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TEDx Talks
Published: 2015-07-09
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Qi5uoNYXqg
do like science fiction I don't know how about you guys but I love sci fi and what it taught me in the past fifteen years that connecting some hero brain to machine should really be a no brainer right but the matrix Neil I gets a few scary looking plugs shove directly into the need sockets of his brain and then from the comfort of his chair from
a hovercraft he can navigate the complex environment of a matrix using nothing but his mind and if you thought that that was not hard enough just imagine that broad band wifi receiver on that a hovercraft to transport his entire brain to the pictures but most recently in the avatar Jake Sully gets cocooned into an MRI looking to and then from the comfort of the two using
nothing but his mind again he can published an avatar ten foot tall blue humanoid that inhabits wild alien jungle which also somehow has broad band wifi so basically over and over science fiction realized being able to connect some hero brain to machine in order to sync and must act but that science fiction here is science fact forget about wiring the entire brain we cannot even wire
an arm turned on PT but what they really mean they have seen those beautiful arms some of you might even have them all the degrees of freedom they articulated fingers but guess what those fingers can't feel an amputee equipped miss this arm cannot feel a strong handshake neither can they feel a difference between a soft fuzzy peach or snooze fragile egg you think it's a hard
problem you don't look surprised you should be think about our electronics transistors in your I. phone are about one five thousands of for hair New Orleans in your brain are about one fifth transistor can do billions of operations per second in your own can do only about a hundred so how come we cannot connect something so small and so fast the transistor something so big and
so slow as in Europe here's the catch a transistor is has three connections in your own can support over six thousand synopsis as engineers if you're trying to connect to dismiss which you see behind me is a state of the art commercially available deep brain stimulation implant if you ever a Parkinson's patient that stopped responding to medication this is what you would get as you are
sitting completely awake a doctor will drill two holes into your skull through which they will feed millimeter sick three inch long wires directly into your head through those wires we will apply voltages between one and ten volts which is about a hundred times more than what's used by you know runs for communication and that's the therapy and it is this technology that looks a rather crude
and actually dates to eighteen hundreds it was pretty promising results in fact you may know that deep brain stimulation can relieve some of the Parkinson's patients restore water control reduce tremors the question is at what cost at the same time the same stimulation can change someone's personality from a workaholic to slacker turning them into an unstoppable gambler a very common side effect by the way it
can give people an incurable depression well no side effects should not be so surprising because if what you see behind me were the New Orleans and the connections between them then the size over deburring stimulation implant should be the size of the size of the room so basically trying to use this device to interact as those individual cells will be a key in trying to play
Tchaikovsky's first piano concerto this fingers the size of a pickup truck so you say that the resolution is not high enough in the device is too big but Hey as engineers we are really great at making things small we have reduced the computer from the size of a building do size of a pocket so how come the strategy is that worked so well for us for
miniaturizing and scaling so silicon based electronic circuits do not work for us to connect to neural circuits okay let's take a look this is a silicon wafer this is what's inside your iPhone this is the what's all the modern electronics have been a based on it's hard it's brittle sharp it's very flat Smith it is really good for one thing caring currents and supporting Walter just
here is your brain put put into fists together this is about the size of your brain and its surface is really three dimensional and developed and on the inside soft like a putting in fact you can scoop it was a spoon end of it that's soft putting there are billions of cells not just neurons that that constantly interacting with each other electrically but also changing chemicals
also victualling and pulling constantly brain is nothing like a silicon wafer and if you think that's not enough think about your arms and legs and the nerves inside them or your spinal cord imagine what happens to them what's strange thing experience every time you get into a downward dog in new yoga class or simply get out of bed so basically does the squishy environments and nothing
like silicon wafer in order for us to connect to them vivid need new materials the this materials need to be able to be more squishy they need to be able to match this mechanical complexity of neural circuits but at the same time they should be able to interact visit brain across all of its languages not just electrical but also a chemical and also mechanical how can
we do this how can we build such a device I'll show you a prototype of a structure that does exactly that what you're going to see next is a movie recorded was a device that can interact twisted brain electrically its records neural signals neural voltages dose of the black spikes that use it can supply a stimulus optically as the pulses of blue laser that you see
on the screen and it can infuse chemicals you will see them as a pink rectangle what you're going to see is neural activity triggered by those pulseless and then this neural activity is going to change in fact is going to decrease in response to a chemical in few Sir the same structure so you see that activity this is the chemical and negativity decreases the reason why
decreases because the chemical is an inhibitor and then when the brain naturally washes out this chemical that TV to comes back and this is all done it is the same structure Soviet interacted is the brain across multiple modalities V. have interacted electrically we have interacted chemically what about mechanics how do you think this device looks take a look at one of your hairs pick one up
the device that allowed us to interact with the brain across those mentalities looks just like one of your hairs and feels just like one of your hairs imagine that at the tip of your hair there are electrodes to record neural signals there is a light guide to supply stimulation and there microscopic channels to infuse chemicals but this this device of course it's not a hair a
fibre many if you might be familiar this optical fibers that go underneath the Atlantic and Pacific though some glass cables that allow you to exchange information ms your best friends in London and Tokyo other devices I made very similarly except they're not plus they're composed of many different materials and knows materials have different functionalities that allow us to speak languages of the brain but really this
device feels like a hair but doesn't actually match the mechanics of the brain does it leave a mark on the nervous act on the nervous system which you see behind me is the brain slice the dude bright dots I nuclei of cells and what you see that there are few holes inside the brain slice one of them is left by our device but others were there
naturally what are they their blood vessels the holes left by blood vessels that carry nutrients and oxygen to the brain and it looks like V. R. tricking the brain into thinking that our device is a blood vessel in thus reducing its response so maybe as we are learning from biology to design the devices after the blueprints of the brain off to the blueprints the blood vessels
maybe we can start hacking the brain ms out it ever noticing that this being hacked but whom am am I kidding let's don't get ahead of ourselves VH one so you are ready to get this device implanted into your head you should meet me after this and the I have a few forms for you to sign and we are taking the C. ride back to my
lab does if you who are not I don't blame him because no matter how small how multi functional how soft and how flexible I make the device we still have to implanted miss still have to drill holes in your brain this still have to have wires and the others so ultimately what's better than the minimally invasive neural interface is that interface that's noninvasive adult Kitty come
up is the way to interact is the brain wirelessly and completely remotely how can you do that we'll have to look deeper into the brain into weight functions ultimately what we're trying to do is to control voltages on your aunts and those voltages are controlled by concentrations of science inside and outside of New Orleans if we learn to control those concentrations of violence we can control
the brain how can you do it well let's imagine in your own as a building this building has walls that's in your own %HESITATION membrane inside those walls their doors those are I'm channels they allowed four runs to go in and out for people to go in and out what it means for us to get into that building is to have the right key deride door
the other way to get into a building is to pull a fire alarm that opened fire escape doors and then I was it people can move in and out and this is exactly what I'm proposing to do in the for those fire escape doors are the familiar ones imagine eating I have been here that familiar sensation of burning pain on your tongue is precisely the same
if you ever to please him down directly on the stove and the reason for it is because the channel inside the receptors on your tongue that response to capsaicin beaches the hot spice up I have been here is exactly the same I'm channel that response to chic in this I channel is not only present in your tongue or is also present in the neurones in your
brain well across the entire nervous system so basically what they're proposing to do to control the brain stir heated up we don't want that that's fever what we don't want is to control specific groups of cells when we want them and add to do whatever we need them to do how can we do that how can we deliver that heat stimulus where we needed deep in
the brain remotely and wirelessly turns out the humans I really transparent to magnetic fields in fact the fields miss frequencies of hundreds of kilohertz and low amplitudes no feel them at all why am I telling you this because V. can synthesize magnetic nanoparticles those essentially speckles of magnetic dust about one five thousands of your hair and they can be dissolved in water and former fluid that
looks just like an espresso but when you place them in a magnetic field that's variable this particles undergo a process called hysteresis we can think about it is a magnetic analog of friction and so that process the heat up so now imagine we can inject this espresso looking fluid of particles into the brain and then apply the field to the entire subject entire subject and only
the groups of neurons that are surrounded by the particles will experience the heat and become activated well everything else bill stay intact sounds hard right let me show you moving what you're going to see is neuron's flashing in response to magnetic field stimulus in this picture those flashes mean activity mean firing action potentials there will be no wires and no tethers we have acquired a group
of cells until the stimulus comes on and now they start to respond to the stimulus no wires no there there's no brain sockets no tissue damage completely remote stimulation of a precise group of neurons so maybe as it was starting to learn how to harness those natural fire escape mechanisms off our new friends V. can start to learn how to interface ms the brain wirelessly and
remotely and maybe one day some heroic mind can pilot in Alberta from the comfort of their two but how soon can we get there is a field of brain machine interface since they spend about twenty years and then this twenty years our machine has gone from Intel four eighty six you remember right iPhone six well our interface from that machine to the brain speak practically unchanged
our desire to reduce the brain to the simplicity of silicon wafer is leading us in circles of tissue damage side effects and missed opportunities so what can we do what should we do when can you start but then Shirley reckon acting the spinal cords of paralyzed patients or re attaching the limbs to amputees that Sir such that they can feel again what treating Parkinson's and depression
well as citizens we can encourage our regulatory bodies to speed up the approval of new technologies obviously his out sacrificing the safety SP shins Vic could sign up for clinical trials dead in both new technologies but this engineers we can embrace the complexity of the brain and maybe one day they can play the piano of the nervous system result even ever touching its keys
