Couple days ago I saw a video posted of Derek Jacobys TEDxVictoria talk on Hackerspaces and Biology, at first glance I was really happy to see the two terms in the same sentence. Hackerspaces, HackerHouses, or the more media-friendly, MakerSpaces, have been popping up exponentially everywhere in the last 10 years.  It’s a fantastic movement in bringing like-minded individuals of all sorts of walks of life, professions, trade and hobby together to talk shop, network, and divulge into interests, experiments or take part in large scale projects.  Mixing know how, resource and project management they are hyper-generators...incubators even of ideas and sometimes...game changers.

Like when you are able to put the words Biology and Hackerspaces in the same sentence.

Biohacking.

This is where the real magic starts happening. Man/Woman will always be curious. It’s how we create. It’s how we thrive.  It’s how we evolve.  With technology decreasing in not only price, but also in scale, we begin to be able to brush the threshold of the very building blocks that make you and me what we are. I previously had no idea that by the end of 2012 it will only cost $1,000 to sequence an entire human genome. 300gb of DNA code.  Less than $3.50 per gigabyte of your human DNA decoded. The kicker is that price is down from $10,000,000 in 2005.

There are however the caveats, the ethical boundaries.  Where would they lay?  Designer babies are already possible. We can take cells and replicate them to create entire organs using organ scafolding structures.   But these are the questions people will be asking very soon.  And all and all, it’s exciting that we get to see these human innovations of direction and stride.  We just need to make sure all our hands are on the reigns, not necessarily to hold back...but to hold on tight.

It only seems fitting that IBM (in conjuction with 5 other major universities and DARPA), the company that brought us Jeopardy champ, artificial intelligence computer, Watson, would be who brings us something straight out of science fiction novels.  

The NeuroSynaptic Chip

The first of its kind to process in the same fashion as the brain does; a “neurosynaptic core” with integrated memory (replicated synapses), computation (replicated neurons) and communication (replicated axons), all in one chip.  It’s like taking computer computation from 2-Dimentions into full 3-Dimentional space.  This attempts to overcome what is know as the “von Neumann paradigm”, the current way our present day’s computer architecture is ruled by.  Von Neumann introduced the architecture of the processer and the memory being two separate pieces of hardware in the 1940s.   By integrating the memory into the same hardware as the processor you begin to see context dependant processes in an energy efficient manor PLUS eliminating the bottle neck of the Bus…just like a brain.  

And that seems to be one of the driving forces behind IBMs new chip, is the energy efficiency, and rightly so.  They can already slap together simulate synapses and firing neuron simulations into a super computer.  But even as powerful and helpful as a super computer can be, its downfall is its size, its upkeep, its administration and the amount of energy it takes to drive.  

But as Dr. Dharmendra Modha, head of the SyNAPSE project (Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics), says, the brain is not a neural network, it’s a synaptic network, if you look at the junctions between neurons (called synapses’) you would see that they outnumber the number of neurons by a factor of 10,000” What DARPA has asked the team was to demonstrate at a nano scale, low power material that captures the function of the synapse.  A calculate size of 1 picojoule fitting 10,000,000,000 single synapses’ inside the space of 1 square centimeter

This interview which explains more that Dr. Modha did with Fast Company is fantastic and highly suggested.

That alone was 3 years ago.

Fast forward to today they have 2 working prototype designs, both at 45 total nanometers a piece and currently contain 256 neurons.  One core contains 262,144 programmable synapses and the other contains 65,536 learning synapses.  3 years ago, it was an idea, today, it is quite the reality.  What do you think 20 – 50 years will look like from now?

Sources IBM Press Release

Video: Fast Company interview IBM's "Brain" Guy

Images: IBM Research - Almaden

This may seem as no surprise at first glance; however, the difference is this time around University of Florida researchers actually monitored and collected activity data. In a news report released by University of Florida News, this new research improves on previous studies by recording the actual energy expended, as well as monitoring the consumption of oxygen molecules in almost 200 people of average age to 75. 

This is a major improvement from previous methods which relied on a self reporting technique in which researchers simply asked how much activity a person had on a daily basis. The method was prone to error because people may forget some of the activities that they had participated in, or exaggerated how much activity they have in a day. It also tended to be more sports related activity and less walking around the house and other common day to day activities; even small daily chores add up on the energy consumption chart and help in fighting off the decline of cognitive abilities.

This research along with others shows that physical activity could not only prevent, but also possibly treat cognitive impairment. The link between the two was found to be stronger with this scientifically collected data than it was with the self-report data collected previously, which just goes to show that you should never skimp out on the science.

Sources: [University of Florida News  | Archives of Internal Medicine (full report)]
Image Source: [Beth's Brain Injury Blog]

In mid-June, Professor Brian Pollard of Manchester spoke to the European Anesthesiology Congress in Amsterdam regarding a 3D real time representation of changes in electricity in the brain as it slips from consciousness using a light weight machine that can fit on a small push cart called fEITER ("functional electrical impedance tomography by evoked response) in which has the capability of scanning the brain at 100 images a second, or 100fps.

As far as I have seen, this is the first time this type of real-time scan movie capture has been possible. Iva also mentioned on Facebook how this further proves Professor Susan Greenfield of Oxfords theory of the multiple levels and layers of conscience.

The images and video Professor Pollards assistant sent to me after emailing the professor last night after the conference. This video is not ours, but was given to us by the Professors Assistant when asked for it.

According to an article written on The Physics arXiv Blog entitled “Human Brain Limits Twitter Friends to 150” , your brain restricts you to on average 150 friends. 

The article explains this prediction made by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar in the early 90’s after monitoring social interactions amongst primates. He theorized that the volume of the brain is directly linked to the amount of people you can maintain social contact with. Obviously, when we say friend, we are not referring to everyone who “follows” you or “friends” you in social networks, but people in which you actually have a deep link with.

Bruno Goncalves and some colleagues from Indiana University were given access to Twitter for 6 months during which they reviewed 3 million Twitter users over the course of 4 years 

Their results? The average of those users monitored could keep meaningful social interactions with between 100 and 200 people, which roughly agrees with the Dunbar number of 150.

After reading the original research paper (which I encourage everyone to do) and corresponding data, I found I am curious about some of the conclusions, namely dealing with the weight (designated as ω out) as a representation of how strong a friendship is. It is calculated by a formula that takes into consideration the number of replies between 2 people in a conversation. The higher the weight, the stronger the friendship.

As seen in the graph, a maximum weight is achieved when a user has between 100 and 200 outgoing links, or simply, when a user responds to 100-200 people regularly.

In looking at the interval between 0 and 100 in which the average weight of each connection is between 5 and 6, it is interesting to see the weight seems to increase over the initial period as a user gains more contacts. This could just be an artifact of a “new user effect”, or a learning curve when a new user first starts using Twitter and not an actual result of social interaction of people with less than 100 friends.

The range of 100-200 friends is also interesting in that it just barely passes the peak weight of 6. Afterwards, the weight does not drop below 5 until almost 350 outgoing contacts, and it doesn’t stay below 5 significantly until about 500 outgoing contacts. While the peak relations as defined by the study do indeed occur between 100 and 200 friends, there is still a substantial amount of people maintaining almost as strong connections with up to 500 people.

Still, in the end the research seems to be well done, and it is interesting to see how close the Dunbar prediction is to real life scenarios. The question remains however, is this a maximum number restricted by our brains as Dunbar predicts, or will new technology and time slowly expand our social abilities?

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Chris Birkinbine is a writter and contributor for Cerebralhack and you can find his personal blog Here

Thanks to a friend at CES looks like Mattel has found good fortune using NeuroSkyS Think Gear Technology. We were sent pictures from CES 2011 of what looks to be the ultimate battle of the minds: Mind Flex DUAL!

We have a video too but are waiting for the upload. No further information has been given yet, will update more as I find out :)

So it looks like after many months the Beta SDK for the (once OCZ now) BCInet NIA (Neural Impulse Actuator) has finally been released. When going to the site http://cortex.in/hr3oPx you will see the following message: Thank you for your interest in the Windows SDK. Due to popular response, our open beta test has reached capacity. If you are still interested in participating, please mail us at sdk@bcinet.com with your name, company, title, phone number and SDK interest, and we’ll contact you directly. 

For those already participating in the beta test, you will be kept informed of updates via e-mail. –The BCInet Team In essence what this means is that a bunch of knuckleheads have been using fake email addresses to apply for the Beta SDK. All you have to do is use your real email address and the rest of the noted information necessary and you will be emailed the location where to download it from. Happy Hacking!

On 9.13.2010 Emotiv forums lit up with the news of its EPOC device being hacked, promptly the post made by Cody Brocious (Daeken) was taken down and removed.  The next day, a post was createdto merely discuss the existence of the hack, some cheered, some sneered, even one of the admins (Read: Research Manager and CTO) jumped in on the discussion.  And from reading there really is a divide in the comprehension of what hacking this device means. What the hack allows is raw EEG data available from the ($300) consumer EPOC unit, which is only a perk of the ($750) Research EPOC unit in which I am sure you are bound by some sort of NDA.  

The admin that posted made it seem like because of this, Emotiv may have to close their doors and go out of business due to “skittish investors” and that the Research Unit is a “substantial part of our revenue” However, as a poster even points out: “on what planet is a bare bones driver written in python the equivalent of a research SDK?”  And to further that, most people buying a research unit are doing so for profit, and you can’t very well make a profit off someone else’s technology using their equipment without being sanctioned to do so…the research unit gives you that ability.  And the other far-fetched idea that some other company will come along and….steal open data…..?  

I don’t know who’s got who drinking the kool-aid over at Emotiv, but there seems to be an ample supply to go around. 

Personally if your investors pulled the rug out from under you that quick, you were already working on borrowed time for one reason or another, your next scape goat could be sneezing in the wrong direction.  He goes on to talk about “It’s all well and good to demonstrate how smart you are by hacking the iPhone – Apple can afford to lose some revenue”.  I’d really like to know how and why this guy thinks that the iPhone getting hacked cost Apple money.  Maybe someone should not only point out to him that it increased its sales….but that Androids entire business model and popularity is based on the fact that there are so many Android hackers customizing devices to the way CONSUMERS want.  It’s no wonder their investors are skittish….they have people like this they are throwing money at. I decided to have a small chat with Cody to get a little insight as to what he thought of the whole situation. This is what he had to say….

How have things been going since its news came out?

Things have been going quite well. We’ve received a great deal of support from the community, and at this point we have support for nearly everything the EPOC has. Linux support is now solid, and we can read the raw EEG data with the same precision as the official SDK.

I’ve seen the community take the discovery with open arms, but I’ve heard Emotiv themselves haven’t been to happy, what actions have they taken, if any at all regarding it?

I heard they are looking to patch the hole and stop selling devices till it’s fixed. Emotiv has been posting various things on their forum in response to Emokit, but they haven’t contacted me, or — to my knowledge — Github (which hosts the source). It looks like they’re going to attempt to battle this on a purely technical level. You mentioned earlier that you had just recently got into EEG and BCI devices.

What was it that first caught your eye? And what about it intrigued you?

I really got into this because it’s the intersection of device hacking, which I’ve done for ages, and brain hacking, which I’m very new to. The EPOC is the highest quality EEG device for its price, as far as I’m aware, and presented an opportunity for me to mix two of my passions. I’m really looking forward to what people do with it now that Emokit is getting to be close to production ready.

Have you taken a look at the other two commercially available BCI devices (Mindset and OCZs NIA) or have any thoughts on them?

I’ve looked quickly at them, but haven’t gotten my hands on either.  The reason I chose to go after the EPOC was the large sensor count, which is really quite impressive for the price.

Yea, it is actually. My relationship with the NIA and Mindset people have been overly “open arms”, they are some great people working in those two places, my inquiry’s to Emotiv have always been less “friendly” or open, and robotic responses, and from the reaction Ive seen from one of their techs about the whole situation. Do you think this sort of relationship that Emotiv puts out will change in the future in general towards their users?

I think it has to. If they don’t change the way they’re doing things, there’s no chance they’re going to survive. Right now they’re attacking the people driving development for their product (being called a ‘pirate’ repeatedly on the Emotiv forum spawned me to write “The Hardware Hacker Manifesto” a couple days ago, in fact) rather than embracing it and using the open development community to drive sales of their product to consumers. They seem to think that because they have tech, they’re going to sell units, where it’s really a large library of software that will sell units. They’ll either figure that out or someone else will.

In closing, we are living in a technological age, one in which no one person can see what the future holds.  One thing can be certain; it is and will be the people who control it.  When it comes to the subject of the mind, you will not have a shortage of the same curiosity that gave birth to the first computer hacker, in fact, there will be an exponential amount as the opportunities present themselves, because I believe our mind is the most powerful and complex element in the entire universe, to some, that’s a scary thought, but to me personally, it gives me hope knowing curiosity and innovation without restrictions is what will drive out future, and not fear.

It looks as if Dr. Michael Schuette has morphed OCZs’ NIA (Neural Impulse Actuator) into a spin off venture called BCInet.  From what I gathered from previous talks is that BCI and OCZ were at a “We are from Mars, and you are from Venus” type of relationship, OCZ has let the spin take place with there blessing, and with royalties I would imagine. What does this mean for the NIA? Well, it means less restrictions, faster turnover, and a new and imporved device and an overhaul of its software that is used to power the NIA. Dr. Schuette has let us at CerebralHack know that out test driveing unit is on its way, and when it does, Ill be giving  a side by side comparison of the two devices. Stay tuned! Share and Enjoy

It’s long been accepted by the medical community that physical exercise has a dramatic effect on brain function, it even causes neurons to be made. In fact it would represent a commercial opportunity when you start to look at studies that show the delay of the onset of Alzheimer’s and senility, this applies mainly towards general brain health and function. My particular interest is in physical activity and brain function. What I have in mind is; for an example, say we have a machine that causes physical activity, a treadmill, and we have a variety of sensors, respiration, pulse, the others could be EEG, or whatever technology we can use to monitor the brain. Obviously we cannot use an MRI, it’s too big.  Say we put this person in a virtual environment and create an immersive experience.

Put these things together with the specific goal of achieving tasks, or being successful with certain mental tasks that would otherwise seem unreachable to that person otherwise. We already know by observing MRIs the increase in oxygen levels with brain activity. There are a lot of things we can tell from observing with EEG, this technology has already been accessed for gaming head-gear and so on that can observe in some ways what’s going on. But basically if we were successful with this we would have a device that allows us to be smarter, and for me that’s a pretty interesting task.

This was the presentation Jamie Hyneman, Host of Mythbusters, gave at the VLAB “Business of the Brain” event.  

Thanks to my friend EdRabbit and one of the co-chairs for the event, Tansy Brook, Comms. Mng. @ Neurosky we got to sit-own with him and ask him a few more questions in relation to his presentation, and a tiny delve into his interest into the brain, and where he sees BCI in the future.

What are your opinions on the current technology on the market today?

This kind of thing is in its infancy, I got interested in in the application I described because we are just getting to the point where we can have a look at what’s going on from a number of different points of view with these types of different technologies.  So far, there’s been no magic bullet that can tell us everything we want to know. By the time we get done with a number of them we start to feel we are peeling away the layers of an onion.

Its great that things are starting to happen, while nobody that I’ve seen has really gotten there yet [on that kind of scale] there is enough of a format and momentum that Im starting to feel like we are on the verge onf really being able to have some really deep insights and interaction.  It’s about the right time to take a step into the right direction.

Can you expand a little more on what your idea is?

This came from my own personal experience; I work out on a treadmill when I do my design work. For me, it’s like hitting a switch. Its almost like, when Im not on my treadmill, I’m stupid. I became intrigued with that, and because of my background in linguistics and language acquisition, a lot of things fell into place. Your brain doesn’t exist in a vacuum. There are a lot of interactions that go on between the body and the brain. We typically don’t pay intention to it. We associate brain work with something you do at a desk.
I look at it from an evolutionary perspective. The guy in the cave who discovered a sharp stick to hunt animals with wasn’t sitting in a cave pondering the physics of sharp sticks. He was most likely active; in the act of hunting, or mating or defense where his system was fully active, and that’s how we fully evolved. The greatest mental activity during our evolution would had to of been through heavy physical activity. It’s a largely under-investigated feature that we see from what technology we have now. It points to us being much smarter the more physically active you are.

You mentioned this stems from linguistics?

Its all about how the brain works and how it adapts into its environment. There is another direction this comes from. When thoughts are formed, and neural cascades happen….if you think of this as a pile of sand, and you drop a single gran and it causes an avalanche, that’s a idea, that’s a concept, that’s a problem that was solved. It’s not necessary, often; it’s counterproductive to move in a linear fashion as opposed to something that you are more able to morph into. Thoughts aren’t lined up in little rows of neurons, or behave that way. They are connected all over the brain.

When something coalesces into an idea, this is a result of all these different connections that help anchor this thought that helps create this pile that helps create the cascade. While it’s not relative to theoretical physics, we know from some of the studies that have been done that simply randomly moving around your arms while thinking creates additional grains of sand to this pile so to speak that allow thoughts to attach, and structures to be built that eventually precipitate into either anchoring a new concept or a new vocabulary word, or a grammatical structure, or even higher level concepts that effectively turn intuitive leaps. Simple physical activity, combined with the chemicals of the brain and the oxygenation of the brain help create these cascades that basically mean, we have completed a mental task.

So at this point for you, it’s an idea and a concept, have you been looking into your own studies?

Yup, given even the rudimentary technology we have today, we have enough to create and are in the process of creating a perfect concept with it. Ive been working with nVidia, who has provided some support with this. Their interest in this has been exploring immersive environments for a lot of their gaming projects. The gaming aspect is low hanging fruit as far as trying to test the potential of this type of technology.

What steps do you think future and current companes need to take, and where do you see them in 5yrs?

VLAB is one of the types of venues where these types of connections are being made. That’s the most important thing. We have people involved in forensics and sleep technology and even gaming, a lot of these seemingly disconnecting technologies, at some point or another one of them is going to work with the other and then we will have something coalesce from that. A lot of what we have going here is this bit about the ageing population, and brain function is something that is at the top of the list that all people are concerned about as they get older. So there are a lot of resources that can therefore be applied.