Would
you:
- like to surf the Internet, make a phone call or send a text message using only your brain?
- like to “download” the content of a 500 page book into your memory in less than a second?
- like to have extremely advanced nanobots constantly crawling around in your body monitoring it for disease?
- like to be able to instantly access the collective knowledge base of humanity wherever you are?
All of that may sound like science fiction, but
these are technologies that some of the most powerful high tech firms in the
world actually believe are achievable by the year 2020.
However, with all of the potential “benefits” that
such technology could bring, there is also the potential for great
tyranny.
What do you think that the governments of the world
could do if almost everyone had a mind reading brain implant that was connected
to the Internet?
Could those implants be used to control and
manipulate us?
For now, most of the scientists that are working on
brain implant technology do not seem to be too worried about those kinds of
concerns. Instead, they are pressing ahead into realms that were once
considered to be impossible.
Right now, there are approximately 100,000 people
around the world that have implants in their brains. Most of those are
for medical reasons.
But this is just the beginning.
According to the Boston Globe, the U.S. government plans “to spend more
than $70 million over five years to jump to the next level of brain implants”.
This new project is being called the Systems-Based
Neurotechnology for Emerging Therapies (SUBNETS), and the goal is to be able to
monitor the “mental health” of soldiers and veterans. The following is
how a recent CNET article described SUBNETS…
SUBNETS is inspired by Deep Brain
Stimulation (DBS), a surgical treatment that involves implanting a brain
pacemaker in the patient’s skull to interfere with brain activity to help with
symptoms of diseases like epilepsy and Parkinson’s. DARPA’s device will be
similar, but rather than targeting one specific symptom, it will be able to
monitor and analyze data in real time and issue a specific intervention
according to brain activity.
This kind of technology is being developed by the
private sector as well. In fact, according to Scientific
American scientists are becoming increasingly excited about how brain
implants can be used to “reboot” the brains of people with depression…
Psychological depression is more than an emotional
state. Good evidence for that comes from emerging new uses of a technology
already widely prescribed for Parkinson’s patients. The more neurologists and
surgeons learn about the aptly named deep brain stimulation, the more they are
convinced that the currents from the technology’s implanted electrodes can
literally reboot brain circuits involved with the mood disorder.
The NeuroPace RNS is the first implant to
listen to brain waves and autonomously decide when to apply a therapy to
prevent an epileptic seizure. It was developed by a company with a staff of
less than 90 people, only about 30 on the core electronic, mechanical, and
software engineering teams.
A different team of researchers has discovered that
it can stimulate the repair of brain tissue in rats using brain implants…
Stroke and Parkinson’s disease patients may benefit
from a controversial experiment that implanted microchips into lab rats.
Scientists say the tests produced effective results in brain damage research.
Rats showed motor function in formerly damaged gray
matter after a neural microchip was implanted under the rat’s skull and
electrodes were transferred to the rat’s brain.
Without the microchip, rats
with damaged brain tissue did not have motor function. Both strokes and
Parkinson’s can cause permanent neurological damage to brain tissue, so this
scientific research brings hope.
But,
what else
might
it bring
as well?
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