The Computer and The Brain… they like to Sing a Song

Hi Cho, can I ask you some questions about brain implants?

Hi John, sure, ask away 😉                                                                       

I’m collaborating with a journalist, Manuel, on a piece about the connections between science and Sci-Fi

Interesting, there’s a lot of hype an misinformation out there, this sounds useful. 🙂

Indeed! Specifically, I’d like to go over one example of an implant from a book

OK, I’ve read a lot of sci-fi as a student, I hope I know it … 😄           

It’s called “The Turing Option” by Harry Harrison and Marvin Minsky

I know Minsky of course!, he founded MIT’s AI laboratory!                 

Good! So they co-wrote this book about a brain implant that can help heal brain damage

Cool, I don’t know the book, but I wish we had such a thing. How would this device work?

Basically they implant a tiny supercomputer in the damaged area, which would reconnect severed neurons

That does sound like sci-fi indeed: the question is how?. 😏             

They use something called “PNEP film chips—programmable neural electron pathway devices”

these are “coated with living embryonic human nerve cells”, first attached to an external computer, later to the implant

This actually starts to sound realistic, Minsky knew what he was doing.

So this checks out? We can do something like this nowadays?

Yes and no. Forget about the scale of the problem, we can’t deal with millions of neurons yet

and even a supercomputer can’t keep up with the brain, let alone an implantable one!

OK the problems of scale, but in principle? Repairing the brain?

Maybe. We can inject stem-cells and these would indeed reform connections in a damaged area,

and we can implant a chip in the brain to receive and send impulses, “read and write” if you like.

The trick would be to link those: guiding regrowth with AI.                
In principle, that should be possible.                         

Great! Thank you so much!