Brain implants
Our expert has been Dr Timothy Constandinou – Reader in Neural Microsystems at Imperial College London and Deputy Director of the Centre for Bio-inspired Technology.
A recently completed (2018) project is this one about “Enabling Technologies for Sensory Feedback in Next-Generation Assistive Devices” (3 min read)
When this reading list was last updated (September 2018) Tim was most excited about the ENGINI project “to make mm-sized neural implant technology”
This is his World Economic Forum talk about it
His colleague Ian Williams suggested we check out Max Jair Ortiz Catalan who did this TED talk about his work on osseointegration and neural interfaces
Other current developments/applications
Restoring Active Memory (RAM)
restoring memory – US military development
and “fixing” mood
And here’s an extraordinary video we all watched showing how implants can help with Parkinson’s Disease (from back in 2012).
DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) have made some other big advances recently.
In fact the DARPA site is kind of extraordinary – given that they’re releasing public info about some of the hugely advanced things they’re working on, the mind boggles as to what they’re keeping secret.
This is a great article about the ethics of enhancing yourself with brain implants with lots of Rabbit Hole links and including some nice quotes and links to the work of Anders Sandberg – who was also one of our experts. He’s a transhumanist and a reader at Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute and Jon interviewed him for a podcast.
Interview/assessment of controversial neuroscientist Theodore Berger who claims to have ‘cracked the code’ that will allow implants to “restore the ability to create long-term memories”.
And of course you can learn Kung Fu.
