mentioned a sacred grotto in the Palatki ruin, near Sedona, where people went for hundreds or possibly thousands of years to eat peyote and other hallucinogens and then stare at the petroglyphs.

Why did they keep coming back? Was it just that hallucinogens were part of their religion? (If so, they were hardly alone.) Perhaps these rituals served a practical purpose beyond spiritual discipline and / or recreation. Maybe these ancient peoples were trying to be more creative?

I should note that I used to have an alarm clock that made the exact same chiming sound as one of these Starbucks timers. Not a similar sound — the exact same sound. When I hear that sound, something way down in my brain tells me that it’s time to change my state of consciousness. Specifically, it tells me that I need to wake up. It’s a classic pavlovian response. There must have been many times that I have heard that sound while dreaming and, upon receiving the signal, had the world around me dissolve away to be replaced with the real world.

So when I hear the timer go off at Starbucks, my brain gets the signal to wake up, and there is this moment of expectation that the dreamworld around me is going to disappear. It only lasts for an instant, but it is a profound and disorienting sensation. The world becomes a very unreal place for a moment, and I become frustrated that there is not a real world to wake up to.

Just for a moment, I get a glimpse of another level of reality — a more real level of reality — but of course, this is no “glimpse,” just a sense that that other level is there and that I’m missing out on it. All I know about this other level of reality is that it’s more real than the one I’m in…and that I can’t get there.

And it is a complete illusion, of course.

But maybe it’s more than that, too. I don’t believe that the real world is an illusion and that I need to awaken to some enlightened state of existence. (Well, I don’t entirely believe that.) But I do believe that trying to perceive and understand our world in a new way — to get to the “next level,” if only metaphorically –is a huge part of the journey we’re all on. And it’s good to be reminded of that, even by a cheap electronic timer.

How about the ever-important question of looking cool? Not being cool, mind you — as a self-described geek I think actually being cool is probably out of the question. But looking cool can be achieved so long as we’re clear that by “looking cool” we mean “taking steps to ensure that I look somewhat less dorky than I would have otherwise.”

That goal is achievable.

Take bicycle helmets, for example. I bought a new one today. Let’s compare. Here’s the old one:

Here’s the new one:

I mean, the new one is cooler, right? I think I’ll kind of look like the Silver Surfer cutting through the mountain trails with that helmet on.

And there, you see, is our big problem. Some would argue that there is no coolness to be found anywhere in any reference to Silver Surfer whatsoever. But more up-to-date hipsters (See? I’m hopeless) would probably argue that there is something reasonably cool about this:

…but something very sad indeed about this:

No, seriously, brace yourselves.

I’m not kidding.

Ready, then?

New research shows that it’s because our brains, compensating for our inability to see in real time (we’re actually about a 10th of a second behind the curve), compensate by showing us what is likely to happen next:

[Researcher Mark Changizi of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York] says it’s our visual system that has evolved to compensate for neural delays, generating images of what will occur one-tenth of a second into the future. That foresight keeps our view of the world in the present. It gives you enough heads up to catch a fly ball (instead of getting socked in the face) and maneuver smoothly through a crowd.

“Illusions occur when our brains attempt to perceive the future, and those perceptions don’t match reality,” Changizi said.

Optical illusions such as the one shown above occur because our brains assume motion and are trying to show us what things will look like as we move towards (or away from) the image. Of course, we only become aware of this when something like an optical illusion draws our attention to it, but the truth is that our brains are doing this all the time — everything we see is a prediction.

In his book On Intelligence, Jeff Hawkins claims that intelligence derives from prediction. This research would seem to go along with Hawkins’ ideas — if our vision is based on an attempt to predict what’s coming next, why not all of our senses and, indeed, the very act of thinking?

We are all, in a very fundamental sense, futurists.

I would certainly have to agree with Taylor that our brains can transform the world. Our most recent Better All the Time feature focused on various good news developments having to do with the human brain. The news was all over the map — hope for treating brain cancer, an improved understanding of what a single neuron is capable of doing, thoughts on the proper care and feeding of our brains. All of this is great stuff, to be sure, but I wonder if by looking at individual news items we aren’t missing out on a hugely significant big picture?

The human brain is what brought us down from the trees and into art galleries. It is the reason we can build bridges, compose sonnets, cure diseases. It’s one thing to get all excited about incremental developments in biofuels or LED-based light bulb solutions — and I don’t mean that disparagingly, we should get excited about those things — but any improvement in how we use, care for, or even just understand our brains is good news with a multiplying effect. The human imperative is improvement of the human condition, and the human brain is, well, the brains of that operation. When we make better use of our brains, or care for them better, or understand them better, we are improving our Improvement Machine.

The neocortex is that special core brain part that only mammals have. That’s how you can tell a mammal brain from a reptile brain. Look for the neocortex. From this site, I learned that the neocortical column (NCC) is a handy building block for higher brain function, and that a human brain is really nothing more than a robust collection of specilaized NCCs working together in harmony.

So in other words, once IBM gets a single NCC emulation running, they are well on their way to emulating an entire neocortex and, eventually, an entire brain. The question, then, is this: will a computer emulation of a brain produce a computer emulated mind?

If so, Blue Brain will be the first step towards electronic immortality via mind uploading. And even if the “playback” piece doesn’t work yet, the “backup” piece will be very encouraging to those who are looking to upload eventually. After all, if IBM can create a working electronic replica of a brain, they should, before long, be able to make a working replica of any brain, including yours or mine. And if the whole brain is backed up, it’s just a matter of time before we have computers sophisticated enough to tease out that elusive “mind” thing. (Unless it turns out that there really is something more to a mind than brain function, but I doubt it.)

So, what has become of Blue Brain? Well, an update reveals that the project has made tremendous strides towards creating a virtual rat brain in a computer. This passage in particular caught my attention:

Though the first artificial brain may seem simple, it will be a useful model. Brain researchers can use it to reproduce functions from the real organ and test their theories. As they build in new processes, the model grows ever more detailed — a sort of wiki project of the mind. It also offers an important advantage over a natural brain, since it lets researchers monitor each and every (simulated) mental activity in the machine.

But — has there been mental activity?

The newborn “Blue Brain” surprised the designers with its willfulness from the very first day. It had hardly been fed electrical impulses before strange patterns began to appear on the screen with the lightning-like flashes produced by cells that scientists recognize from actual thought processes. Groups of neurons started becoming attuned to one another until they were firing in rhythm. “It happened entirely on its own,” says Markram. “Spontaneously.”

Perhaps my title for this entry is a little overstated. This isn’t quite “thinking” yet. But it’s something: self-organizing virtual “mental” activity. What’s the brain trying to do? Probably just find the rest of the brain, not to mention the spinal chord and nervous system. I doubt that it’s thinking any ratty thoughts so far. On the other hand, that this level of response occurred raises interesting — and somewhat disturbing — questions about what will happen a few generations later when we’re simulating complete animal and eventually human brains.

What will a virtual mouse brain experience? By then, will we have a virtual body and virtual environment for it, or will a fully functioning brain come on line in a complete perceptual void? That’s a pretty troubling question when we’re talking about a human brain rather than a mouse brain. Years ago, Harlan Ellison wrote a short story whose title sums it up: I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.

Yikes. On the other hand, it might not be horrifying at all. Maybe just a little boring. Or maybe like being asleep.

All the same, I don’t think I’ll be offering up a copy of my brain for the initial experiments.

The neocortex is that special core brain part that only mammals have. That’s how you can tell a mammal brain from a reptile brain. Look for the neocortex. From this site, I learned that the neocortical column (NCC) is a handy building block for higher brain function, and that a human brain is really nothing more than a robust collection of specilaized NCCs working together in harmony.

So in other words, once IBM gets a single NCC emulation running, they are well on their way to emulating an entire neocortex and, eventually, an entire brain. The question, then, is this: will a computer emulation of a brain produce a computer emulated mind?

If so, Blue Brain will be the first step towards electronic immortality via mind uploading. And even if the “playback” piece doesn’t work yet, the “backup” piece will be very encouraging to those who are looking to upload eventually. After all, if IBM can create a working electronic replica of a brain, they should, before long, be able to make a working replica of any brain, including yours or mine. And if the whole brain is backed up, it’s just a matter of time before we have computers sophisticated enough to tease out that elusive “mind” thing. (Unless it turns out that there really is something more to a mind than brain function, but I doubt it.)

So, what has become of Blue Brain? Well, an update reveals that the project has made tremendous strides towards creating a virtual rat brain in a computer. This passage in particular caught my attention:

Though the first artificial brain may seem simple, it will be a useful model. Brain researchers can use it to reproduce functions from the real organ and test their theories. As they build in new processes, the model grows ever more detailed — a sort of wiki project of the mind. It also offers an important advantage over a natural brain, since it lets researchers monitor each and every (simulated) mental activity in the machine.

But — has there been mental activity?

The newborn “Blue Brain” surprised the designers with its willfulness from the very first day. It had hardly been fed electrical impulses before strange patterns began to appear on the screen with the lightning-like flashes produced by cells that scientists recognize from actual thought processes. Groups of neurons started becoming attuned to one another until they were firing in rhythm. “It happened entirely on its own,” says Markram. “Spontaneously.”

Perhaps my title for this entry is a little overstated. This isn’t quite “thinking” yet. But it’s something: self-organizing virtual “mental” activity. What’s the brain trying to do? Probably just find the rest of the brain, not to mention the spinal chord and nervous system. I doubt that it’s thinking any ratty thoughts so far. On the other hand, that this level of response occurred raises interesting — and somewhat disturbing — questions about what will happen a few generations later when we’re simulating complete animal and eventually human brains.

What will a virtual mouse brain experience? By then, will we have a virtual body and virtual environment for it, or will a fully functioning brain come on line in a complete perceptual void? That’s a pretty troubling question when we’re talking about a human brain rather than a mouse brain. Years ago, Harlan Ellison wrote a short story whose title sums it up: I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.

Yikes. On the other hand, it might not be horrifying at all. Maybe just a little boring. Or maybe like being asleep.

All the same, I don’t think I’ll be offering up a copy of my brain for the initial experiments.

The brain is a beautifully engineered get-out-of-the-way machine that constantly scans the environment for things out of whose way it should right now get. That’s what brains did for several hundred million years — and then, just a few million years ago, the mammalian brain learned a new trick: to predict the timing and location of dangers before they actually happened.

Our ability to duck that which is not yet coming is one of the brain’s most stunning innovations, and we wouldn’t have dental floss or 401(k) plans without it. But this innovation is in the early stages of development. The application that allows us to respond to visible baseballs is ancient and reliable, but the add-on utility that allows us to respond to threats that loom in an unseen future is still in beta testing.

UPDATE:

Commenter Triticale asks:

Hey, I’ve done beta testing before. Where do I download a copy to try?

Triticale is being too hard on himself. He, like all the rest of the human race, is already beta-testing a neocortex. That is the problem with this theory. There probably isn’t a sizable control group of people with lessor developed or greater developed neocortices. So it would be hard to test whether our inability to accurately predict long-term risk is something that could be improved upon, or whether we are facing a limit on biological computation.

Acknowledging this major problem with proof, I have my own neocortex theory. Perhaps the conflict between the amygdala and the neocortex can explain why we humans enjoy rollercoasters and horror movies. Of course neither activity is really dangerous. Intellectually we know that even a hypercoaster like Superman: The Escape is safe, but we feel a sense of accomplishment when we overcome the primitive amygdala to get on the ride.

Deactivating a specific gene transforms meek mice into daredevils, researchers have found. The team believe the research might one day enable people suffering from fear – in the form of phobias or anxiety disorders, for example – to be clinically treated.

The research found that mice lacking an active gene for the protein stathmin are not only more courageous, but are also slower to learn fear responses to pain-associated stimuli, says geneticist Gleb Shumyatsky, at Rutgers University in New Jersey, US.

So here we have the beginnings of a technique which, ultimately, a meglomaniac could use to breed an army of truly fearless warriors. Or a fanatical dad could use to produce the perfect football player.

This idea reminds me of one of those self-help-seminar questions you run across sometimes: what would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? Of course, living without fear isn’t exactly the same as knowing you can’t fail. Presumably, it would be more like not caring that you can fail. That sounds kind of dangerous.

On the other hand, we read this:

The lack of the protein does not appear to affect other learning experiences, as both sets of mice were able to memorise the paths out of mazes equally well. “This is a good sign for an eventual clinical application that could let people deal with their fears in an entirely different way,” Shumyatsky says.

If I could be smart enough to assess risks rationally and then operate without fear, that sounds like a pretty good deal. But I might go for a boost of intelligence before I think about turning off the fear switch.