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
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…
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”)
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…
Your AI Use Is Breaking My Brain https://www.404media.co/your-ai-use-is-breaking-my-brain/
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…
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…
Your AI Use Is Breaking My Brain https://archive.is/U2YIx
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.
"The rise of blue-space therapy: how the sea is helping people deal with trauma, anxiety and addiction"
#Nature #Environment
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).
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
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…
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/
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
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.
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…
Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation for visual snow syndrome: symptoms relief and changes in brain dynamics. A case report #rTMS
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
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…
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
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'.
"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.
1/10
#MathsMonday
This article was referred to me - https://puzzlewocky.com/brain-teasers/probability-puzzles/ever…
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…
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'`,…
"EU-approved pesticide found to have potential effects on brain development"
#EU #EuropeanUnion #Pesticides
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…
RE: https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/116529331753494872
This study raises a lot of “methodology vs conclusions” red flags — or at least what I’m seeing doesn’t jibe with how it’s being presented.
(It comes off like “using AI causes brain damage!!” but the actual experiment seems more like it shows that if you let people use a calculator on a test and then yank it away without warning 3/4 of the way through, they get pissed off and bail.)
I’m all for dunking on AI in education, but maybe take this one with a dose of skepticism until the dust settles.
I hope the world still exists when my NDAs expire. I hope my brain hasn't imploded by then.
🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on #KEXP's #VarietyMix
Demolition Hammer:
🎵 .44 Caliber Brain Surgery
#DemolitionHammer
https://masshypnosia.bandcamp.com/track/44-caliber-brain-surgery-demolition-hammer-cover
https://open.spotify.com/track/0aMqAaZaFz8iD2IsUfMzkt
🎶 show playlist 👇
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6G4PaS9BNkIuGqMo44rbfZ
🎶 KEXP playlist 👇
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6VNALrOa3gWbk794YuIrwg
One thing they don't tell you (or perhaps know) about antidepressants is that you can and likely will continue to have the brain zaps later, even when you've stopped taking them for a while-- I'm talking months later. Not that antidepressants don't work- they can, and do. But just something to be prepared for.
#MentalHealth
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…
💢 MRI scans reveal how the brain processes toxic workplace abuse
#mri
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'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
Something to help cool your brain.
#RockyMountainNationalPark #naturephotography #elkOfMastodon
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…
NeuroXess eyes mass BCI production with new unit coming online in H2 #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
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.
I have some sketches of an essay that I need to write, but I think it's worth brain-dumping a bit more in the mean time.
#LLMs are an attempt to make tech grow forever. But like, how many "your mom/a friend, but done by a precarious worker instead" apps do we really need? Everything right now is in the AI grift hole, but there's almost nothing of interest (even if you ignore the ethical concerns). Like, no, I don't fucking want a robot to lie to me about my groceries. That doesn't sound like a useful feature. There's a lot of useless shit being pumped out to prop up the bottom line, and a lot of people just want to be able to use their old phone for more than a couple of years.
No one is happy with this. No one wants this. Except the billionaires who are forcing us all to drink the capitalism koolaid, because they'd rather exterminate life on earth than live in a world where they experience consequences.
Nothing grows forever. That's not how literally anything in reality works, or has ever worked, at all in history. Some people think that the universe itself may work like that, but that's only an educated guess. Finite things don't grow forever. Every organism, every society, every technology, every dynamic and adaptive system we have ever known goes through a growth phase and then goes in to a stabilization phase. Or, following a Malthusian pattern, grows until it reaches a catastrophic point and collapses. Like lemmings. Or reindeer. Or cancer.
A study in Nature Health finds that microplastics and nanoplastics
were at a higher level in brain tumour samples from living patients
than in healthy human brain samples from cadavers,
with a correlation between microplastic surface area and tumour proliferation. https://go.nature.com/4cuBK4I…
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.
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…
(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/
Millions take omega-3 fish oil for brain health but a new study found no benefit #nutrition
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
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
Physical Intelligence says its new model, π0.7, can direct robots on tasks they weren't trained on, an "early sign" of generalization, surprising researchers (Connie Loizos/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/202…
RE: #BCI
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'`,…
Bec's Unhinged Reviews
The local weirdness, the big headlines, the TV that melts your brain, the everyday moments that deserve a gentle roast and a hard laugh. It's opinionated, community-fuelled, and proudly unpolished...
Great Australian Pods Podcast Directory: https://www.greataustralianpo…
(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_…
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'`,…
Third successful implantation of wireless visual prosthesis brain implant advances the frontier of artificial vision #ICVP (intracortical visual prosth…
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
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.
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 &
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
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
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…
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…
🕵️ 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;
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…
(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";
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
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.
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…
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
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…
(YouTube, 2025) The surprising way the brain is wired https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9939jVJIZYo "What if vast areas of the brain contribute to many different functions and its connectivity is far more intricate than we once believed?"
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…
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/
Brain-computer interfaces in healthcare: building the picks and shovels company while the giants fight over gold #BCI
Astrocytes connect specific brain regions through plastic networks (in mice) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10426-6 "communication between distant brain regions that is mediated by plastic networks of gap junction-coupled astrocytes";
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…