Some of our post-protoplasmic tenements may be meat, some may be metal, some may be silicon, some may even attempt the vastly more inconceivable leap to pure software, or even into the pure light of quantum computational fields. Regardless of one’s intolerance for hype or inclination for reading too much into the posthuman tea leaves, one thing is for certain: this  experimental era of mashups and multi-substrate hybrids over the next few decades will be both exciting and at times troubling to behold. We’re participating in our own evolution, for better or worse.

Pandora’s box is open. There’s no putting the genie back in the bottle. Pick a favorite cheesy B-movie metaphor if you like, the progress manifest in seemingly innocuous projects like the “advanced telepresence robot created by Silicon Valley robotics start-up Anybots” is already analogous to prototype bicycles with wings found in Orville and Wilbur Wright’s earliest garage. Are video-phone sticks on wheels absurdly crude, compared to remote embodiments we’ll consider humdrum by the 2020′s? Of course. At the same time, we err to dismiss them as inconsequential. No, the human drive toward applied, adaptive futuretechture is made of this very ho-hum stuff.

In any and all cases, the impulse toward richer, more integrated remote presence and extra-corporeal embodiment experiences continues accelerating.

From The New York Times: What Is I.B.M.’s Watson?

“Homo sapiens, the first truly free species, is about to decommission natural selection, the force that made us. Soon we must look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become.” — Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998)

Wirehead Hedonism | Reproductive Revolution | Abolitionist.com | Superhappiness.com | BLTC

“Just as Copernicus’s heliocentric notion of universe is now bedrock truth, the Neuro Revolution will bring about new ideas of human spirituality that will forever reshape our understanding of humanity’s role and place the universe. A quiet transformation has begun, albeit one that may take centuries to play out fully” (Lynch, 152. The Neuro Revolution.).

May 18, 2010 MIT/Stanford VLAB:

Brain-Computer Interfacing (BCI) promises a quantum leap in human interaction with technology — enabling our thoughts and emotions to control devices and enabling devices to know what we’re “really thinking” and feeling. Currently, there are more than 300 million brain toting people in the United States alone, making the opportunities for BCI products far-reaching.

BCI is bringing fresh and often unexpected perspectives to established industries, from entertainment and transportation to medicine and information systems. In this emergent phase of consumer-related BCI, innovators are redefining sleep management, gaming, user interfacing, courtroom evidence, and national security—and this is only the beginning.

For the first time, neuroscientists and savvy entrepreneurs, from a number of traditionally unrelated industries, are teaming up to move BCI technology out of research and medical labs and into our everyday lives. The Business of the Brain event will address the challenges and opportunities of this exciting revolution, including limitations of “wet” sensors, “noise” interference, government regulation, novel user interfaces, designing industry-specific BCI applications and the cost engineering of current applications.

Meet the minds behind this wave and find out how entrepreneurs are using the way we think to drive the future of technology.

Topics to Be Explored:

• Developing new industries vs. enhancing current industries
• Hardware, software and service opportunities
• Barriers of entry (how to build them up or tear them down)
• What VC’s are looking for in BCI
• Data interpretation and context
• Cutting edge vs. currently available

The Brain Controlled Robot by the brain-computer interface project by the Neural Systems Group at the University of Washington.

Brave New Brain:

How Neuroscience, Brain-Machine Interfaces, Neuroimaging, Psychopharmacology, Epigenetics, the Internet, and Our Own Minds are Stimulating and Enhancing the Future of Mental Power

Singularity Hub reporting:

The world’s first patient-ready and commercially available brain computer interface just arrived at CeBIT 2010. The Intendix from Guger Technologies (g*tec) is a system that uses an EEG cap to measure brain activity in order to let you type with your thoughts. Meant to work with those with locked-in syndrome, or other disabilities, Intendix is simple enough to use after just 10 minutes of training. You simply focus on a grid of letters as they flash. When your desired letter lights up, brain activity spikes and Intendix types it. As users master the system, a few will be able to type as quickly as 1 letter a second. Besides typing, it can also trigger alarms, convert text to speech, print, copy, or email.

More details on Using an EEG-Based Brain-Computer Interface for Virtual Cursor Movement with BCI2000 and exclusive lab video at JOVE: Journal Of Visualized Experiments.

This morning I watched a bird — I believe a finch — in the back yard. He was making use of the bird house, which is quite small, featuring perhaps a 3/4″ hole for a front door.

This bird arrived on the perch with about a 4 inch long stick in it’s beak. Obviously, getting that in the front door didn’t go too well.

Many birds are known tool users and problem solvers, and this very tiny clump of neurons knew enough to execute an Olympic, 2-inch horizontal perch hop with 1/2 twist, rotating 180 degrees and craning a tiny neck by sufficient additional measure to insert the long end of that stick into the house, then squeeze past and move inside to drag the stick inside.

Now, to my mind, that’s one hell of a computation problem to solve, so I took a minute to check out how the hell birds do that. Wikipedia is usually a good starting place:

It seems that birds use a different part of their brain, the medio-rostral neostriatum/hyperstriatum ventrale (see also nidopallium), as the seat of their intelligence, and the brain-to-body size ratio of psittacines and corvines is actually comparable to that of higher primates.

Interesting. So, just because the neocortex is the location of our highest human brain functions, that doesn’t necessarily place any restrictions upon neuronal capabilities in other regions or configurations, in general. This seems like an interesting avenue of inquiry for machine intelligence, because compared to what little computers can do today in terms of visual context construction, it would be quite a compliment to call any computer a total “bird brain.”

Maybe when it comes to machine intelligence, or even modeling substrate independence for any kind of intelligence, we should consider learning to fly, before we walk.

“Electroencephalogram (EEG) is a powerful non-invasive tool widely used in both medical diagnosis and neurobiological research because it provides high temporal resolution in milliseconds which directly reflects the dynamics of the generating cell assemblies, and it is the only brain imaging modality that does not require the head/body to be fixed.” — Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience

This is too good for Researchers and Developers to not give them the free advertising.

“The Emotiv EPOC is a high resolution, neuro-signal acquisition and processing wireless neuroheadset. It uses a set of sensors to tune into electric signals produced by the brain to detect player thoughts, feelings and expressions and connects wirelessly to most PCs.”

Take advantage of the Emotiv EPOC neuroheadset to conduct EEG research. Join the Emotiv Research Community by licensing an Emotiv Software Development Kit (SDK) for research.

“The games application includes the first three games that have been developed: Emotipong, Cererbral Constructor, and Jedi Mind Trainer (WingRaise). Cortex Arcade will allow you to control the three games included using the Emotiv Epoc neuroheadset.”

With Neurokey, ThinkTyping works.

Remarks below about Neurokey from Russell Abbott, 02/03/2010 10:37:39

“I was thinking you could include predictive text mode, in a similar way to mobile phones. Reduce the number of keys and use a detection for each key.”

“This way you could type a message a lot easier with cognitiv. I use predictive all the time on my phone and I am able bodied, without it is a real pain. So I imagine typing individual letters by gyro, cognitiv or expressiv would be quite frutstrating for a disabled person.”

How to map a 1GB per mm² intracranial mushdrive and other empirically based explanatory spelunking.

Don’t worry, there will be no quiz, because we can tell whether or not you’re paying attention and fMRI whether or not you get it. ;-)

Marty Sereno: “The strange sort of reality of the visual system, from which you reconstruct and construct this static feeling of stuff out there is this sequence of [really bizarre, fisheye lens distorted looking, scanning, zooming] glances. Somehow, you actually assemble that series of glances into a meaningful, coherent, representation of the room.”

So what differentiates our brains from animal brains, which are otherwise so strikingly, anatomically similar?

Marty Sereno: “They don’t have a productive way of attaching up a symbol stream to this visual scene assembler, that they otherwise just use for assembling the current visual scene. So the theory is basically that, this final stage just requires some more rapid way of allowing auditory symbols which didn’t mean anything, or evolved for essentially meaninglessness and just sort of because they sounded good, essentially attaching them up to the higher level parts of the visual system where this scene assembly process goes on normally, with respect to the current scene. So that’s my theory.”

Conclusions:

• Preadaptation 1: vocal control by sexual selection
• Preadaptation 2: serial assembly of glances
• Language is not an isolated organ in the brain, but instead largely built upon existing functionality
• The ability to evoke fictive scenes leads to a great increase in cognitive power (evoking past, future)
• The final stage in this scenario only requires the development of stronger auditory/visual mapping