Author: Martins NRB1,2, Angelica A3, Chakravarthy K4,5, Svidinenko Y6, Boehm FJ7, Opris I8,9, Lebedev MA10,11,12, Swan M13, Garan SA1,2, Rosenfeld JV14,15,16,17, Hogg T18, Freitas RA Jr18
Affiliation:
1Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, United States.
2Center for Research and Education on Aging (CREA), University of California, Berkeley and LBNL, Berkeley, CA, United States.
3Kurzweil Technologies, Newton, MA, United States.
4UC San Diego Health Science, San Diego, CA, United States.
5VA San Diego Healthcare System, San Diego, CA, United States.
6Nanobot Medical Animation Studio, San Diego, CA, United States.
7NanoApps Medical, Inc., Vancouver, BC, Canada.
8Miami Project to Cure Paralysis, University of Miami, Miami, FL, United States.
9Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL, United States.
10Center for Neuroengineering, Duke University, Durham, NC, United States.
11Center for Bioelectric Interfaces of the Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience of the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia.
12Department of Information and Internet Technologies of Digital Health Institute, I.M. Sechenov First Moscow State Medical University, Moscow, Russia.
13Department of Philosophy, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, United States.
14Monash Institute of Medical Engineering, Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia.
15Department of Neurosurgery, Alfred Hospital, Melbourne, VIC, Australia.
16Department of Surgery, Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia.
17Department of Surgery, F. Edward Hébert School of Medicine, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, Bethesda, MD, United States.
18Institute for Molecular Manufacturing, Palo Alto, CA, United States.
Conference/Journal: Front Neurosci.
Date published: 2019 Mar 29
Other:
Volume ID: 13 , Pages: 112 , Special Notes: doi: 10.3389/fnins.2019.00112. eCollection 2019. , Word Count: 343
The Internet comprises a decentralized global system that serves humanity's collective effort to generate, process, and store data, most of which is handled by the rapidly expanding cloud. A stable, secure, real-time system may allow for interfacing the cloud with the human brain. One promising strategy for enabling such a system, denoted here as a "human brain/cloud interface" ("B/CI"), would be based on technologies referred to here as "neuralnanorobotics." Future neuralnanorobotics technologies are anticipated to facilitate accurate diagnoses and eventual cures for the ∼400 conditions that affect the human brain. Neuralnanorobotics may also enable a B/CI with controlled connectivity between neural activity and external data storage and processing, via the direct monitoring of the brain's ∼86 × 109 neurons and ∼2 × 1014 synapses. Subsequent to navigating the human vasculature, three species of neuralnanorobots (endoneurobots, gliabots, and synaptobots) could traverse the blood-brain barrier (BBB), enter the brain parenchyma, ingress into individual human brain cells, and autoposition themselves at the axon initial segments of neurons (endoneurobots), within glial cells (gliabots), and in intimate proximity to synapses (synaptobots). They would then wirelessly transmit up to ∼6 × 1016 bits per second of synaptically processed and encoded human-brain electrical information via auxiliary nanorobotic fiber optics (30 cm3) with the capacity to handle up to 1018 bits/sec and provide rapid data transfer to a cloud based supercomputer for real-time brain-state monitoring and data extraction. A neuralnanorobotically enabled human B/CI might serve as a personalized conduit, allowing persons to obtain direct, instantaneous access to virtually any facet of cumulative human knowledge. Other anticipated applications include myriad opportunities to improve education, intelligence, entertainment, traveling, and other interactive experiences. A specialized application might be the capacity to engage in fully immersive experiential/sensory experiences, including what is referred to here as "transparent shadowing" (TS). Through TS, individuals might experience episodic segments of the lives of other willing participants (locally or remote) to, hopefully, encourage and inspire improved understanding and tolerance among all members of the human family.
KEYWORDS: brain-computer interface; brain-machine interface; brain-to-brain interface; brain/cloud interface; nanomedicine; neuralnanorobotics; neuralnanorobots; transparent shadowing
PMID: 30983948 PMCID: PMC6450227 DOI: 10.3389/fnins.2019.00112
