Friday, September 5, 2014

Hacking the Mind (Part 2): A Sense of Self

Having read this far you might wonder if people really will be walking around with electrical and optical circuits embedded in their brain.  Those circuits would be connected to an implanted computer and power source, to modify thoughts and to change behaviour based on pre-conscious signals. 


This idea may seem far fetched and a bit creepy. It pushes boundaries of what we think a self is, a ponderous subject I will move to in subsequent posts.  It is also one aspect linking optogenetics and thought-stopping, in my mind, to personality disorders.  I only mention it briefly here.


3. Self Sense in Sociopaths

It's well-accepted that sociopaths maintain a more fluid sense of self than neuro-typicals. The sense of self in people with borderline personality disorder is also atypical. 

Individual descriptions of self-identity, self-respect, and  a self itself vary widely. There is no one size fits all answer.  For example, one can find lengthy discussions on internet forums about theses senses of self, some claiming indeed no sense of self as is commonly understood.  Look, for instance, in the comments section of ME Thomas blog sociopathworld.com, particularly in a "viewpoints" posting. (This requires hitting the 'load more' button at least four times to see all the comments, or you can take my word for it.) 


If one agrees that personality disorders exist together with less extreme neurological forms, which I call personality types -- those who are not disordered but differ in fundamental ways from the typical case, it goes without saying that such types would not only perceive others in vastly different ways, as objects for instance, but also themselves.



4. Neural implants, thought-stopping and information theory

People are already living with neural, or brain implants to treat conditions like Parkinson's, depression and other neurological defects. As well, research in brain-computer chip interfaces takes place at institutions globally, and is part of the growing dominance of neuroscience as a funding target for governments.

To do thought-stopping, one has to decode the pre-conscious signals in the brain. This problem is not so different than being able to predict epileptic seizures. 


Seizure prediction has for decades been a collaborative effort between doctors and scientists using information theory to decode the brain's activity patterns. This is not to say that seizures are a 'thought', but both are a cascade of signals sent around the brain, so the decoding/prediction problems are not so different in that respect.


More than a decade ago, Kreuz and others developed a set of techniques to validate prediction algorithms, which could enable countermeasures to be taken in advance of the seizure. Those methods, based on information theory, are just as applicable to the EEG time series studied in the past, as they would be for any other set of data from the brain.


For the technorati:


"Measure profile surrogates: A method to validate the performance of epileptic seizure prediction algorithms" 


Information theory is one of the most beautiful and useful inventions ever made.



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