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
💧 Hydraulic brain: Body motion linked to fluid movement in the brain
#brain
"none of these legacy behaviours are rational. They arise out of that bundle of behaviours inherited from our two billion years of sexually selected ancestors... If our ancestors had not had these behaviours, we would not be here. Our ancestors were not, in the sense we mean here, rational... A purely rational being — a being created ab initio rational — would not have these behaviours.
No one is proposing to build an AI with a lizard brain. It won't happen."
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
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.
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
🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #VarietyMix
Wah Wah Wah:
🎵 Brain Overload
#WahWahWah
https://wahwahwah.bandcamp.com/track/brain-overload
https://open.spotify.com/track/0cYBQxqkQdlWLqqC2x4Odv
After flying with virtual wings for one week, the brain learns to accept the impossible #noninvasive…
Jason Collins, 1st openly gay NBA player, dies of brain cancer at 47 (Ramona Shelburne/ESPN)
https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/48753479/jason-collins-dies-47
http://www.memeorandum.com/260512/p106#a260512p106
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
tummy is Angery and brain cells r Logged Out so I am going to tend to my video game crops
Wow, this chart is wild!! Also, UK Ministers are dropping like flies, which means Starmer is going to be gone soon.
#CanPoli #CdnPoli #Democracy
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c1e2n923v1lt
Your AI Use Is Breaking My Brain https://archive.is/U2YIx
"The rise of blue-space therapy: how the sea is helping people deal with trauma, anxiety and addiction"
#Nature #Environment
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…
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.
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…
"Rejoice, for even though we do, verily, walk through the valley of the shadow of death, not all the phantasms we see in the valley are as dark as they appear."
This essay, like all the essays on my blog, is on #CreativeCommons Attribution/Share Alike licence.
Please feel free to republish it anywhere.
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…
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
…
Your AI Use Is Breaking My Brain https://www.404media.co/your-ai-use-is-breaking-my-brain/
"We are in a period where we face huge challenges on many fronts: the planet is burning, the species which provide the ecosystem services we depend on to survive are going extinct, we are fighting wars over resources. We need to focus on the real risks we face. #ArtificialGeneralIntelligence is not one of these. It may happen, but probably not soon. If it does happen, i…
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…
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…
🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on #BBC6Music's #StuartMaconiesFreakZone
Horse Lords:
🎵 Brain of the Firm
#HorseLords
https://horselords.bandcamp.com/track/brain-of-the-firm
https://open.spotify.com/track/0DHt1bMH83gSBStd1aNj36
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/
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
"our energy systems are already massively in carbon debt. We cannot afford to borrow any more carbon from fossil reserves. To burn carbon now to build AGI on the vague hope that it may by some remote chance produce systems with more insight than we now have, at a time when our politicians are already failing to act on the very clear data being produced by their own scientists, it the purest folly"
#AGI
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…
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/
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
Reading the Lattice Without the Legend: Grinberg, Syntergy, and the Argument for Real Entry
A scientist walks out of his office in Mexico City on December 8, 1994, and never walks back in. The man is Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum, forty-eight years old, a UNAM-trained neurophysiologist with a doctorate from New York Medical College, the author of a stack of monographs on consciousness, and the last serious researcher to claim that the human brain could be wired into a…
"we are at the end of days. Our planet — which is, as far as we know, the only planet anywhere in the universe to support intelligent life — is literally burning as I write this, and it is burning because we are burning it. Building huge data centres to pursue the egocentric fantasies of kleptocrat pirates only accelerates that process"
#AGI
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…
So there was something about Github culture over time, and maybe just tech and linkedIn culture that started poising my brain.
This idea that when I make stuff... it's gotta be _for other people_ or designed to be consumed by other people... and you have to have a little marketing pitch and sell it... drive adoption etc... That's the narrative that got wedge into my skull.
Open source use to be you published a tar balls for people to download.
Anyway.... I'm b…
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 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…
Scientists discover a surprising link between vitamin C and brain health #nutrition
My brain is breaking by vibe bros discovering that Tailwind is shit and it’s better to use external CSS with classes (because it uses “fewer tokens”)
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
"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.
Everyone should listen to this week’s Hidden Brain (NPR.)
Some academic named Dave is making the solid case for “radical acceptance “ grounded in design thinking.
I concur with his core argument: reality is the only place where anything can work. Seems like a good place to start, to accept it. That doesn’t mean endorsing reality, just that we live in a broken world and should try to skip the “stages of grief “ in navigating adversity.
I am currently discovering step by step the work of Mark Hallett :
https://www.thetransmitter.org/brain-stimulation/remembering-mark-hallett-leader-in-transcranial-magnetic-stimulation/
Quite a long journ…
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
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
1/10
#MathsMonday
This article was referred to me - https://puzzlewocky.com/brain-teasers/probability-puzzles/ever…
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…
"EU-approved pesticide found to have potential effects on brain development"
#EU #EuropeanUnion #Pesticides
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…
Intermittent fasting triggers surprising changes in the brain #health
Connect-One: Early feasibility study of #Connexus brain-computer interface #Paradromics
💢 MRI scans reveal how the brain processes toxic workplace abuse
#mri
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…
Massachusetts-based brain implant company Axoft raised a $55M Series A and says it tested its device in a Shanghai patient, with plans for more trials in China (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20…
RE: #BCI
Something to help cool your brain.
#RockyMountainNationalPark #naturephotography #elkOfMastodon
Millions take omega-3 fish oil for brain health but a new study found no benefit #nutrition
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'`,…
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
(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/
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.
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 failure we observe in chronic BCI recordings is not purely a materials problem or a surgical problem. It is partly a cellular biology problem. And cellular biology problems have biological solutions." https://www.linkedin.com/posts/tkozai_…
Third successful implantation of wireless visual prosthesis brain implant advances the frontier of artificial vision #ICVP (intracortical visual prosth…
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
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'.
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'`,…
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'`,…
I'm looking for quantifiable measures of effective information bandwidth from auditory to visual areas in the human brain. Has anyone tried that using what is now known about the human connectome? Next question will be how sensory experience may affect this bandwidth through functional re-routing (non-physical "rewiring").
#blindness
NeuroXess eyes mass BCI production with new unit coming online in H2 #BCI
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.
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
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…
A brain implant for depression is about to be tested in humans #BCI
The mature brain and the neuroscience of wisdom https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/best-practices-in-health/202603/the-mature-brain-and-the-neuroscience-of-wisdom by William Haseltine; "A late-maturing bra…
Imagination is not just replaying what we see and hear https://www.sciencenews.org/article/imagination-perception-overlap-brain-neuroscience "Conjuring a nonspecific scene or sound pings brain networks that respond to more than one sense"
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…
🕵️ 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;
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;
Brain prioritizes "sound offsets" during hearing repair https://neurosciencenews.com/auditory-repair-noise-damage-30639/
Noise-induced reduction and early recovery of superior paraolivary nucleus sound-offset responses
(YouTube) #Neuralink: Accessing new brain regions with surgical robotics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93yWGUiYFEk Totally naive: "Every problem has a specific location in your brain";
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.
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…
Would getting a Neuralink Blindsight brain implant for restoring vision be worth it? #BCI
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
Designing implants that don't scar the brain https://neurosciencenews.com/flexible-brain-implants-polyimide-biocompatibility-30538/ "Surprisingly, making probes 'ultra-thin' or allowing them to 'float' wirelessly didn't…
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…