Brain Mapping, Uploading, and Immortality — Part II (Sebastian Seung)

“A great science fiction detective story” - Ian Watson, author of The Universal Machine

While Dmitry Itskov is hiring talent to make the instantiation of human consciousness in a synthetic humanoid body a reality (see Part I of this series), Sebastian Seung, a Professor of Computational Neuroscience at MIT is working out the details of mapping that consciousness.

Seung’s new book Connectome deals with the attempt to create a map of the neurons in a human brain and the connections between them.

The home page for his lab, with a list of publications and links to several of them, is here.

You can find an NPR article and a podcast of a reasonably good interview with Seung here.

Seung’s TED lecture is embedded below and below that is the video trailer for Connectome.

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Brain mapping and uploading feature in my novel Luck and Death at the Edge of the World, due out in May 2012.  Get details and download a free, previously published short story on my site here.

Blog posts are on the Home page.

Details about the novel are on the Luck & Death page.

The free story is on the My Writing page.

Brain Mapping, Uploading, and Immortality — Part I (Dmitry Itskov)

“A great science fiction detective story” - Ian Watson, author of The Universal Machine

Numerous news articles have recently devoted attention to a project launched by Russian media entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov to turn a familiar science fiction trope — the instantiation of human consciousness in a synthetic body — into a reality.  He conceives of this happening in stages:

• the development of a functional humanoid synthetic body manipulated through an effective brain-machine interface
• the development of such a body, but including a life-support system for a human brain, so that the synthetic body can replace an existing organic one, and
• the mapping of human consciousness such that it, rather than the physical brain, can be housed in the synthetic body

News coverage can be found on the web from Gizmodo, Wired’s Danger Room, CTV News, the Daily Mail, and other sources.

Itskov’s Global Future 2045 initiative can be found here.

A short video (2 minutes) of Itskov discussing the project is embedded immediately below, with a longer one (27 minutes) further down.

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One of the places this science fiction trope plays out is in my novel Luck and Death at the Edge of the World, due out in May 2012.  Get details and download a free, previously published short story on my main page here.

Blog posts are on the Home page.

Details about the novel are on the Luck & Death page.

The free story is on the My Writing page.

Report: Concerns About Military and Law Enforcement Applications of Neurology [full report + video]

News item here. Full report in pdf here.

Emotiv Unveils World’s First Brain-Controlled Video Gaming Headset

Read about it here.  If you really want, you can buy it here ($299.00 at the time of this post).

***  for demo video use this link***

Notion in Motion: Wireless Sensors Monitor Brain Waves on the Fly

Read it here.

Brain implant to control virtual hand and feel virtual objects

Article and more videos here.

Brain-computer interface plays music based on person’s mood

Read it here.

Stanford joins BrainGate team developing brain-computer interface to aid people with paralysis

Read it here.