Ed Boyden from MIT talked about “synthetic neurobiology”, which is a fancy way of saying we’re going to put electronics in our brains. Or we already do if we’re one of the hundreds of thousands of people living with an artificial neural implant for treatment of deafness, blindness, Parkinson’s disease, or Tourette’s syndrome.
In addition to battery-powered electronic implants (with downloadable software, and maybe computer viruses), brain augmentation can happen through trans-cranial magnetic stimulation, which is getting more precise, or something called two-photon microscopy. From what I can tell, this technology involves pumping laser light into certain molecules in hopes of getting the molecules to absorb two photons simultaneously, which causes the molecule to re-emit a single photon of higher energy than either of the two input photons. I must have missed the part where he explained how this could augment a person’s brain function. Maybe it has something to do with the compounds that make neurons sensitive to certain wavelengths of light. Boyden is part of a start-up “neurotech” firm called EOS Neurosciences, dedicated to commercializing the technology to confer photosensitivity to neurons not normally responsive to light.
Boyden said (not in so many words) that electrode (or fiber optic) implantation will suffer from the same “tyranny of numbers” problem that led electronics engineers to invent the integrated circuit. The IC lets us connect up a much larger number of components because we can fabricate them right next to each other, from the same material. Could an “IC” approach help neural prostheses? It’s a little harder than the electronics case since one of the circuit components (the neuron) is given to us and can’t be changed.
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