LIFESITE/ Emily Mangiaracina-
The U.S. government just boosted research efforts to map the human brain, which observers note will allow scientists to “directly alter neural function using digital devices,” a transhumanist achievement.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently launched “BRAIN 2.0” (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnology), giving $600 million in fresh funding to accelerate and expand a program launched in 2014 under the Obama administration. The initiative aims to map our 86 billion neurons and understand “how they’re different,” and how they’re organized, according to Stat News.
The project’s most immediate aims are therapeutic, with ongoing efforts to digitally generate speech from the totally paralyzed, for example, or alleviate severe depression with electrical jolts. But, as Obama pointed out during BRAIN’s unveiling, research opens the possibility to unexpected inventions: “The Apollo project that put man on the moon gave us, eventually, CAT scans,” he noted at the time.
BRAIN’s scope includes projects under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), including a program to develop an implantable neural interface to provide “data transfer” “between the brain and the digital world,” essentially allowing electronic “mind reading” as well as “mind control” of electronics.
Justin Sanchez, the director of DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office, had predicted that brain interface technology will not be limited to therapeutic use for those suffering from impairments, but will change day-to-day living for society as a whole.
“We’ve laid the groundwork for a future in which advanced brain interface technologies will transform how people live and work,” Sanchez noted as DARPA awarded grants in 2017 to help develop “an implantable system able to provide precision communication between the brain and the digital world.”
Elon Musk, who is developing a Brain Computer Interface (BCI) implant called Neuralink, has gone so far as to predict in 2020 that implant usage would expand to allow the general population to “telepathically” communicate with each other within “five to 10 years” if progress went smoothly. Continue reading…
