Treating the brain like a black box, here are some ideas on places where technology might be able to (or has already been proven to) interface with the brain:
INPUTS
- Somatosensory system: receptors for touch, heat, pain, and proprioception; mechanical devices that touch or move your body; heaters; electrodes in/on the skin; things that can be eaten or swallowed; transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulators (TENS) for blocking pain; electro-muscle stimulation (EMS) for causing muscle contraction; percutaneous tibial nerve stimulation (PTNS);
- Smell: “smell printers” that mix chemicals on the fly.
- Taste: i don’t remember reading anything about technology interfacing with taste buds, except Trisenx, who also do smell printers
- Hearing: cochlear implants, headphones, or any other device that produces the perception of sound
- Vision: optical illusions, computer displays, headsets, laser beamed directly onto the retina, retinal implants
- Balance: mechanical devices that touch or move your body
- sensory substitution: training parts of one sensory pathway to replace another
- neural implants: direct input into the brain; deep brain stimulation (brain pacemakers); vagus nerve stimulation (VNS);
- noninvasive electrical stimulation: transcranial magnetic stimulation (TNS): creates electrical eddy currents in the brain; cranial electrotherapy stimulation (CES): low intensity electrical current used to treat anxiety, depression, etc; transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS): electrodes placed on scalp to modulate, but not stimulate, brain activity
This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009 at 11:13 am and is filed under neuroscience, research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
One Comment
Nice work!
1. somatosensory: first thing to mind..transdermal patches….deliver feel good chemicals…religious pharmacology…black market for halucinogens? designer drugs that are not illegal?
dermal receivers. detect areas of blood flow or below baseline blood flow…application? for meditation? therapy?
2. hearing: i love sound. cross cultures….20,000 hz to 20 hz……Headphones that create audible sound from those EM waves that are subacoustic or ultrasonic….application: novelty, hear your pets and wild animals speak…know when they are laughing and you can’t “hear” them
3. olfactory!! the only sense that doesn’t need to be processed by the thalamus before having a taste of cortical processing…direct link to hippocampus…memory of smell….smell of memory
odor detector that coded emotion/mood…application: fire prevention; security at airports? smell bomb materials?
Enhance sense of smell by activating dormant genes…we have over 300 olfactory genes that are dormant!!! lets wake them up
4. taste: sodium and ca2 channels code sweet, bitter, sour…all of them are simple channels…film placed over tongue…powers ipod??
initial thoughts
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