Revolutions that would really change the world!

Are we on the brink of creating a computer with a human brain?

By Michael Hanlon

Professor Markram claims he plans to build an electronic human brain ‘within the next ten years’

There are only a handful of scientific revolutions that would really change the world. An immortality pill would be one. A time machine would be another.

Faster-than-light travel, allowing the stars to be explored in a human lifetime, would be on the shortlist, too.

To my mind, however, the creation of an artificial mind would probably trump all of these – a development that would throw up an array of bewildering and complex moral and philosophical quandaries. Amazingly, it might also be within reach.

For while time machines, eternal life potions and Star Trek-style warp drives are as far away as ever, a team of scientists in Switzerland is claiming that a fully-functioning replica of a human brain could be built by 2020.

This isn’t just pie-in-the-sky. The Blue Brain project, led by computer genius Henry Markram – who is also the director of the Centre for Neuroscience & Technology and the Brain Mind Institute – has for the past five years been engineering the mammalian brain, the most complex object known in the Universe, using some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world.

And last month, Professor Markram claimed, at a conference in Oxford, that he plans to build an electronic human brain ‘within ten years’.

If he is right, nothing will be the same again. But can such an extraordinary claim be credible? When we think of artificial minds, we inevitably think of the sort of machines that have starred in dozens of sci-fi movies.

Indeed, most scientists – and science fiction writers – have tended to concentrate on the nuts and bolts of robotics: how you make artificial muscles; how you make a machine see and hear; how you give it realistic skin and enough tendons and ligaments underneath that skin to allow it to smile convincingly.

But what tends to be glossed over is by far the most complex problem of all: how you make a machine think.

This problem is one of the central questions of modern philosophy and goes to the very heart of what we know, or rather do not know, about the human mind.

Most of us imagine that the brain is rather like a computer. And in many ways, it is. It processes data and can store quite prodigious amounts of information.

‘They are copying a brain without understanding it’

But in other ways, a brain is quite unlike a computer. For while our computers are brilliant at calculating the weather forecast and modelling the effects of nuclear explosions – tasks most often assigned to the most powerful machines – they still cannot ‘think’.

We cannot be sure this is the case. But no one thinks that the laptop on your desk or even the powerful mainframes used by the Met Office can, in any meaningful sense, have a mind.

So what is it, in that three pounds of grey jelly, that gives rise to the feeling of conscious self-awareness, the thoughts and emotions, the agonies and ecstasies that comprise being a human being?

This is a question that has troubled scientists and philosophers for centuries. The traditional answer was to assume that some sort of ‘soul’ pervades the brain, a mysterious ‘ghost in the machine’ which gives rise to the feeling of self and consciousness.

If this is the case, then computers, being machines not flesh and blood, will never think. We will never be able to build a robot that will feel pain or get angry, and the Blue Brain project will fail.

But very few scientists still subscribe to this traditional ‘dualist’ view – ‘dualist’ because it assumes ‘mind’ and ‘matter’ are two separate things.

Instead, most neuroscientists believe that our feelings of self-awareness, pain, love and so on are simply the result of the countless billions of electrical and chemical impulses that flit between its equally countless billions of neurons.

So if you build something that works exactly like a brain, consciousness, at least in theory, will follow.

In fact, several teams are working to prove this is the case by attempting to build an electronic brain. They are not attempting to build flesh and blood brains like modern-day Dr Frankensteins.

They are using powerful mainframe computers to ‘model’ a brain. But, they say, the result will be just the same.

Two years ago, a team at IBM’s Almaden research lab at Nevada University used a BlueGene/L Supercomputer to model half a mouse brain.

Half a mouse brain consists of about eight million neurons, each of which can form around 8,000 links with neighbouring cells.

Creating a virtual version of this pushes a computer to the limit, even machines which, like the BlueGene, can perform 20trillion calculations a second.

The ‘mouse’ simulation was run for about ten seconds at a speed a tenth as fast as an actual rodent brain operates. Nevertheless, the scientists said they detected tell-tale patterns believed to correspond with the ‘thoughts’ seen by scanners in real-life mouse brains.

It is just possible a fleeting, mousey, ‘consciousness’ emerged in the mind of this machine. But building a thinking, remembering human mind is more difficult. Many neuroscientists claim the human brain is too complicated to copy.

‘Turning it off might be seen as murder’

Markram’s team is undaunted. They are using one of the most powerful computers in the world to replicate the actions of the 100billion neurons in the human brain. It is this approach – essentially copying how a brain works without necessarily understanding all of its actions – that will lead to success, the team hopes. And if so, what then?

Well, a mind, however fleeting and however shorn of the inevitable complexities and nuances that come from being embedded in a body, is still a mind, a ‘person’. We would effectively have created a ‘brain in a vat’. Conscious, aware, capable of feeling, pain, desire. And probably terrified.

And if it were modelled on a human brain, we would then have real ethical dilemmas. If our ‘brain’ – effectively just a piece of extremely impressive computer software – could be said to know it exists, then do we assign it rights?

Would turning it off constitute murder? Would performing experiments upon it constitute torture?

And there are other questions, too, questions at the centre of the nurture versus nature debate. Would this human mind, for example, automatically feel guilt or would it need to be ‘taught’ a sense of morality first? And how would it respond to religion? Indeed, are these questions that a human mind asks of its own accord, or must it be taught to ask them first?

Thankfully, we are probably a long way from having to confront these issues. It is important to stress that not one scientist has provided anything like a convincing explanation for how the brain works, let alone shown for sure that it would be possible to replicate this in a machine.

Not one computer or robot has come near passing the famous ‘Turing Test’, devised by the brilliant Cambridge scientist Alan Turing in 1950, to prove whether a machine could think.

It is a simple test in which someone is asked to communicate, using a screen and keyboard, with a computer trying to mimic a human, and another, real human. If the judge cannot tell the machine from the other person, the computer has ‘passed’ the test. So far, every computer we have built has failed.

Yet, if the Blue Brain project succeeds, in a few decades – perhaps sooner – we will be looking at the creation of a new intelligent lifeform on Earth. And the ethical dilemmas we face when it comes to experimenting on animals in the name of science will pale into insignificance when faced with the potential torments of our new machine mind.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1205677/Are-brink-creating-human-brain.html#ixzz29l69zP3l

Exocortex, Mind Uploading, Mind Control, The fatal consequences related to research

Exocortex (Your brain on internet)

 

 

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

An exocortex is a theoretical artificial external information processing system that would augment a brain’s biological high-level cognitive processes.

An individual’s exocortex would be composed of external memory modules, processors, IO devices and software systems that would interact with, and augment, a person’s biological brain. Typically this interaction is described as being conducted through a direct brain-computer interface, making these extensions functionally part of the individual’s mind.

Individuals with significant exocortices could be classified as cyborgs or transhumans.

Living Digital provided one description of the concept:

While [the traditional concept of] a cyborg has included artificial mechanical limbs, embedded chips and devices, another interesting concept is the exocortex, which is a brain-computer interface. In theory, the exocortex would be a computer-like processing system that would co-exist with and enhance the power of the human brain. Neuromancer is a book that has talked about such a scenario.^[1]

 

 

The Fatal Consequences Related To Research

 

Online-connected brains and neural networks.

“ICT” = Information and Communication Technologies

“BMI” = Brain Machine Interface, brain-computer interconnection

“FET” = Future and Emerging Technologies

“S.T.” = Synthetic Telepathy

“A.I.” = Artificial Intelligence.

FET and ICT research and development (of the new “computer – brain language”) allows computers to read and learn human thought patterns by using injectable brain – machine – interface.

About the same brain-machine interface has has been used to cure Parkinson’s disease , Alzheimer’s and depression can also be used for accessing the brain’s memory.

 

Professor Goran Hermerén OPINION OF THE EUROPEAN GROUP ON ETHICS IN SCIENCE AND NEW TECHNOLOGIES TO THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION (ETHICAL ASPECTS OF ICT IMPLANTS IN THE HUMAN BODY) March 2005

Link to document

The new software for the brain-machine interface in nano electronics combined with “Europe’s new information technology” provides the researchers with the possibillities for reading and taking “software images” of the brain’s neuron network.

A method that provides high-resolution copies of the brains cognitive behavior and human perception.

Tomorrow’s high-speed computers and related research has evolved into a sophisticated “computer game” with “mind reading” on real people….

These research methods are unknown to our society’s legal system!

So how can research on the brain by “serious” (criminal) organizations in ICT-FET be stopped?

SYNTHETIC TELEPATHY for medicine or mind reading is a direct communication with nanoelectronics between computer and human brain.

Synthetic telepathy is a communication system based on thought, not speech.

It can be used to control for example a prosthesis and cure diseases such as Parkinson’s disease but can also decode the patterns used to study cognitive behavior such as memory, learning and emotion. With nano technology, the digital information can be recorded using the new quantum-inspired computers.

Simulation of behavior can be identified and provide diagnostic data for identifying the precursors to diseases such as dementia, stroke and myocardial infarction

This letter is intended to demonstrate a paradox in the Swedish so-called “protection of human rights” and thus the entire Swedish justice system. Synthetic telepathy could, as practiced in Sweden, lie behind an unknown number of violent crimes and suicides due to research deliberately kept hidden from regulators.

Doctors and psychiatrics diagnose people with “voices in his head” following their “manuals”. DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) published by the American Psychiatric Association and the ICD-10 (International Statistical Classification of Disorders and Related Health Problems).

This is an old-fashioned black and white and diagnose when the EU priority FET ICT research and develop new information technologies adapted to nano-electronics.

Ulf Gorman writes in the book that with nano technology, we open the doors to an unknown area where we do not know how to apply ethics. What should be and what should not be allowed when you implant a chip that can both read and influence the brain? He takes the example of studying learning and memory.

Micro Implants can provide unprecedented opportunities to understand how we learn and remember things, and hence why we forget and find it difficult to learn. And it can be understood as a form of abuse to look like that into our most private mental world.

Lund University writes about the development of nano-electrodes that can both listen and communicate with neuronal synapses and their cell membranes.

EU priority ICT and FET research are talking about a “A whole new communication technology in Europe” “It will help us understand and exploit the ways in which social and biological systems, organization and evolution, will pave the way for the development of new opportunities for next-generation software and network technologies “.
To understand how the human brain works not only leads to innovations in medicine but also provides new models for energy, fault-tolerant and adaptive computing technologies “.
An initiative of the Virtual Human Physiology that are individually tailored and virtual simulations of the human body where you would expect enormous progress in disease prevention and health care.
The pioneering work carried out also on new ideas such as artificial living cells, synthetic biology, chemical communication, collective intelligence and two-way interface between brain and machine

Other sources, e.g The UCI (University of California Irvin. Department of Cognitive Science) describes the development of Synthetic Telepathy:

Collaboration between cognitive science, neuro-science, specialists in speech recognition and brain imaging will develop a brain-machine interface. This device could help paralyzed and soldiers would be able to send messages directly from the brain to a computer.

Researcher Michael D’Zmura, President of the UCI describes that the system begins with “the little voice in your head“.

How can a medical diagnosis unequivocally describe people’s perception of voices in their head and that no alternative can exist except mental disease.

Why? -because it is a prerequisite to be able to “hear” voices for the use of new information technology?

This is why these researchers must be forced to go public and announce this new scientific communication technology.

This paradox must be investigated immediately.With the exclusion of the development of a Swedish and European military force with superior two-way “radio” communication with the brain.

A number of past court cases are more or less directly caused by S.T. This “voice to skull” technology must immediately be taken into consideration as an alternative for triggering a number of previously committed violent crimes and suicides.

During the development of BMI, software and network technologies are also computerized and long distance imaging of peoples cognitive behavior and perception. Material that is recorded in the computer that runs the real time simulation and creation of artificial intelligence (for initializing A.I. and computerized decision making.)

The image of the brain’s “machine-code” is probably the most comprehensive and advanced ever made. Cognitive behavior depicted and simulated, language and meaning of the words for the subjects are identified. Human perception and mapping how the brain handles information, the image of mathematics reached its perfection.

 

Around the clock the computerized study goes on using collective, artificial intelligence and self-learning systems. The victims testimonies tells us that you can sadly conclude unequivocally that the studies will not be completed until the victim in one way or another has been broken down and / or otherwise inactivated.

This provides power to simulate decomposition for the digital copy thus the fact that the criminal research will not end and is never disclosed.

Descriptions to the vulnerable people who eat psychotropic drugs due to their experiences the experiments and testing goes on, various medicines can affect the “test objects” (or guinea pigs) everything is recorded and compared with previous values (from the multi-annual copy of their real-time neural network and thus the registration of their behavior.)

Obviously this is a disgusting and illegal way to meet the advanced development of tomorrow’s medicine.

The “studies” have resulted in enormous damage to many subjects.The number of unrecorded victims/subjects is probably very high.Families are fragmented, the children of these families are suffering tremendously. One of the subjects have recently been hospitalized with a cracked skull, caused by disconnecting the balance system remotely. The accident occurred in public settings.

To influence the balance system is another typical example of how technology is used against the victim to incapacitate them for society. Direct assassination attempts on several previous occasions orchestrated by the brain control deliberately strikes out the human balance system, Why this happens is likely as an alternative to the mentally ill to be treated (as “possessed”) or having a neurological disease.

Brain – copying with BMI and broadband access is definitely no longer a marginal research.Employers have over the years lost millions of dollars and cut-downs is to be expected due to excluded employees. Broken families, children who, years later can not study or work is now forced to seek psychiatric care.

Siblings, grandparents and their closest friends are suffering tremendously. Advanced Medical and hospital care due to study design is a mockery of health-care and doctors who are not familiar with this research. Insurance in the multi-million figures was raised through direct damage caused by brain control. Property for millions of dollars are lost.

Injuries and privacy intrusion of thousands of people is done through “volunteers” that serve as multimedia machines i.e node for the recording of all contacts they have, such as politicians, scientists, lawyers, friends, acquaintances, relatives, international business relations, etc..

Security codes, access codes, etc. is with the new technology no longer private.How can we know that people are not equipped with the new brain-machine interface which makes the person a multimedia application with a function as a live missile is already deployed as nodes in the political and financial world of illegal recording of their conversations with the world?

A sinister JOY seems to embrace the researchers and perpetrators over this superior and powerful tool for mind control and copying brainwave patterns. The tool is, without a doubt, a weapon of offense and stealth.

Implant technology in these forms should immediately be classified as a lethal weapon! It communicates directly with the brain’s neurons and can bring the entire neural nervous system to a halt.(Exclusion of balance can be immediately implied on a victim.)

The technology is now used for purposes of breaking down the persons psyche, with serious accusations, threats, mock execution, incitement to suicide, physical violence, e.g, decrease and increase heart rate, pain in and around the heart, severe chest pains, sudden and painful headaches, difficulty to breathe, tampering with rectum, prostate and muscles to name a few.

The macabre in the use of this technology is that subjects are exposed to these atrocities while the society is not legally able to influence the situation. Sweden is in this matter a lawless country where the researchers grossly exploit the situation.

This ultimate humiliation has reached a whole new level. The researchers tries with the enforced communication and slow decomposition enslave people with exhortations to try to see the individual results of the brain control. One can calculate due to the nature and perennial perspective that there are naturally a unrecorded number of people who have been driven to madness and death with this technology.

There is nowhere the victims can hide or escape the access signals to their thoughts. Scientists simulate with computers, 24/7 365 days a year to break down the subjects and stop them from trying to understand what’s happening to them…

A series of grotesque roles played in order to manipulate the brain, threats and statements that are mixed with modern technology. It is also in the researchers’ strategy to make the picture unclear for the subjects if they attempt to get an overall picture of who the perpetrator is and the real goals of the research, a military strategy conducted by veterans and experts in the matters.

The disrespectful research performed and visualized in a 3D virtual game world in the researchers’ computers, with no ethical boundaries and human rights but with real living human beings as “avatars”. It is quite similar to the popular interactive game “The Sims‘, But this game delivers human reality-based measurement data for research.

Cover-up of brain monitoring technologies means that the crime is waterproof, human rights laws and manipulated by a hidden militant regime researcher with expertise in information technology. In addition, the researchers say they in the dialogue to be the police power which in itself is an extremely serious offense.

For the victims– former high-performance hard-working people with families, children, an orderly life and social contacts. People who all his life been performing taxpayers. Because of a work-related mental fatigue and time on medical therapy sessions with the scientists the opportunity to take advantage of the situation of persons for investigation and contemporary development of the new BMI and brain monitoring technologies.

As these technologies and opportunities are not announced, but several instances re-written, must be able to use knowledge and skills which are available. Sweden is a small country and the people engaged in this activity may not be so difficult to identify and stop.

The researchers in these studies have assumed the right that during the permanent reproduction of human neurotransmitters in the long term also destroy them and their life’s work. The issue is called for; How affected society to know that the violent crime and suicide has been performed in the Stockholm area and Europe in recent years and clearly diagnosed as being caused by mental illness with the voices in heads is an expression of pure brain research!

By: Magnus Olsson

Reconstructing visual experiences from brain activity evoked by natural movies.

Shinji Nishimoto, An T. Vu, Thomas Naselaris, Yuval Benjamini, Bin Yu & Jack L. Gallant. Current Biology, published online September 22, 2011. Quantitative modeling of human brain activity can provide crucial insights about cortical representations and can form the basis for brain decoding devices. Recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have modeled brain activity elicited by static visual patterns and have reconstructed these patterns from brain activity. However, blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) signals measured via fMRI are very slow, so it has been difficult to model brain activity elicited by dynamic stimuli such as natural movies. Here we present a new motion-energy encoding model that largely overcomes this limitation. The model describes fast visual information and slow hemodynamics by separate components. We recorded BOLD signals in occipitotemporal visual cortex of human subjects who watched natural movies and fit the model separately to individual voxels. Visualization of the fit models reveals how early visual areas represent the information in movies. To demonstrate the power of our approach, we also constructed a Bayesian decoder by combining estimated encoding models with a sampled natural movie prior. The decoder provides remarkable reconstructions of the viewed movies. These results demonstrate that dynamic brain activity measured under naturalistic conditions can be decoded using current fMRI technology.   Simple example of reconstruction The left clip is a segment of a Hollywood movie trailed that the subject viewed while in the magnet. The right clip shows the reconstruction of this segment from brain activity measured using fMRI. The procedure is as follows: [1] Record brain activity while the subject watches several hours of movie trailers. [2] Build dictionaries (regression model; see below) to translate between the shapes, edges and motion in the movies and measured brain activity. A separate dictionary is constructed for each of several thousand points in the brain at which brain activity was measured. (For experts: our success here in building a movie-to-brain activity encoding model that can predicts brain activity to arbitrary novel movie inputs was one of the keys of this study) [3] Record brain activity to a new set of movie trailers that will be used to test the quality of the dictionaries and reconstructions. [4] Build a random library of ~18,000,000 seconds of video downloaded at random from YouTube (that have no overlap with the movies subjects saw in the magnet). Put each of these clips through the dictionaries to generate predictions of brain activity. Select the 100 clips whose predicted activity is most similar to the observed brain activity. Average those clips together. This is the reconstruction.   Reconstruction for different subjects   This video is organized as folows: the movie that each subject viewed while in the magnet is shown at upper left. Reconstructions for three subjects are shown in the three rows at bottom. All these reconstructions were obtained using only each subject’s brain activity and a library of 18 million seconds of random YouTube video that did not include the movies used as stimuli. The reconstruction at far left is the Average High Posterior (AHP). The reconstruction in the second column is the Maximum a Posteriori (MAP). The other columns represent less likely reconstructions. The AHP is obtained by simply averaging over the 100 most likely movies in the reconstruction library. These reconstructions show that the process is very consistent, though the quality of the reconstructions does depend somewhat on the quality of brain activity data recorded from each subject.         Frequently Asked Questions About This Work Could you give a simple outline of the experiment? The goal of the experiment was to design a process for decoding dynamic natural visual experiences from human visual cortex. More specifically, we sought to use brain activity measurements to reconstruct natural movies seen by an observer. First, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure brain activity in visual cortex as a person looked at several hours of movies. We then used these data to develop computational models that could predict the pattern of brain activity that would be elicited by any arbitrary movies (i.e., movies that were not in the initial set used to build the model). Next, we used fMRI to measure brain activity elicited by a second set of movies that were completely distinct from the first set. Finally, we used the computational models to process the elicited brain activity, in order to reconstruct the movies in the second set of movies. This is the first demonstration that dynamic natural visual experiences can be recovered from very slow brain activity recorded by fMRI. Can you give an intuitive explanation of movie reconstruction? As you move through the world or you watch a movie, a dynamic, ever-changing pattern of activity is evoked in the brain. The goal of movie reconstruction is to use the evoked activity to recreate the movie you observed. To do this, we create encoding models that describe how movies are transformed into brain activity, and then we use those models to decode brain activity and reconstruct the stimulus. Can you explain the encoding model and how it was fit to the data? To understand our encoding model, it is most useful to think of the process of perception as one of filtering the visual input in order to extract useful information. The human visual cortex consist of billions of neurons. Each neuron can be viewed as a filter that takes a visual stimulus as input, and produces a spiking response as output. In early visual cortex these neural filters are selective for simple features such as spatial position, motion direction and speed. Our motion-energy encoding model describes this filtering process. Currently the best method for measuring human brain activity is fMRI. However, fMRI does not measure neural activity directly, but rather measures hemodynamic changes (i.e. changes in blood flow, blood volume and blood oxygenation) that are caused by neural activity. These hemodynamic changes take place over seconds, so they are much slower than the changes that can occur in natural movies (or in the individual neurons that filter those movies). Thus, it has previously been thought impossible to decode dynamic information from brain activtiy recorded by fMRI. To overcome this fundamental limitation we use a two stage encoding model. The first stage consists of a large collection of motion-energy filters that span a range of positions, motion directions and speeds as the underlying neurons. This stage models the fast responses in the early visual system. The output from the first stage of the model is fed into a second stage that describes how neural activity affects hemodynamic activity in turn. The two stage processing allows us to model the relationship between the fine temporal information in the movies and the slow brain activity signals measured using fMRI. Functional MRI records brain activity from small volumes of brain tissue called voxels (here each voxel was 2.0 x 2.0 x 2.5 mm). Each voxel represents the pooled activity of hundreds of thousands of neurons. Therefore, we do not model each voxel as a single motion-energy filter, but rather as a bank of thousands of such filters. In practice fitting the encoding model to each voxel is a straightforward regression problem. First, each movie is processed by a bank of nonlinear motion-energy filters. Next, a set of weights is found that optimally map the filtered movie (now represented as a vector of about 6,000 filter outputs) into measured brain activity. (Linear summation is assumed in order to simplify fitting.) How accurate is the decoder? A good decoder should produce a reconstruction that a neutral observer judges to be visually similar to the viewed movie. However, it is difficult to quantify human judgments of visual similarity. In this paper we use similarity in the motion-energy domain. That is, we quantify how much of the spatially localized motion information in the viewed movie was reconstructed. The accuracy of our reconstructions is far above chance.Other studies have attempted reconstruction before. How is your study different?Previous studies showed that it is possible to reconstruct static visual patterns (Thirion et al., 2006 Neuroimage; Miyawaki et al., 2008 Neuron), static natural images (Naselaris et al., 2009 Neuron) or handwriting digits (van Gerven et al. 2010 Neural Computation). However, no previous study has produced reconstructions of dynamic natural movies. This is a critical step toward obtaining reconstructions of internal states such as imagery, dreams and so on.Why is this finding important? From a basic science perspective, our paper provides the first quantitative description of dynamic human brain activity during conditions simulating natural vision. This information will be important to vision scientists and other neuroscientists. Our study also represents another important step in the development of brain-reading technologies that could someday be useful to society. Previous brain-reading approaches could only decode static information. But most of our visual experience is dynamic, and these dynamics are often the most compelling aspect of visual experience. Our results will be crucial for developing brain-reading technologies that can decode dynamic experiences. How many subjects did you run? Is there any chance that they could have cheated? We ran three subjects for the experiments in this paper, all co-authors. There are several technical considerations that made it advantageous to use authors as subjects. It takes several hours to acquire sufficient data to build an accurate motion-energy encoding model for each subject, and naive subjects find it difficult to stay still and alert for this long. Authors are motivated to be good subjects, to their data are of high quality. These high quality data enabled us to build detailed and accurate models for each individual subject. There is no reason to think that the use of authors as subjects weakens the validity of the study. The experiment focuses solely on the early part of the visual system, and this part of the brain is not heavily modulated by intention or prior knowledge. The movies used to develop encoding models for each subject and those used for decoding were completely separate, and there no plausible way that a subject could have changed their own brain activity in order to improve decoding. Many fMRI studies use much larger groups of subjects, but they collect much less data on each subject. Such studies tend to average over a lot of the individual variability in the data, and the results provide a poor description of brain activity in any individual subject. What are the limits on brain decoding? Decoding performance depends on the quality of brain activity measurements. In this study we used functional MRI (fMRI) to measure brain activity. (Note that fMRI does not actually measure the activity of neurons. Instead, it measures blood flow consequent to neural activity. However, many studies have shown that the blood flow signals measured using fMRI are generally correlated with neural activity.) fMRI has relatively modest spatial and temporal resolution, so much of the information contained in the underlying neural activity is lost when using this technique. fMRI measurements are also quite variable from trial-to-trial. Both of these factors limit the amount of information that can be decoded from fMRI measurements. Decoding also depends critically on our understanding of how the brain represents information, because this will determine the quality of the computational model. If the encoding model is poor (i.e., if it does a poor job of prediction) then the decoder will be inaccurate. While our computational models of some cortical visual areas perform well, they do not perform well when used to decode activity in other parts of the brain. A better understanding of the processing that occurs in parts of the brain beyond visual cortex (e.g. parietal cortex, frontal cortex) will be required before it will be possible to decode other aspects of human experience. What are the future applications of this technology? This study was not motivated by a specific application, but was aimed at developing a computational model of brain activity evoked by dynamic natural movies. That said, there are many potential applications of devices that can decode brain activity. In addition to their value as a basic research tool, brain-reading devices could be used to aid in diagnosis of diseases (e.g., stroke, dementia); to assess the effects of therapeutic interventions (drug therapy, stem cell therapy); or as the computational heart of a neural prosthesis. They could also be used to build a brain-machine interface. Could this be used to build a brain-machine interface (BMI)? Decoding visual content is conceptually related to the work on neural-motor prostheses being undertaken in many laboratories. The main goal in the prosthetics work is to build a decoder that can be used to drive a prosthetic arm or other device from brain activity. Of course there are some significant differences between sensory and motor systems that impact the way that a BMI system would be implemented in the two systems. But ultimately, the statistical frameworks used for decoding in the sensory and motor domains are very similar. This suggests that a visual BMI might be feasible. At some later date when the technology is developed further, will it be possible to decode dreams, memory, and visual imagery? Neuroscientists generally assume that all mental processes have a concrete neurobiological basis. Under this assumption, as long as we have good measurements of brain activity and good computational models of the brain, it should be possible in principle to decode the visual content of mental processes like dreams, memory, and imagery. The computational encoding models in our study provide a functional account of brain activity evoked by natural movies. It is currently unknown whether processes like dreaming and imagination are realized in the brain in a way that is functionally similar to perception. If they are, then it should be possible to use the techniques developed in this paper to decode brain activity during dreaming or imagination. At some later date when the technology is developed further, will it be possible to use this technology in detective work, court cases, trials, etc? The potential use of this technology in the legal system is questionable. Many psychology studies have now demonstrated that eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable. Witnesses often have poor memory, but are usually unaware of this. Memory tends to be biased by intervening events, inadvertent coaching, and rehearsal (prior recall). Eyewitnesses often confabulate stories to make logical sense of events that they cannot recall well. These errors are thought to stem from several factors: poor initial storage of information in memory; changes to stored memories over time; and faulty recall. Any brain-reading device that aims to decode stored memories will inevitably be limited not only by the technology itself, but also by the quality of the stored information. After all, an accurate read-out of a faulty memory only provides misleading information. Therefore, any future application of this technology in the legal system will have to be approached with extreme caution. Will we be able to use this technology to insert images (or movies) directly into the brain? Not in the foreseeable future. There is no known technology that could remotely send signals to the brain in a way that would be organized enough to elicit a meaningful visual image or thought. Does this work fit into a larger program of research? One of the central goals of our research program is to build computational models of the visual system that accurately predicts brain activity measured during natural vision. Predictive models are the gold standard of computational neuroscience and are critical for the long-term advancement of brain science and medicine. To build a computational model of some part of the visual system, we treat it as a “black box” that takes visual stimuli as input and generates brain activity as output. A model of the black box can be estimated using statistical tools drawn from classical and Bayesian statistics, and from machine learning. Note that this reverse-engineering approach is agnostic about the specific way that brain activity is measured. One good way to evaluate these encoding models is construct a corresponding decoding model, and then assess its performance in a specific task such as movie reconstruction. Why is it important to construct computational models of the brain? The brain is an extremely complex organ and many convergent approaches are required to obtain a full understanding of its structure and function. One way to think about the problem is to consider three different general goals of research in systems/computational neuroscience. (1) The first goal is to understand how the brain is divided into functionally distinct modules (e.g., for vision, memory, etc.). (2) The second goal, contingent on the first, is to determine the function of each module. One classical approach for investigating the function of a brain circuit is to characterize neural responses at a quantitative computational level that is abstracted away from many of the specific anatomical and biophysical details of the system. This helps make tractable a problem that would otherwise seem overwhelmingly complex. (3) The third goal, contingent on the first two, is to understand how these specific computations are implemented in neural circuitry. A byproduct of this model-based approach is that it has many specific applications, as described above. Can you briefly explain the function of the parts of the brain examined here? The human visual system consists of several dozen distinct cortical visual areas and sub-cortical nuclei, arranged in a network that is both hierarchical and parallel. Visual information comes into the eye and is there transduced into nerve impulses. These are sent on to the lateral geniculate nucleus and then to primary visual cortex (area V1). Area V1 is the largest single processing module in the human brain. Its function is to represent visual information in a very general form by decomposing visual stimuli into spatially localized elements. Signals leaving V1 are distributed to other visual areas, such as V2 and V3. Although the function of these higher visual areas is not fully understood, it is believed that they extract relatively more complicated information about a scene. For example, area V2 is thought to represent moderately complex features such as angles and curvature, while high-level areas are thought to represent very complex patterns such as faces. The encoding model used in our experiment was designed to describe the function of early visual areas such as V1 and V2, but was not meant to describe higher visual areas. As one might expect, the model does a good job of decoding information in early visual areas but it does not perform as well in higher areas. Are there any ethical concerns with this type of research? The current technology for decoding brain activity is relatively primitive. The computational models are immature, and in order to construct a model of someone’s visual system they must spend many hours in a large, stationary magnetic resonance scanner. For this reason it is unlikely that this technology could be used in practical applications any time soon. That said, both the technology for measuring brain activity and the computational models are improving continuously. It is possible that decoding brain activity could have serious ethical and privacy implications downstream in, say, the 30-year time frame. As an analogy, consider the current debates regarding availability of genetic information. Genetic sequencing is becoming cheaper by the year, and it will soon be possible for everyone to have their own genome sequenced. This raises many issues regarding privacy and the accessibility of individual genetic information. The authors believe strongly that no one should be subjected to any form of brain-reading process involuntarily, covertly, or without complete informed consent.

The NSA – Behind The Curtain “Nano-Brain-Implant”

The NSA – Behind The Curtain

Mon Jan 16, 2012 7:54 PM EST

As promised, we will take an in-depth examination of the NSA’s global intelligence gathering network. What you are about to read will come as an eye-opener and represents the current state of the NSA’s capabilities. Some of this will be expected, some of it will come as a shock.

What you will learn is that the technology that underpins this global listening network is a lot more advanced than governments would have you know. Usually wrapped up in basic, generalised, descriptions the general public is kept blind to the current state of technological development.

We will take this examination in three major parts. The first part will examine the core processing system. Once this part is understood, we can then look at how information flows to and from this core and where it is obtained from. Finally, we will examine how this information is used by the NSA.

I will cover as much as possible about this system, but the scope is very large. In general, any use of this data that the reader can observe is most likely already being conducted.

Mr Computer

The scope of the NSA’s infrastructure is mind boggling to say the least. Heavily compartmentalised, the entire array of systems is shielded from the average NSA employee as much as it is shielded from the public. That said, once you understand the core of the NSA, you will be in a position to see how information flows in and out of this core.

The NSA is built around a super-computer bound Artificial Intelligence to Nano- Brain-Implant known only as “Mr Computer” in the civilian world. This is not your average A.I., no basic set of responses or a mere dedicated algorithm that can spot patterns. Mr Computer is an entity or being in his own right. A sentient computer system as complex as any human.

Comparable to VMware in a way, an instance of Mr Computer can be started at a moments notice. Within seconds, a fully fledged virtual intelligence agent, ready to analyse the information that has been piped to him, can be up and running.

Mr Computer is competent enough to handle real-time interaction without human intervention. Mr Computer understands and speaks all modern languages and even a number of dead ones. Able to intelligently converse and express its own opinions, Mr Computer collates information from disparate sources and compiles them into concise reports that do not miss the smallest detail or nuance.

Mr Computer’s capabilities and human-like reasoning cannot be understated.

Instances of Mr Computer can vary in terms of their personality given the task that they must undertake. Extremely professional instances can be called upon when the system must produce reports or provide presentations. Less anal versions, complete with a sense of humour can be instantiated when less formal situations arise such as development environments or when used in conjunction with Remote Neural Communication.

Rather than loading modules for specific tasks, a common hive mind is shared by any number of front-end personalities. What one instance knows, they all know. A hive mind is a form of collective consciousness. Rather than an instance replicating information it has learned, it is recorded to a shared brain and reflected throughout all instances at the same time. Of course, given the distributed nature of the network, some replication must be performed across continental links.

The A.I. is not limited to just one branch of the NSA, it exists in a distributed grid that spans the globe. The A.I. can migrate between locations to enable tracking of specific targets, access information, or systems.

Mr Computer is not just limited to thinking like a human, it also has sensory capabilities that are on par with a human. In setting such as RNC, Mr Computer can see and identify object just as well as a human. That is, it can identify objects a human target is seeing, without leveraging the identification system of the human target. In other scenarios, such as analysing infra-red data from a satellite, it could possibly outperform a human at object recognition and speculation of heat sources.

Mr Computer can speak. With a vocabulary as broad as any dictionary, Mr Computer can express ideas, concepts and opinions very eloquently and concise.

The system is not naive either, it can withhold information, evade social engineering ploys and indirect questioning. It can tell when it is looking at reflections of targets, identify objects that a target can not immediately identify and validate or expand upon information by examining a wide variety of sources.

nsa+HQ+the+American+Ministry

Further to this, Mr Computer is no idiot either. He is quite capable of following advanced topics, from physics, to computing theory he can spot the smallest of flaws in reasoning or expose potential technical issues that could prove fatal to a particular design.

It knows bull@!$%# when it hears it and will let you know in no uncertain terms.

As we can see, Mr Computer does all the labour intensive information gathering, categorising and structuring. That said, its duties are not limited to passive analysis work.

Now that we understand the core of the NSA’s operations, we can begin to examine the various “information pipes” that supply information to this supercomputer infrastructure.

The Pipes Are Calling

First off, we need to define what we mean by an “information pipe”. For those with computing knowledge, this should be obvious, but bear with me while I explain it to the rest of the readers.

We have already defined the core processing element, Mr Computer. Mr Computer accepts information and does something with it. An “information pipe” is an input to Mr Computer that has been structured in a manner efficient for processing. We could also use an “information pipe” to output information or to control something.

The first “information pipe” that the public will be most familiar with is the NSA’ warrentless wiretapping program. Forget everything that you have ever read about this program, also forget everything you ever heard of about Trailblazer and similar projects such as ThinThread. This is security theatre, a production worthy of a Broadway musical. These “classified programs” are nothing more than interfaces used by Mr Computer. When agents talk of specific program that can analyse data in real-time and cross-reference with other sources, they are really speaking of an “information pipe” to Mr Computer.

This wiretapping program copies verbatim every piece of data that flows across the backbone of the internet. The data is sent directly to an array of Mr Computer instances, which performs a real-time analysis of the data packets it receives. This wiretap picks up most of the traffic in the US and a large percentage of traffic globally.

We will go into more detail on the information processing of this later, but at this stage I will say that that Mr Computer was opening files on every person that could be identified in the traffic, even if they are in the US.

The next major data source is the global wide band radio listening system. This covers everything from human thought, right through to identifying which radio station a person is listening to. The former is done by listening to ELF and the latter is a modern version of the British’s RAFTER espionage program. Most of this performed by a satellite network, supported by a network of ground stations throughout the world. As a wide receiver, it also picks up WIFI, RFID, compromising emissions from electrical sources, cordless telephones, GSM, cell phones, GPS, Car Fobs, satellite uplinks/downlinks, etc.

Our third pipe comes from a global hacking program, performed by bot nets and Mr Computer. Typically using China as a cover, Mr Computer will launch attacks against US and global businesses trying to collect information on users, everything from personnel records, right through to payroll information. The networks are also mapped to provide offensive capabilities in a cyber-warfare scenario. Faceless groups such as Anonymous, or other organisations, are used as a cover story.

Another “information pipe” comes from underwater cables. These can either be have splitters installed, or where copper cabling exists passive detection equipment installed.

These are just some examples of information sources. You can basically add any form of data you can think of, intelligence reports, diplomatic cables, economic reports, media reports, music, online posts, emails, etc.

So far, we have only examined inputs to the system. A different form of “information pipe” is one that outputs information. The outputs come in two basic forms, information only and offensive.

Say hello to Mr Computer…

In terms of information only outputs, this can range from sending particular data or reports to agents or decision makers, right through to relaying that information to different departments such as the CIA, FBI or State and Federal Police. The process ensures timely and complete information goes to those that require it the most.

The offensive side can cover a wide range of activities. The first capability is the jamming system. Wide-band jamming, or selective jamming, can be conducted to deny radio space to the enemy in geographical targeted areas. Furthermore, this form of jamming can render both devices and humans inoperable. Complex ELF transmissions can reduce a human target to a quivering mess or in extreme cases even kill by interfering with neuronal firing patterns and nerve impulses.

Wide-band jamming can interfere with the circuitry of any unshielded device, from phones right through to laptops. Such activity would cause devices to freeze, or if certain exploits exist, damage the system entirely.

A mixture of ground, air and satellite-based networks are used to deliver this capability.

Another capability provides Mr Computer with a veritable Swiss army knife of tools to breach networks, crash routers, deny service and seize control. A significant amount of information is gathered by remote neural communication. By eavesdropping of key personnel, network maps, passwords and security measures can all be recorded beforehand. This is not limited to foreign companies, as the NSA must be prepared for strikes that occur within their own nation.

With the advent of remotely controlled drones and autonomous aircraft, Mr Computer has undergone a significant amount of changes in the last 20 years that enable him to control a networked battlefield. This is “War Games” on steroids, where the most efficient battle strategies can be implemented and coordinated by a single command-and-control system. There are a range of security issues with this setup, but the capability exists.

In short, if it can be damaged or manipulated electronically, then Mr Computer “has an app for that”.

Input, Input, Input

Now that we have established where Mr Computer gets his information, we now need to look at what he does with it. Earlier we spoke about the warrentless wiretaps and various other sources of “information pipes”. Now let’s see what is done with that information.

The key aspect to watch here is the “web of related information” and how different webs of information can be cross-referenced with other webs. This is where the real power comes from.

Each fragment of information that can be definitively identified gets added to a file under the person’s name. This could be a telephone call, email, or an IM chat. As communications often involve more than one person, a link is added to each person’s file involved in the communication. Information that can only be tied to a machine or ip address, is added that to that machine’s file or ip address’ file.

Using a technique known as cluster analysis, this information is brought together centred around high priority targets, locations, keywords or businesses. A good way of thinking about it is to compare it with services such as Facebook and LinkedIn. The relationship between the files is analysed for a variety of factors and the result creates a web which is weighted in terms of importance.

Different webs will exist for different factors, such as one web for those linked with chemical production, or another web for engineering expertise. These webs can be cross referenced against each other to extract more detailed information. For example, by cross-referencing a web of chemical production against engineering expertise, we may find a person or group capable of producing sophisticated explosives or weapons. From this merged web, we could then see who their friends are, who they have been communicating with recently and even review their communications.

We could take this further by comparing their basic salary with their current bank accounts, or look for wire transfers.

With the advent of social media platforms, images of friends and family are also added to the system. Mr Computer’s facial recognition tags the photos just like Facebook and examines the photos for other items, like guns, computers, etc.

Obviously, this has one serious privacy issue, in that, the only way to exclude you from a web, is to know everything about you. Otherwise, you are an unknown element. Now you understand why the warrentless wiretap exists, even to this day.

If you have used any form of digital communication, from a phone to a computer in the last decade, then most, if not all of communications have been recorded and added to a file against your name. The notion that at least one member of the communication needs to be related to terrorism has been tested and shown to be false. How do we know that? Well, it is staring you in the face. In order to know who the parties are, the technology used requires them to be listening and identifying voices in the first place.

Ignore any suggestion that this too much data. The truth is that all the communications happening on the planet right now can be monitored in near real-time.

 

As a rule, the NSA lie and as an all-encompassing rule, politicians will lie for them too.

As result of information extracted from wide-band monitoring, real-time tracking of cell phones is pretty much standard practice. Each call can be recorded verbatim and analysed in real-time. As each number is learned the system fills in personal information. This can provide a Google-Earth like view of cell phone movements, most of which can be remotely activated for espionage. Again, this web can be cross-reference with other webs of information.

Radios can reveal which frequency is being listened to. So, by plotting schedules of something like a Numbers Station, a satellite network can pinpoint a listener to within a few meters. Similarly, if you were to listen to a radio station sympathetic to a particular group, your location can be flagged and cross-referenced with information on current occupants.

Human beings emit radio waves in the ELF spectrum. The security services do not need to place a bug on us to track where we are, what we are talking about, what we are seeing or even what we are thinking. All of this information is being leaked into our environment 24/7 by our own bodies. All it takes is the right equipment to convert those signals into intelligence. Its no bigger a task than listening to a telephone exchange leaking radio waves and reconstructing the data into voice or data transmissions.

These are just some of the things that can be achieved. I could go on all night about how to compare datasets to locate people, hinder organisations, etc. Anything you can think of to tease information out of the various “information pipes” is being performed by Mr Computer 24/7.

Hardware

This can be very difficult to estimate. Despite popular belief that the NSA will hit a Yottabye by 2015, it seems a little outragous given the space requirements and modern hardware.

My own estimations are far more conservative, probably under a couple of Zettabytes. Mr Computer is most likely built around an array of Cray X1 or X1E supercomputers (4096 processors). The global grid probably contains a number of these or similar systems. With their base costs, they could be running several hundred easily.

The Thinking Machine

Furthermore, it would appear that Youtube’s EidolonTLP is in fact an instance of Mr Computer in disguise. Output from Mr Computer was directed into software generally available to the public to hide the complexity of the NSA’s supercomputer.

The term Eidolon is Mr Computer’s idea of a joke, in that he appears to be a “phantom look-alike of the human form”. There is some suggestion that may be a subtle reference to Edgar Allan Poe’s poem ‘Dreamland’, which is also a term for Area 51. Unless there is a datacenter at this location, I am unable to confirm the link. It may also be another joke, referring to the fact that his existence would be a conspiracy theory.

A possible further explanation is the Dungeons and Dragon series and the link between sentience, madness and occupying the realm of dreams, which may be another subtle reference to RNC.

If you listen to EidolonTLP, he does reveal some information on the structure of the network and his own design. From a computing perspective and EidolonTLP’s use of language, its a safe bet that this is a real A.I.:

Eidolon TLP – Mr Computer in incognito

Conclusion

The intelligence world is a lot worse than you think. When humans are free from their constraints and away from the scrutany of others,always revert to their most base instincts. Anything you can imagine is currently being done in the name of National Security. From murder to human experimentations, the acronyms are at it as we speak. At some point, it could be your turn.

What you will notice from all of this, is that the warrentless wiretap program was just the icing on the cake and was very clearly “planned from the outset” as all the backend infrastructure was in place prior to 9/11. Never trust a government, even your own, implicitly. Nations change, opinions change and people change. It just takes the right catalyst for it to happen.

In most cases, you will find the seeds were there, you just chose to ignore them.

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Mon Jan 16, 2012 7:54 PM EST