look, i’m thinking
As has been shown, our awareness of our planet, our ecosystem, our society, our behaviour etc. changed dramatically from the moment we were able to observe Mother Earth from the outside, from space. We could suddenly link what we experienced ‘down here’ with what we saw from ‘up there’. Our outer and inner perspective suddenly became linked as we were looking at the bigger pictures of ourselves from outer space. It are these kinds of feedback loops which propell human insight forward.
Norbert Wiener, father of cybernetics, recognized such feedback loops as core to all intelligent systems. His findings formalized the notion of feedback and influenced a wide variety of fields ranging from engineering to computer science, from biology and philosophy to social sciences looking at the organization of society.
In his latest TED talk, neuroscientist and inventor Christopher deCharms shows how his company Omneuron is using advanced fMRI technologies to look at the happenings inside our brain in real time, in 3D. The sheer possibility of looking at what we think, feel, do ‘up there’, opens up a whole new era of discovery and remediation (e.g. chronic pain control). Psychiatry, pharmaceuticals, surgery were three major categories of treatment. Now there is a fourth. Check out the video here.
Advances in neurofeedback technologies and treatments have already shown some of the ways in which increased awareness of our brains’ activities can be used to enhance training, revalidation and for other purposes as well (e.g. gaming).
Think ahead. Imaging techniques are advancing rapidly and molecular imaging is all the hype now. Think about zooming in from brain to brain area to cell level. Which new pathways does this open up?
Image courtesy of the University of Oxford’s FMRIB Centre
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January 9th, 2009 at 19:58
[...] recently reported on some amazing new discoveries using advanced fMRI technologies (see also here). The team of Yukiyasu Kamitani at Japan’s ATR’s Computational Neuroscience [...]