March 06 2008 / by AlFin / In association with Future Blogger.net
Category: Other Year: 2008 Rating: 11
Cognitive Science has embarked upon the epic quest to understand
– and recreate – a functioning “human-equivalent” brain. With such
a daunting task of unprecedented magnitude, different teams of
scientists are approaching the problem from different directions.
A UC Berkeley team used an 
fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scanner to
learn how the visual cortex (occipital lobe) of the brain decodes
visual images.
Writing
in the journal Nature, the scientists, led by Dr Jack Gallant
from the University of California at Berkeley, said: “Our results
suggest that it may soon be possible to reconstruct a picture of a
person’s visual experience from measurements of brain activity
alone. Imagine a general brain-reading device that could
reconstruct a picture of a person’s visual experience at any moment
in time.”
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By Dick Pelletier
The mega-billion dollar Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI)
recently developed a new state-of-the-art facility – Janelia Farm Research
Campus – to learn how brain cells store and process
information. 
Today, biologists can only observe a cell’s activity by
indirectly analyzing chemicals it produces in response to stimulus.
But what if you could take a picture of a brain cell at the very
moment it recorded a thought? HHMI
researchers believe this worthy goal can be achieved and they are
rounding up some of the top researchers in the world to make it
happen.
Janelia Farm will provide its world-class science team with near
unlimited funds in a mostly unsupervised environment. “The
Institute’s core belief is that scientists who demonstrate
creativity and imagination make lasting contributions to benefit
humanity when they are given flexible, long-term support and the
freedom to explore,” said former HHMI
President Thomas Cech.
Attempts to capture memories, personality, and feelings –
elements that describe the mind – are not new. Researchers have
successfully transplanted worm brains, and a proposal is underway
to implant a trained mouse brain into a new mouse to see if habits
and traits can be transferred. But the host body is destroyed in
these experiments. (cont.)
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As the lines between human and biological entities blur, and sophisticated mind communication networks are formed, what could be the potential impacts on society? 
Imagine a world some point during the middle of the 21st century where virtual communities and direct mind to mind communication is possible at ever increasing speeds, Where human-machine entities can share information they choose at near the speed of light from any positions on the globe, imagine being able to understand almost as if it were your own cognitive processes how to read and write Japanese as someone from japan, or understand medicine or physics like a PhD graduate.
Difficult to imagine? Perhaps sounding a bit like the Borg from star-trek? well resistance is futile because the explosive nature of Nanotechnology, biotechnology, artificial intelligence and most importantly information transfer all point towards a future much more vast and incomprehensible than this.
Since the dawn of single celled organisms life has grown to complex networks of single cells to organisms to human cognition itself and each explosion is not only an explosion in the capability to manipulate and adapt to the environment, its also an explosion in consciousness itself. And best of all it functions on very simple evolutionary principles that hold to this day (albeit in a slightly more complex batch of interactions).
To imagine what i mean think of a petri dish called earth and place inside that petri dish one single celled organism, provide it with a suitable environment and watch it divide exponentially till copies of itself cover the whole petri dish. Well then what? (cont.)
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