Wolfgang Schwarz

Brain Prostheses

The world's first brain prothesis is interesting for several reasons:

Firstly, of course, it illustrates that when philosophers disagree about what would happen in a particular thought experiment, it is of very little help to carry out the experiment in reality: Will these rats become zombies?

Secondly, they are creating a hippocampus prosthesis. I guess they will also try what happens if that prosthesis is stimulated from the outside. There is a slight chance that this will have considerable effects on learning. I don't expect that we might one day learn just by stimulating the prosthesis. But we might learn much more easily by doing so.

Thirdly, the way the prosthesis works shows that we might be able to create brain prostheses without having a clue about how the brain works:

No one understands how the hippocampus encodes information. So the team simply copied its behaviour. Slices of rat hippocampus were stimulated with electrical signals, millions of times over, until they could be sure which electrical input produces a corresponding output. Putting the information from various slices together gave the team a mathematical model of the entire hippocampus.