Expanding the Human Mind: The Future of the Brain: Neurobiology, Electronics, and Other Tools Part 2

Why Pursue Brain/Mind Enhancement?
Why might we wish to move in this direction? One reason is simply to restore damaged brains. Physical injuries, strokes, tumors, and neuro-degenerative diseases in the brain cause heartbreaking disabilities. The afflicted individual may live a much reduced life for many years. What a tragedy to lie paralyzed, or to live among family and friends without comprehending their words.

Another motivation is personal development. We are not born equal. Our society is gradually acknowledging that many are born with strong propensities for mental illness such as depression or addiction, difficult or impossible to combat by pure mental effort--i.e., by a "strong will." Thus medicinal remedies are now accepted, which in reality are molecular probes that attach to selected neurons in the brain. Besides problems of outright disease, some of us are much smarter, happier, more confidant, fearless, and likeable than others. If we understand the basis for such differences, why should less-favored individuals not overcome their weaknesses, rather than struggle for a lifetime with their suboptimal neural constitution?

It is important to realize that most long-term mental changes will take considerable time to achieve, both to change the quantity and quality of the neurons involved and to create the more subtle modifications that will come with use. For example, instilling the qualities of pitch discernment, timing, and finger agility of skilled musicians would undoubtedly require the modification and growth of many auditory and motor circuits, plus much practice to develop their potential.
In general, the scope for quick, effortless change by taking a pill will be quite limited. This is fortunate, since human relationships, both personal and societal, depend on predictability. Rapid changes in personality, motivations, habits, and skills could produce social chaos.

Building Better Brains
Looking further ahead, can human beings add useful new capabilities to their minds? For example, a method of directly sensing by touch or sight the entire three-dimensional constitution of an object would be a giant mental leap, bringing to our mind the ability to directly observe the patterns of forces, motions, heat, and fluid flowing in our environment. You could be simultaneously aware of the actions and activities of all parts of your body, inside and out. Three-dimensional sensing would bring solutions at a glance to many practical problems that now require extensive training and computer aids to solve.
A personal digital assistant placed on or within your body could make comparable three-dimensional calculations, but the assistant would always be an outsider, integrating with your brain only as a little voice whispering in your ear or a screen holding up pictures to view. Integrating at a deeper level than the senses will require complex connections--and vastly more of them--as well as coping with the far greater speed of electronic pulses compared with neural pulses. Still, as we will see below, the digital assistant and the brain may eventually get together.

Our conscious mental sensations define us as humans and individuals. They are clearly associated with structures in the brain, which leads us to wonder if new neural structures supporting new mental powers will lead to new mental sensations.
It is certainly not clear what neural structures might support the three-dimensional sense I have just described. But we do have two existing senses to guide us. First, our bifocal vision is a partial sense of a three-dimensional surface. Second, our senses of touch, physical position, and motion combine to provide us with a crude three-dimensional sense of our body in space. When we learn how the neural structures supporting these senses function, they may guide us in designing and integrating into the brain comprehensive three-dimensional senses.

There are further possibilities--novel emotions, novel modes of sensing. Such explorations will take much effort, their purpose not pursuit of novelty for its own sake, but rather an attempt to explore the possibilities, to discover if there is a systematic world of mental sensations as real and extensive as the material world we perceive with our present senses.

Longer-Term Futures: Mind and Mental Function
In time, we will accumulate detailed functional descriptions of the brains of large numbers of individuals. Many will contribute all or part of their personal information to a common pool, sharing with the world how their individual differences in brain structure and function contribute to differences in mental characteristics, from personality to talents. The information will point in two directions. Just as today we acknowledge that some of us are especially susceptible to mental illness, tomorrow's vastly deeper knowledge of the functional differences in brains will foster greater understanding and acceptance of people as they are, how their lives are constrained by the physical constitution of their brains.

However, we will no longer be resigned to living with what we began life with. We can move to change our mental makeup by modifying our brain's functional structure, to enhance what we like and diminish what we don't, proceeding on the assumption that all normal human brains, free of major mutations or accidents of development, have the same complement of neural structures, just as we all have the same set of muscles, bones, and ligaments. Our physical individuality comes from the differences in their size, length, and shape.

At its simplest, functional differences in the same neural group will depend on the number of neurons in the group. We can place modified neurons within the group to send inhibitory signals that effectively decrease the number of neurons. To effectively increase their number, we can send stimulating signals that lower their firing threshold, thus making fewer neurons do more work. Over the long term, stimulation may also increase the number of neuron branches, further enhancing the neuron's effectiveness.

There is surely some limit to enhancing the existing neuron supply. When we need more neurons, we can place modified neurons within the group and induce them to form connections.

A far more formidable challenge will be to connect neuron groups to distant parts of the brain and body. One approach is to place a line of "beacon" cells to guide the growth of new branches along the desired path. Another, more radical way is to connect the neurons to an electronic interface, which would convert the neuron's signals to electronic signals and relay them directly to the target neuron group.

The electronic interface can be upgraded to make arbitrary connections by adding digital switching circuits. Additional circuits could turn the interface into a computational facility to aid memory or make instant simulations. The interface would become the digital assistant described earlier, with the potential to connect naturally to any portion of the brain rather than only to the sensory inputs. Of course, we would need a deep knowledge of brain function to make useful connections rather than creating chaos.

A New Brain, and What We Might Do with It
If we can systematically add (and subtract) neurons from functional groups, where can it all end? Can we effectively transmute one brain into another?

There are several qualifiers. First, we are dealing with actual growth, which takes time. Second, genes will vary between individuals, creating variations in each of the neuron types. While we can try to compensate for genetic variability by using modified neurons to administer neurotransmitters, inhibitors, enhancers, growth factors, etc., we would really need to modify each neuron's genetic complement to transmute its function completely. And third, brains have a lifetime of experience, which will impose biochemical adaptations on each neuron, reflected in its pattern of branching and its patterns of stimulation and response. Experience will still count. Nevertheless, biological inequality will no longer seem inevitable.

What about capabilities we have yet to conceive? Can we add a genuinely new capability to the human mind, complete with never-experienced mental sensations in our consciousness? For example, the light-detecting cells in the eye sense only three colors--red, green, and blue. Their signals are sent to the brain and combined to produce the perceptions of the thousands of colors we "see." In the future, can we examine the neural structures that produce color vision so as to design and grow neural structures that support vision that senses four primary colors and perceives millions?

If we can grow a neural structure that supports new mental sensations, we may be able to substitute other constituents for neurons while still producing the same results. For example, electronic circuits connected in the same manner as the neurons could potentially simulate the actions of neurotransmitters and receptors. Perhaps the circuits need only reproduce the vast complexity of electric field changes that accompany neuron action.

What are the advantages of replacing neurons? First, the circuits might be more compact, allowing us to stuff more brain power into our skulls; or perhaps they might speed up our mental powers to match the electronic speeds of the digital world.
More profoundly, extending our mental powers by engineered changes would allow us to systematically explore a potential world of mental sensations far beyond those we know today. Thus we might find that all our emotions are combinations of a few basic emotional "atoms." By studying the way the basic emotions combine to produce our present emotions, we could combine them in new ways to create emotions never before experienced. An enormous world of mental sensations awaits our exploration, analogous to the immense number and variety of biological species.

About the Author
William Holmes has a Ph.D. in biophysics and advanced training in artificial intelligence. His major activities have been in the fields of laboratory automation and computerized radiotherapy planning. He was for many years a faculty member in the Biochemistry Department and the Biomedical Computer Laboratory at the Washington University School of Medicine. He presents a detailed exposition on building neural structures in his forthcoming book, Mind over Matter: Building a Limitless Future through Biological Design. His address is 2335 East Seneca Street, Tucson, Arizona 85719. E-mail bholmes2@mindspring.com.

Article Title: Expanding the Human Mind: The Future of the Brain Neurobiology, Electronics, and Other Tools May Give Us Mental Powers That Are Truly Mind-Boggling. Contributors: William Holmes - author. Magazine Title: The Futurist. Volume: 41. Issue: 4. Publication Date: July-August 2007. Page Number: 41+. COPYRIGHT 2007 World Future Society; COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale Group

Expanding the Human Mind: The Future of the Brain: Neurobiology, Electronics, and Other Tools Part 1

by William Holmes

We have the power to enhance our minds by three very different approaches: by education, by computers, and by the techniques of neurobiology. While education dates back to prehistoric times, computers are a modern invention barely a half century old. Neurobiology is only now beginning to realize its potential for expanding our minds.
Education has gradually become a formal process for passing on knowledge as cultures have grown more complex and opportunities for adults have multiplied. Education is still our best hope for productive, prosperous individuals and nations, but the speed and learning capacity of the human mind is reaching its limits. Formal education and training for doctors, lawyers, and Ph.D.'s takes up to 20 years.

Computers provide one path toward overcoming the speed and capacity limitations of the human mind. The programmed electronic computer was first conceived as a successor to mechanical calculators, then adapted to record keeping in the business world. It was soon apparent that any mental task reducible to a set of written rules can be reduced to a computer program. This realization has led to continuing optimism that practically any task the mind performs can be analyzed in detail and programmed. The remarkable technical achievements of the electronic industry in doubling computer capacity and speed at the same cost every two or three years has fueled this optimism. If the problem is too difficult to solve today, more computer power will surely come to the rescue before long.

One should not belittle the accomplishments of computer programs. Inexpensive computers with quality graphics will bring universal education and specialized training to even the most impoverished countries. Their schools will need little more than electric generators for the computers and local teachers for guidance. A world of less formal information is at our fingertips through the Internet, fostering all kinds of informal self-education. Practically all records are on computers, and one can increasingly pose simple questions in natural language and hope to receive a useful response. There are "expert programs" for solving a large range of specialized problems, from the best mix of crops for the family farm to the material requirements and assembly instructions for building a house. Computers with TV cameras are learning to recognize faces and common objects by sight. Adding mechanized appendages to a computer lets it grasp, recognize, and manipulate objects, and to move through a cluttered environment. Even simple forms of true robots are appearing, with facial expressions and simulated emotions.
Some prognosticators have extrapolated the steady advance of intellectual and robotlike computer programs to the extreme, predicting computers of superhuman mental powers along with superhuman speed. These predictions rely on extrapolating the past and present exponential increase in computer power for decades into the future. Such predictions also assume that the hard, unsolved problems of understanding how the human mind works will rapidly yield to sustained effort.
But even if computers do become comparable to humans for performing common intellectual and physical tasks, they will still be outsiders. We will have created independent creatures with minds of sorts, but no more a part of ourselves than the aliens of science fiction. Such computers/robots will at best be capable assistants. We must look inward in order to enhance our own minds and explore their potential. We need the science and techniques of biology, more specifically human neurobiology.

Advancing the Power of the Mind
Neurobiology is the science of the nervous system, and it can be approached from many directions. Neuroanatomy studies the physical structure of the brain and how brain cells (neurons) are organized and connected. The connections themselves are quite complex. Electric pulses from a neuron travel down a branching axon fiber to destinations on other neurons. The ends of the fibers secrete nanosize packets of neurotransmitters that bind to receptors on the destination neuron, either stimulating or inhibiting it. Thousands of axons from other neurons may impinge on a single neuron, each capable of secreting neurotransmitter packets. The neurotransmitters combine to cause the neuron to either generate electric pulses or suppress them. Neurotransmitters may also interact in more complex ways, providing the neuron much flexibility in response to its many inputs.

Unraveling the complexities of neurotransmitters is a major focus of neurobiology research. It is the foundation for the rational design of medicines for treating depression, mania, schizophrenia, Parkinson's disease, and other mental and physical disorders of the brain. In brief, current medicines interact with specific neurotransmitter receptors on certain classes of neurons, altering the effects of a natural deficiency or excess in neurotransmitter action.

Over the past 150 years we have accumulated a significant body of knowledge relating higher brain functions, such as language, to specific areas of the brain. Much of this knowledge has come from observing individuals with brain damage, using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) or in some cases autopsies. Many strange deficits have been observed, such as inability to recognize spoken words, the loss of color vision, loss of the sense of humor, and the inability to visualize or draw one side of the body.

Today we can even peer inside the human brain to some degree, primarily by functional MRI, which allows researchers to observe those areas of the brain that become more active while performing such ordinary activities as reading or solving simple problems. The most detailed view of all comes from electrodes placed in the brain to measure the activity of individual neurons. Though largely limited to primate brain research, we have found such astonishing entities as "mirror neurons." These neurons respond to an action such as grasping an object both when the subject does the grasping and when the subject sees another individual grasping the object. We are watching some innate capacity of the brain to imitate the action of others. Unfortunately, researchers' inability to instruct nonhuman test subjects--or to question them about their mental states--limits these studies' potential for applying the findings to humans. So we must fall back on the methods of experimental animal psychology to pose the problem and analyze the results.

It is awesome to contemplate the full complexity of the brain, tens of billions of neurons connected through literally trillions of branches acting through complex patterns of neurotransmitters. It will take many decades to learn in detail how activities at the neurotransmitter level result in the conscious activities we experience and the subconscious activities we can measure by electrodes, MRI, and other methods.

In this light, proposals to simulate the entire brain in molecular detail on a computer seem presumptuous. Proponents believe that such a simulation will produce a functioning inorganic brain. Presumably these simulations will produce numerous high-speed geniuses to simultaneously work on our most difficult problems.

A Piece of Your Mind?
Clearly, we must study in great detail the characteristics of individual neurons. The cell is the fundamental structural and functional unit of biological organisms. Thus, studies of the brain and the rest of the nervous system ultimately depend on our knowledge of its neurons. Can they be classified into a reasonable number of types? What is the molecular biology of each type, its neurotransmitters, receptors, pattern of axon branching, modes of modification, and propensity for growth?

With this information, we could identify specific neuron cell types within the brain, recording their locations and connections to other neurons. It should also become possible to isolate neuron stem cells and stimulate them to differentiate into the variety of neuron types found in the brain and peripheral nervous system. Repairing and modifying the nervous system will depend on a supply of the appropriate neurons.

We can analyze--either in vivo or in cell culture--the specific factors guiding the growth of connections from one neuron to another. Such knowledge will become vital when we try to build or rebuild neural structures in the brain and peripheral nervous system, leading to desperately needed techniques to restore severed nerves in the limbs and spinal cord. Such needs will drive research and development of new applications.

Finally, we are learning to make long-term connections between neurons and electronic circuits, two very different entities. Neurons can be grown on thin, biologically friendly films that keep the cells separate from the circuits. Each remains in its preferred environment, but they are so close that a circuit can either detect electric pulses in an adjacent neuron, or alternatively, generate an electric pulse strong enough to stimulate the neuron to fire. Simple arrays of electrodes are already used to detect neuromuscular signals generated by the shortened nerves in a severed limb and translate them to useful movements of an artificial limb attached to the stump.

Near-Term Brain Research

Given the pace of molecular biology in unraveling the genome, its controls, and the proteins it generates, we can expect to learn within the next 10 years much of what we need to describe and classify neuron types, to locate them in the embryonic and mature brain, to grow them in cell culture, and connect them with distant neurons, guiding the growth of their axons along pathways marked with biomolecules.

Progress will be slower in creating a "circuit diagram" of the brain--that is, a compendium of the pattern of connections made by the (still unknown) number of neuron groups in the brain. Identification of cell types, embryology, and genetics will speed the process, but it will probably still be somewhat fragmentary 10 years from now.
In the next decade, we still may not completely understand how the neuron "circuits" cooperate to bring about conscious and unconscious mental action, or discover exactly how the mind understands language and music or how it forms and retrieves memories. However, we should learn enough to develop better treatments for mental problems such as bipolar disorder, depression, schizophrenia, obsessive compulsive disorders, and panic attacks. We may understand neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Huntington's, and Parkinson's, well enough to at least design remedies to slow their progress. Possibly we will find compounds to improve our memory, and others more potent than caffeine yet safer than amphetamines to improve our ability to concentrate.

We should also expect significant progress in the next 10 years toward repairing injuries to the nervous system, especially in the limbs and spinal cord. We will know how to stimulate severed axon and dendrite branches to re-extend themselves toward their original terminations, as well as how to stimulate actual cell division to replace neurons. We will be learning to grow more complicated neural structures with several cell types, looking toward repair and replacement of accessible structures, such as the retina of the eye. Interfacing neurons with electronic circuits will have evolved beyond the "Bionic Man" stage to micro packages that are physically unobtrusive.

Ten years from now, we will be poised to look beyond these simpler applications toward the prospect of direct neural connections to the brain. What will we be looking for? The four key areas of our pursuits will be:
1. Understanding the mind: How does our brain support a mind that lets us see, hear, move, talk, solve problems, fall in love, and develop a sense of identity?
2. Understanding consciousness: What is the physical basis in the brain for the mental sensations of consciousness that accompany such brain activity as seeing, hearing, walking, talking, acting, and the feelings of egotism, fear, pride, love, and beauty?
3. Developing existing human potential: Wherein lie the differences among such diverse individuals as Mozart, Einstein, and the Buddha? Can an individual attain some of their extraordinary powers by focused training and perhaps by stimulated growth of selected neural circuits?
4. Exploring beyond existing limits: Are the mental sensations that we experience all that there can be? Is there a whole world of completely new sensations with associated mental powers that we can explore in some rational way?

Mallika Sarabhai (India): Danza para cambiar al mundo

At TEDIndia, Mallika Sarabhai, a dancer/actor/politician, tells a transformative story in dance -- and argues that the arts may be the most powerful way to effect change, whether political, social or personal.

Mallika Sarabhai is a powerhouse of communication and the arts in India. Educated in business, she now leads the Darpana dance company, which works in the Bharatanatyam and Kuchipudi forms. She's also a writer, publisher, actor, producer, anchorwoman ... and all her varied forms of artistic engagement are wrapped around a deep social conscience.

In the mid-1980s, she spent five years playing the lead character Draupadi in Peter Brook's Mahabharata in venues around the world. Returning to India, she entered a fertile period of choreography and creativity, starting with the dance Shakti: The Power of Women. She has founded a TV production company that produces activist programming in Gujarati, and runs Mapin, a publisher of books on art and design.

This spring, she made a run for the Lok Sabha, campaigning on a platform of social responsibility, and focusing on the problems of average people in India regardless of caste or language. She came third in her district, Gandhinagar, in Gujarat, but she has continued her campaign to promote social justice there and in the rest of India.

Liberando la música en tu cabeza-MIT

Tod Machover of MIT's Media Lab is devoted to extending musical expression for everyone -- from virtuosi to amateurs, and in the most diverse forms -- from opera to videogames (Guitar Hero grew out of his group). At TED2008 he talks about what's coming next, from new tools for music creativity to the world's first robotic opera. Machover then introduces Dan Ellsey, a young man with cerebral palsy who has found his voice through music created and performed using Media Lab technologies. Ellsey plays his "My Eagle Song" in a soaring rendition that underscores music's power to heal, to communicate, and to inspire.