2026-05-12 14:49:15
Why brain implants are more than a sci-fi fantasy #BCI
Why brain implants are more than a sci-fi fantasy #BCI
I seem to have written a wee essay about #ArtificialGeneralIntelligence #AGI
It's probably not in its final form yet, I'll probably revise a bit. Comments welcome.
New research suggests brain-controlled hearing technology can help people single out a voice in a crowd, hopefully covering the largest deficiency of hearing aids.
https://neurosciencenews.com/brain-controlled-hearing-aid-60465/
Paper (open access):
cintestinalis: Tadpole larva brain (C. intestinalis)
Entire connectivity matrix for the complete brain of a larva of Ciona intestinalis. Each directed edge represents a synaptic connection from pre-synaptic cell i to post-synaptic cell j (may not be a neuron). Edge weights represent the cumulative depth of presynaptic contacts in µm.
This network has 205 nodes and 2903 edges.
Tags: Biological, Connectome, Weighted
Hands as the Language of Thought: Correcting a Kant Attribution
There is a line about hands that travels well. It reads cleanly, carries an air of philosophical dignity, and arrives in print wearing the name of Immanuel Kant. "The hand is the visible part of the brain," runs the most common English form, or, in an older rendering, "the hand is the outer brain of man." The phrase appears in publishing copy, in teaching materials, on Goodreads quotation pages, in popu…
I bet the galaxy brain strategy will be to replace him with someone even more right-wing and then for some reason completely lose any remaining popular support they might still have
Troy Aikman confesses about his "ridiculous" daily routine to protect brain after surviving 10 career concussions https://www.sportingnews.com/us/nfl/dallas-cowboys/news/troy-aikman-concussions-daily-…
me:
my brain: Bran from Game of Thrones was stark raven mad
After flying with virtual wings for one week, the brain learns to accept the impossible #noninvasive…
Wer nutzt #orgmode für #Journalling?
Ich komme von #Logseq und lege mir dort bei jedem Tag einen Eintrag an. Dieser ist mit einem Hauptthema verlinkt. So komme ich vom Hauptthema zum Tag oder vom Tag zum H…
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have shown that
bacteria can learn from past experiences,
store memories across generations
and adapt their behavior to changing environments
all without a brain or nervous system
https://www.cmu.edu…
from my link log —
The order of the JSON.
https://blog.almaer.com/the-order-of-the-json/
saved 2019-08-16 https://dotat.at/:/J5LA…
"The rise of blue-space therapy: how the sea is helping people deal with trauma, anxiety and addiction"
#Nature #Environment
One downside of enforced brevity in social media is that it leads (ironically) towards redundancy when one creates threads. The brain has a tendency to loop back to recent prior ideas and one can end up saying basically the same things but structured and worded upside down and inside out.
EU-approved pesticide found to have potential effects on brain development https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jul/02/eu-approved-pesticide-found-to-have-potential-effects-on-brain-development
…
One symptom for me of having a bad brain day is that Siri doesn’t understand me as well (I’m using it exclusively to set timers and today both times it misunderstood me on the first try).
Endlose Selbstüberschätzung …
Jeff Bezos Is Funding a Wild Hunt for the Brain's 'Core Algorithm' - Slashdot https://science.slashdot.org/story/26/06/08/0418226/jeff-bezos-is-funding-a-wild-hunt-for-the-brains-cor…
Pi, whose "security brain" AI agent helps companies assess vulnerabilities to prioritize and patch, raised $35M at a $100M valuation; sources: xAI is a customer (Thomas Brewster/Forbes)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewste
budapest_connectome: Budapest Reference Connectome 3.0
A parameterizable consensus brain graph, derived from connectomes of 477 people, each computed from MRI datasets of the Human Connectome Project. Nodes are brain regions, and edges are weighted by the number of "tracks" that run between two nodes, as well as fiber length, fractional anisotropy and the number of occurrences in each of the 477 individuals.
This network has 1015 nodes and 105293 edges.
Tags: Biol…
Occipital and parietal non-invasive brain stimulation enhances perceptual learning and transfer: evidence from high-frequency tRNS https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnins.2026.1794676/full
Scientists Are Building Electronics That Stretch Like Human Skin and Learn Like a Brain
https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-are-building-electronics-that-stretch-like-human-skin-and-learn-like-a-brain/
Behind the Blog: Rare Books and Baseball Brain https://www.404media.co/behind-the-blog-rare-books-and-baseball-brain/
Having tinnitus, I found this interesting .
#tinnitus
Mum Brain
Join TV news journalist Estelle Griepink as she consults the collective mum brain to get you the answers you need to know in ten minutes or less...
Great Australian Pods Podcast Directory: https://www.greataustralianpods.com/mum-brain/
For a moment, I mistakenly thought two posts were the same thread and my brain was busy trying to parse what cattle smuggling had to do with the choosing of the astronauts on the Artemis mission
The Brain That Goes Quiet: Serving a Large Model's Knowledge at 131 Tokens per Second on an 8 GB Laptop by Removing the Large Model from the Runtime Path
Myeong Jun Jo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.12154 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.12154 https://arxiv.org/html/2606.12154
arXiv:2606.12154v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: In earlier work I showed that a 35B-class Mixture-of-Experts model can be loaded and executed on a consumer laptop with 8 GB of GPU memory. That result solved a placement problem and immediately exposed a different one: even correctly placed, the large model needed roughly four seconds to answer, because it was still being invoked at every query. This paper documents what happened when I stopped invoking it. During an offline phase, the large model reads source documents and writes verified answer entries into a structured knowledge store; at runtime, only a lightweight router, a deterministic renderer, and a 1B-class model are active. On the same 8 GB laptop, end-to-end response time fell from approximately 4,465 ms to 518 ms, effective end-to-end throughput rose from 15.7 to 131 tokens per second, and the small model's streaming decode rate held at 226-237 tokens per second with a time-to-first-token of 29-62 ms. The bottleneck is structural: three different large models (Qwen, Gemma, and GLM class) all showed the same multi-second runtime cost, and all three produced usable knowledge stores offline. On a 563-entry store built from seventeen real documents, keyword routing collapsed to 1.5% top-1 accuracy while BM25-based routing reached 92.8% (99.4% top-3), and a confidence gate raised effective top-1 to 98.0% by escalating 12.3% of queries. Exact-match fidelity of the small model ranged from 9/9 to 0/9 across envelope formats carrying identical content. A 16-case verification gate blocked all ten corrupted entries while admitting all six supported ones.
toXiv_bot_toot
The House of Da Vinci (Multi, XP'd on PC) An explosion rocks the tower after a guard gives you a note from Leonardo. Follow his trail and uncover the secrets before it's too late.
Back to the thinky pain games, this time with more of a hidden object type game. Find and open hidden panels, unlock doors, manipulate and combine objects you find to create tools, etc.
Nice setting for this one, Renaissance Italy is always a cool place to check out, and traipsing through Le…
Hey folx! You probably see a lot of stuff from other social networks mirrored to Mastodon, how about we do it the other way around?
Recently, I've starred to mirror my posts to Instagram, Reddit, and other platforms, and I've had quite the success. My biggest post on Instagram, which is just one screenshot of a Mastodon post, has 44.5k likes and 256k views. My
Scientists build 'mind-reading' hearing system for noisy environments https://www.sci.news/medicine/mind-reading-hearing-system-noisy-environments-14757.html "a device that reads brain signals to automatically amplify the voice a list…
Scientists discover a surprising link between vitamin C and brain health #nutrition
Drug reverses autism-like brain changes in adult mice within hours, study finds - Neurology | UCLA Health
https://www.uclahealth.org/news/release/drug-reverses-autism-like-brain-changes-adult-mice-within
– via
1/10
#MathsMonday
This article was referred to me - https://puzzlewocky.com/brain-teasers/probability-puzzles/ever…
"Europe needs stronger enforcement, greater transparency, and more independent scrutiny of industry science. When credible evidence points to risks for children’s neurological development, public health must come before commercial interests."
https://www.
Something to help cool your brain.
#RockyMountainNationalPark #naturephotography #elkOfMastodon
"EU-approved pesticide found to have potential effects on brain development"
#EU #EuropeanUnion #Pesticides
'How to Spot AI Hallucinations Like a Reference Librarian': Use AI to explore. Use libraries to verify. Use your brain to evaluate.
(Do people really cite articles they haven't read, as in the opening story?)
https://www.llrx.com/2025/12/how-to-spot-a
I spent the drive up to Little York working on a lecture about the magic of blessings which primed me such that every time someone said "Enjoy the 4th of July" it exploded in my brain like a firework
#photo #photography
budapest_connectome: Budapest Reference Connectome 3.0
A parameterizable consensus brain graph, derived from connectomes of 477 people, each computed from MRI datasets of the Human Connectome Project. Nodes are brain regions, and edges are weighted by the number of "tracks" that run between two nodes, as well as fiber length, fractional anisotropy and the number of occurrences in each of the 477 individuals.
This network has 1015 nodes and 112890 edges.
Tags: Biol…
On the seductive promise of phrenology and its progeny
https://canopycanopycanopy.com/contents/popular_science
Intermittent fasting triggers surprising changes in the brain #health
Do non-language regions become language regions? The case of deprived sensory cortices https://academic.oup.com/brain/advance-article/doi/10.1093/brain/awag242/8728959 "Deprived sensory cortices, contrary to many claims, do not become language regio…
Octopus Brains Defy a Long-Held Rule About Why Animals Evolve Intelligence : ScienceAlert
Octopus Brains Defy a Long-Held Rule About Why Animals Evolve Intelligence : ScienceAlert https://www.sciencealert.com/the-size-of-cephalopod-brains-se…
"das letzte hemd hat keine kartoffeln."
Sorry, brain fart and typo. Part of the problem with trying to do philosophy when mentally ill is I have a lot of brain fog, and can't really evaluate how good my ideas are.
However, when I typed 'survival', what I meant to type (and thought I had typed, was 'society'.
NeuroXess eyes mass BCI production with new unit coming online in H2 #BCI
It has belatedly emerged that a 6-year-old girl in China who had a rare genetic disease
died a week after receiving the world's first brain gene-editing treatment.
The researchers released animal test results in the international journal Nature this year ahead of the treatment,
but did not disclose the already conducted clinical trial and the patient's death in the paper.
The international journal Science and the research-ethics outlet Retraction Watch reported…
Brain activity under anesthesia challenges what we know about consciousness | ScienceDaily
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/06/260624025514.htm
The unconscious brain appears to be far more capable than scientists once believed. Researchers found that…
The platform revolution: Why BCI needs its developer ecosystem https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/platform-revolution-why-bci-needs-its-developer-alvin-chan-phd-lmucc/ "The future of BCI belongs not to any single company, but to thos…
cintestinalis: Tadpole larva brain (C. intestinalis)
Entire connectivity matrix for the complete brain of a larva of Ciona intestinalis. Each directed edge represents a synaptic connection from pre-synaptic cell i to post-synaptic cell j (may not be a neuron). Edge weights represent the cumulative depth of presynaptic contacts in µm.
This network has 205 nodes and 2903 edges.
Tags: Biological, Connectome, Weighted
(LinkedIn) The BCI race: innovation vs. scale (and why the US might lose the brain-to-computer war) 🧠💥 https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/bci-race-innovation-vs-scale-why-us-might-lose-war-panda-yu-6ba5c/
I woke at 2am and it's now 3am and my brain is still swirling. Unlike my usual insomnia routine, I am choosing to read my masto feed in the hope that my brain changes direction and settles down. Good luck to anyone else awake and struggling to sleep.
Flourish, which is building Cortex AI, a brain-like synthetic intelligence system that uses less power than LLMs, raised $500M, including $100M from Jeff Bezos (Steven Levy/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/jeff-bezos-is-funding-a-wild-hunt-for-t…
Connect-One: Early feasibility study of #Connexus brain-computer interface #Paradromics
Millions take omega-3 fish oil for brain health but a new study found no benefit #nutrition
And yet another reply, “But the human brain works just like an LLM!”
Yes, famously we fully understand how human brains work, maybe just some minor details left to figure out.
Visual-to-auditory sensory substitution may be the supplemental "glue" needed to make brain implants for restoring vision shine: textures and shading, undistorted visual feedback, fill-in for failing electrodes, etc https://www.artificialvision.com/neuralink.htm
RE: #BCI
Well, I have just written my first software, and created my first pull request, since April. It's not rocket science but perhaps my brain is recovering from fog.
#OpenSource
#AmWriting
Advanced developers describe a new kind of fatigue with generative artificial intelligence:
"vibecoding fatigue"
or "AI brain fry".
This could affect all language professions, from journalists to lawyers to translators.
https:/…
cintestinalis: Tadpole larva brain (C. intestinalis)
Entire connectivity matrix for the complete brain of a larva of Ciona intestinalis. Each directed edge represents a synaptic connection from pre-synaptic cell i to post-synaptic cell j (may not be a neuron). Edge weights represent the cumulative depth of presynaptic contacts in µm.
This network has 205 nodes and 2903 edges.
Tags: Biological, Connectome, Weighted
Remember the vacuum tube train? The car tunnels? The brain implant chip? The humanoid robots? Making government “efficient”? An AGI based on… tweets (wtf)?
But sure, colonizing Mars is totally real.
The silence around actual progress with the Neuralink Blindsight brain implant for restoring vision to the blind is deafening, and its opaqueness is blinding too. #BCI #hype vs #transparency &
fly_larva: Drosophila larva brain (2023)
A complete synaptic map of the brain connectome of the larva of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Nodes are neurons, and edges are synaptic connections, traced individually from brain image sections using three-dimensional electron microscopy–based reconstruction. Node metadata include the neuron hempisphere, hemispherical homologue, cell type, annotations, and inferred cluster. Edge metadata include the type of interaction (`'aa'`,…
Can a brain implant restore vision? Elon Musk says yes https://www.dhakatribune.com/feature/tech/416707/can-a-brain-implant-restore-vision-elon-musk-says This is actually a decent news article by not just regurgitating Musk's unsubs…
China has approved the world's first invasive brain-computer chip - here's what's next https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/06/01/1138133/china-world-first-brain-chip/ (archived at
cintestinalis: Tadpole larva brain (C. intestinalis)
Entire connectivity matrix for the complete brain of a larva of Ciona intestinalis. Each directed edge represents a synaptic connection from pre-synaptic cell i to post-synaptic cell j (may not be a neuron). Edge weights represent the cumulative depth of presynaptic contacts in µm.
This network has 205 nodes and 2903 edges.
Tags: Biological, Connectome, Weighted
Review of brain-computer interface technology in ophthalmology: Current status, challenges and future directions https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2667376226000314 Discussing noninvasive BCIs yet not mentioning sensory substitution for vision? Review…
fly_hemibrain: Fly hemibrain (2020)
A synaptic map of the hemibrain connectome of fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Nodes are neurons, and edges are synaptic connections, traced individually from brain image sections using EM reconstruction techniques. Neurons are labeled by their type. Edges are annotated by the connection strength between the neurons.
This network has 21739 nodes and 4259624 edges.
Tags: Biological, Connectome, Weighted, Metadata
Focusing on brain implants for restoring vision to the blind feels like Republicans supporting Trump no matter the cons, following the money and influential power https://bioniclab.substack.com/s/why-bcis-fail Invasive BCIs are not the only game in town, by a long shot.
Scientists discover the brain can rewire itself to truly multitask https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-discover-the-brain-can-rewire-itself-to-truly-multitask/ Implications for sensory substitution? Sensory overload?
Extensive experienc…
cintestinalis: Tadpole larva brain (C. intestinalis)
Entire connectivity matrix for the complete brain of a larva of Ciona intestinalis. Each directed edge represents a synaptic connection from pre-synaptic cell i to post-synaptic cell j (may not be a neuron). Edge weights represent the cumulative depth of presynaptic contacts in µm.
This network has 205 nodes and 2903 edges.
Tags: Biological, Connectome, Weighted
🕵️ Your brain's immune system isn't fighting the implant. It's listening to it. https://bioniclab.substack.com/p/your-brains-immune-cells-are-eavesdropping Post 15 in the Why BCIs Fail series;
Elon Musk's bandwidth argument for Neuralink has a problem: the brain itself https://glitchwire.com/news/elon-musks-bandwidth-argument-for-neuralink-has-a-problem-the-brain-itself/ The 10 bits per second problem (for decision m…
Clinical trial: Home-based vision rehabilitation guided by brain imaging (#BRIGHT) https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT07635329 "identify neural pathways that support training-induced visual plasti…
Brain computer interfaces boot up multipronged legal issues https://www.afslaw.com/perspectives/news/brain-computer-interfaces-boot-multipronged-legal-issues "BCIs may be implantable or noninvasive", "Can neural data ever …
Revision Implant lands oversubscribed €4M round to take brain-powered sight implant into the clinic https://bmmagazine.co.uk/get-funded/revision-implant-4m-funding-brain-visual-prosthesis/ Brain implant for restoring vision to the blind;
What progress would be made if all consciousness researchers started working on voluntary mental imagery? A blind person does not need a brain implant to see if visual content is conveyed via other means and then visualized. Visual access and experience.
(YouTube, Spanish) UMHTV – Recuperación inesperada de la visión de una persona ciega mediante microestimulación cerebral (Unexpected recovery of vision in a blind person through brain microstimulation) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQLJBxeLo20
A tiny eye implant invented by a Stanford scientist is helping blind people read again https://archive.ph/9uSfP "Patients can’t see immediately and need months of training with the glasses to teach their brain to recognize this new form of vision. They also generally recover a narrow field of central vision — so…
If you compare the challenges that a Neuralink Blindsight brain implant for restoring vision still has to overcome with the challenges for The vOICe (sound-guided mental imagery)... https://www.artificialvision.com/neuralink.htm Supporting independent and open science
Brain rewires to stabilize walking during visual impairment https://neurosciencenews.com/brain-rewires-sensorimotor-walking-blindness-30721/
Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging study on the effects of visual status on walking-relate…
Primary and higher-order thalamic nuclei make distinct contributions to cortical reorganization in congenital sensory loss #LGN …
Jeff Bezos has just become the only tech billionaire investing across multiple layers of neurotech https://insidebci.com/opinion/2026-06-07-bezos-multiple-layers-neurotech-only-tech-billionaire-velco-dar/
A map of the imagined: topographic principles of sensory simulation in the human parietal cortex https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.08.03.742540v1 "visual imagery preferentially manifested in posterior regions, auditory imagery in ventral regions" of le…
China clears brain-computer interfaces for commercial use: Is it time for a global coalition? https://thedebrief.org/china-clears-brain-computer-interfaces-for-commercial-use-is-it-time-for-a-global-coalition/
By linking up visual and auditory processing in the human brain, The vOICe vision BCI can act as both a fully noninvasive visual prosthesis for the totally blind and as a research vehicle for macroscopic neuroscience https://www.artificialvision.com/neuralink.htm
Convicted Harvard scientist rebuilds career in China through controversial brain-computer interface lab https://thedebrief.org/convicted-harvard-scientist-rebuilds-career-in-china-through-controversial-brain-computer-i…
Brain implant helps paralysed man to feed himself and drink from cup https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/jul/16/neural-bypass-brain-implant-paralysed-man-feed-himself-drink-from-cup "Keith Thomas can move ar…
A computer model predicted which human brain implant channels would fail #invasive