Could the brain run a program?

[Warpspeed13]

I forget where I saw this I think it was the Halo series with the Cortana AI but basically a program used a human brain for processing information and running itself. Would it be possible to have a program running on a human brain? Would the principle be similer to IBMs' TrueNorth chip? http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/...res-1-million-neurons-5-4-billion-transistors

 

[Simon Bridge]

What makes you think the brain is not running a program right now?

 

[Chronos]

The brain is an excellent multitasker. You can breathe, enjoy an elevated heart rate, secrete adrenaline, compose music, scream and run for your life while being chased by a predator - all at the same time. Wiring the thing for more mundane purposes is a bigger challenge.

 

[Warpspeed13]

What makes you think the brain is not running a program right now?

Your kind of missing the point of the question. Actually your answer wasn't even technically related.

 

[HallsofIvy]

That's because the point of your question is not at all clear! What do YOU mean by "the brain running a program"? What do you mean by "running a program"?

 

[Warpspeed13]

What I mean is could the brain be harnessed as a computer of sorts to run an os or other computer programs.

 

[adjacent]

What I mean is could the brain be harnessed as a computer of sorts to run an os or other computer programs.

Hahah, I don't think we can run windows in our brain. Our brain is way better than a computer. We may not store information like a computer but the way we utilise the information is far more sophisticated.

 

[RonL]

What I mean is could the brain be harnessed as a computer of sorts to run an os or other computer programs.

Sorry I did not take time to do the search, look up 60 minutes.com, they aired a couple of shows that had limbs of people being moved by brain power where sensors were embedded in the skull, in such fashion that the electrical functions of certain lobes of the brain activated circuits in artificial limbs.

IIRC one was a Bluetooth operation (remote) and one was a arm attached to the body.

I would say yes to your question, technology is closing the gap in artificial intelligence where the physical body and mind is involved with electrical and mechanical actions.

 

[phinds]

Sorry I did not take time to do the search, look up 60 minutes.com, they aired a couple of shows that had limbs of people being moved by brain power where sensors were embedded in the skull, in such fashion that the electrical functions of certain lobes of the brain activated circuits in artificial limbs.

IIRC one was a Bluetooth operation (remote) and one was a arm attached to the body.

I would say yes to your question, technology is closing the gap in artificial intelligence where the physical body and mind is involved with electrical and mechanical actions.

What you are talking about is WAY different than "running a program". The brain just doesn't work in the necessarily linear fashion that a computer does. The brain is not capable of running what is currently considered a computer program. Perhaps in the future, when "neural network" type computers have evolved enormously, the programming will have changed enough that the answer will be yes, but not at present.

 

[RonL]

What you are talking about is WAY different than "running a program". The brain just doesn't work in the necessarily linear fashion that a computer does. The brain is not capable of running what is currently considered a computer program. Perhaps in the future, when "neural network" type computers have evolved enormously, the programming will have changed enough that the answer will be yes, but not at present.

As sole owner of the Brooklyn Bridge guess I'll wait to see some other post, before conceding my position

 

[Simon Bridge]

What makes you think the brain is not running a program right now?

Your kind of missing the point of the question. Actually your answer wasn't even technically related.

If you want me to get the point, you'll have to explain what it is ;)

From where I sit, it is directly to the point that I want to make, vis: you have not said what you mean by a "computer program" or what you mean by "running a program". Without knowing this, it is not possible to answer your question. By telling me why you think your brain is not running a program right now, you would have explained what you mean in a way that I can understand. Better: by exploring that question, you would have gained some insights into computers and the brain. But you chose not to :(

For instance - AI researchers sometimes talk about a person's personality as being a computer program or a collection of programs running on a brain. Presumably you do not count your personality as software. So what do you count as software, and how would you be able to tell if it was running?

I have a computer program that does addition. I can also do addition in my head. Is my brain running a computer program when I am doing mental arithmetic? The input and output are the same after all. I can even do my mental arithmetic using the same series of steps that the computer uses, does that help?

What I mean is could the brain be harnessed as a computer of sorts to run an os or other computer programs.

Again - what do you mean by "harnessed as a computer"?
Is "thinking" the same "being harnessed as a computer"? If not, then how is it different?
Why wouldn't the human personality and subconscious be considered an OS?

You seem to be thinking in terms of the kind of software you may run on a digital computer like the one I'm using to type this out. Is that correct? In which case, you are asking if non-native software could be made to run on a brain (still need to say what you mean by "run"... how would you tell if, say, windows, was successfully installed and running?)

So let's put it another way: is the human brain "Turing complete"?

If "yes" then, in principle, the brain can be used to simulate any other computer ... including the one I'm typing at. In which case, it can run programs written for this computer inside the simulation of this computer. That would involve constructing some sort of virtual machine and I suspect a brain would be very slow at the kinds of task that a digital computer is designed to do.

I know I can get my brain to run very simple programs quite easily because I once built a computer and I used to troubleshoot it's software by imagining, in my brain, step-by-step what goes on inside the computer. This kind of visualization is the form that a virtual machine would take.

You may be thinking of wiring someone up with a keyboard and a monitor ... that works too because you would need some sort of interface to mediate between the electronic HUD's and the person. We are doing that right now - I type some stuff into a keyboard in order to run a complicated stimulus-response program on your brain, and I get the output back via a monitor.

Basically I am trying to get you to think in a scientific way about the question you just asked - in accordance with the policies of the forums.

 

[Jarvis323]

So let's put it another way: is the human brain "Turing complete"?

I don't think the brain is Turing Complete simply because we have a finite amount of brain matter to use as storage. If a human being were immortal and had an unbounded amount of paper and pencil, and that paper and pencil were also immortal, then and only then, would we have the physical capability of being Turing complete ( theoretically, but you know we would screw it up by making stupid mistakes anyways) .

If "yes" then, in principle, the brain can be used to simulate any other computer ... including the one I'm typing at. In which case, it can run programs written for this computer inside the simulation of this computer. That would involve constructing some sort of virtual machine and I suspect a brain would be very slow at the kinds of task that a digital computer is designed to do.

The human brain, I think, works very differently than digital computers do. However, they also do somehow do calculations at astonishing rates that we cannot easily match, if at all, with digital computers. But we don't have conscious control over all of what our brain does. Mostly our conscious may just be a by-product of what our brains do, rather than an kind of controlling mechanism. But how we achieve astonishingly fast calculations memory access, to my knowledge, is not fully understood, but we know that it is very different than how digital computers work.

I know I can get my brain to run very simple programs quite easily because I once built a computer and I used to troubleshoot it's software by imagining, in my brain, step-by-step what goes on inside the computer. This kind of visualization is the form that a virtual machine would take.

That sounds like a bunch of BS to me. A virtual machine is just software, written using the same instructions that the software that runs on it uses. And you certainly do not trouble shoot software by working out step by step what goes on in the computer in your head. Our efforts as computer programmers are made fruitful by abstracting away what actually goes on in the computer making high level logical constructs that can be translated into a form the CPU can process. And this is in a way similar to how our brains work. We, our consciousness, is very abstracted from the low level workings of our brains.

You may be thinking of wiring someone up with a keyboard and a monitor ... that works too because you would need some sort of interface to mediate between the electronic HUD's and the person. We are doing that right now - I type some stuff into a keyboard in order to run a complicated stimulus-response program on your brain, and I get the output back via a monitor.

Right, but you are not your brain. Your bumbling typing and rambling is far removed from the technical abilities of the brain that facilitates it. What is to be contemplated is whether or not the brain could be re purposed / accessed directly to tap into it's true technical power. I can't say for certain whether this is possible in some form or another, but I can say that it definitely wouldn't be something that you could come up or even understand based on some off the cuff pondering and speculation.

Basically I am trying to get you to think in a scientific way about the question you just asked - in accordance with the policies of the forums.

Science is a process, not a way of thinking. The question is whether or not the human brain can be programmed to do a general computation, deliberately by a conscious human being. The science you would do to probe this question is not possible on this discussion forum. Here, the question is posed merely for speculation and there is really no other way to address it, unless you can find some scientific research to cite..

 

[gaba]

The fact that coders can think the logic behind the program they're writing, from my point of view means they're already running their program in their head, talking of statements such as 'if' and 'else'.
However, the human brain has definitely a different architecture from silicon cpus, in that way I think it would be improbable for a human brain to run a program already compiled. That would require a standard acknowledgment of universal signals to use the interface..brain drivers or what we still call 'machine code' in computer science.

 

[Simon Bridge]

I don't think the brain is Turing Complete simply because we have a finite amount of brain matter to use as storage. If a human being were immortal and had an unbounded amount of paper and pencil, and that paper and pencil were also immortal, then and only then, would we have the physical capability of being Turing complete ( theoretically, but you know we would screw it up by making stupid mistakes anyways) .

I see this argument a lot.

Consider: the human brain is not restricted by it's physical size for storage - we can and do use peripheral devices for storage. Does that not count?

If it does not, then that would invalidate pretty much any real-world Turing machine from being complete and "Turing completeness" would be impossible outside mathematical abstractions.

If it did then the remaining restriction is the "infinite time" one - which I think is currently an open question in cosmology ... the answer thus rests on how pedantically fine we want to cut that hair ;)

But that aside - you'll see that I put "Turing complete" in scare quotes... and for exactly the reason you brought up. But notice how just considering that rewording of the original question leads in all kinds of rewarding directions?

The brain is clearly powerful enough to run a tic-tac-toe program, or how about a nice game of chess? But does that count as "running a program" per post #1?
We won't know unless Warpspeed13 gets back to us.

 

[IVaN_000]

The brain is an excellent multitasker. You can breathe, enjoy an elevated heart rate, secrete adrenaline, compose music, scream and run for your life while being chased by a predator - all at the same time. Wiring the thing for more mundane purposes is a bigger challenge.

That's true. I always compose music while beeing chased by predators. :tongue:

 

[Simon Bridge]

That's true. I always compose music while beeing chased by predators. :tongue:

Hey - that's what I do ... chases are more fun with a sound track.
Also works for running from bees ;)
Welcome to PF.

 

[.Scott]

What I mean is could the brain be harnessed as a computer of sorts to run an os or other computer programs.

Well, I can "run" computer code myself - and often do to discover why a block of code isn't working as I expected it to.

However, I am 7 or 8 orders of magnitude slower at doing that than a computer. I am also more error prone and a lot less tolerant of boredom. Digital computers do a better job running an OS that the human brain.

Of course, there are things that mammal brains can do that current digital computers and software applications cannot.

The notion of a "device" being able to process information in certain ways and doing it much better than a general purpose digital computer is not unusual. A few decades ago, the were specialized processors for performing floating point operations - and graphic processors are in common use. Perhaps we will soon have quantum information processors.

To make best use of these devices, a regular digital computer is provided as a front end. You still want a user interface (mouse, keyboard, etc) and you probably want a connection to local network or the internet - and the regular computer provides these services. It can also store up problem sets for the specialized computing device to keep it busy.

Say we wanted to harness the functionality of a cerebellum, we might take one from a suitable rodent, attempt to keep it nourished and healthy for at least a few days, hook it up with electrodes for both input and output to a computer, and fire up the computer. The technology is certainly available on the computer end. I'll let the biologists among us decide whether the wet end could be done.

 

[Goodies]

Coming from a heavy computing background and little in hard sciences, I have a relatively good understanding of computer systems and a relatively mediocre understanding of how the brain works. However, I'll make an attempt. A computer program runs because there is an agreed-upon set of instructions (Machine language) that the CPU analyzes and the operating system interprets in a predefined way. As for if the brain can run a program, I'm not quite sure what you mean. A computer program? Certainly not. However, synapses (1's and 0's) occur and the hardware (various structures of the brain) interpret these impulses in a predefined way. It's an interesting question.

 

[Warpspeed13]

That's a better way of putting it what I mean is if you could temporarily isolate a synapsis and make it fire could it be harnessed as a sort of individual core in a processor to run electronics.

 

[Simon Bridge]

That's a better way of putting it what I mean is if you could temporarily isolate a synapsis and make it fire could it be harnessed as a sort of individual core in a processor to run electronics.

... an individual synapse is not complicated enough to be used as an "individual core" in a multicore processor - no.
But I'm guessing you figured that out ;)

More to your original point:
You could, in principle, build such a core out of biological components that include synapses. But "synapses" is not the same thing as "brain".

You could replace a CPU in a computer with a human brain, say, provided the necessary interfaces are available. This begs the question though - what would these interfaces be like? We have them already - keyboard and monitor and mouse ... the simplest action on a computer is an interaction betweenm the machine and the human. Maybe you are thinking maybe the HIDs we currently use could be replaced by direct wires to the brain? Maybe. Or maybe you are thinking of something like in Lexx, where a giant spacecraft has a number of distinct brains as the central computer?

But I hope you can see how difficult it is to phrase meaningful questions in this area.

 

[Warpspeed13]

Ya it's kind of like like the question equivalent of making a wish with a genii. I'm guessing that to word this one perfectly I would have had to know enough about the topic that I would have known the answer already. However I did think of something that would make things even more complicated. If the brain actually turns out to be quantum in nature with further research their could be an arbitrary number of values rather than just 1 or 0 that the neuron appears to give us.

 

[Medicol]

It looks promising, but interception can't be done now yet; that is, one can't get a transmitted signal's data of the host's brain, which wants to say "I love you", for example ? Human brain is seriously more powerful in processing complex data than anything else on earth. "I think therefore things work" seems to define who most of illusionists are; this may be part of first inclusive signs of psychotic disorders but ideas of the OP to make this work is also really helpful in psychology and psychiatry areas to such patients as well in the future. Thanks.(sleep)

 

[Ryan_m_b]

I don't have great knowledge of computer programming but according to some friends of mine when I asked this question the brain already can run a program (sort of). If you're writing/reading code you can imagine it to work through if it makes sense and how it would work. So in a small way you are running the code.

But as for isolating a section of one's brain and having it operate as some sort of internal computer: no there's no way of doing this. We could speculate about future technology but that's fruitless and not the purpose of this forum. Brain-computer interfaces are an active area of research and a very promising one for the treatment of various medical conditions, but they don't allow you to run programs with you mind or anything like that. Rather they are exactly what they say on the tin: an interface. In the same way that a keyboard and mouse allows you to give instructions to a computer so could a BCI. The applications for disabled patients are obvious.

On a slightly different note building a computer out of neurons is possible and is also an area of research. Hybrots are hybrid robots that consist of mechanical parts controlled by a culture of neurons (usually rat).

 

[Warpspeed13]

Hmm I wonder, in this experiment http://www.gizmag.com/infrared-sensory-input-rats/26279/ researchers were able to hook up an infra red camera to the section of a rats brain that detects the impulses from its whiskers allowing it to "see" in infra red without loss of whisker functionality. Since were the only creature that we know of capable of the type of languages we use, and we have the ability to learn new languages I wonder what would happen if you just started tapping out binary information into the language cortex of the brain? It seems like the brain should rather quickly pick up the new language.

 

[Ryan_m_b]

Hmm I wonder, in this experiment http://www.gizmag.com/infrared-sensory-input-rats/26279/ researchers were able to hook up an infra red camera to the section of a rats brain that detects the impulses from its whiskers allowing it to "see" in infra red without loss of whisker functionality.

Please try to post primary sources where possible and necessary, news articles are often a source of misinformation. The original article is:

Perceiving invisible light through a somatosensory cortical prosthesis
Eric E. Thomson, Rafael Carra & Miguel A.L. Nicolelis
Nature Communications 4, Article number: 1482
Received 24 August 2012 Accepted 15 January 2013 Published 12 February 2013
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v4/n2/full/ncomms2497.html

The research is quite interesting.

Since were the only creature that we know of capable of the type of languages we use, and we have the ability to learn new languages I wonder what would happen if you just started tapping out binary information into the language cortex of the brain? It seems like the brain should rather quickly pick up the new language.

Our use of language is different to others but we're not the only organisms with language, not by far. Aside from that I'm not sure what you think this would accomplish. Humans can already learn binary, it really wouldn't be hard to train yourself to translate binary into a normal language. Might be difficult to read but not impossible.

As I understand it from the OP he's talking about somehow getting a human brain to run a computer program like a computer does. So in your head you could call up an operating system and presumably run all sorts of useful applications. There's no foreseeable way how this could naturally occur. It could be speculated that cortical prosthetics could somehow allow this if sensory implants (like the one described in this paper) were used to impart sights/sounds and a BCI that interprets signals to control something (like a computer mouse or robotic arm which are common research goals) was used to give instructions, and both of these things are linked to a computer that runs programs. Whilst that seems physically possible the engineering of such a device is not currently possible. It also begs the question of what practical advantage this has over current interfaces.

 

[.Scott]

If the brain actually turns out to be quantum in nature with further research their could be an arbitrary number of values rather than just 1 or 0 that the neuron appears to give us.

A quantum information processor would not be like a regular computer. Almost all of the apps you run now, will still be run on classical computers even if QM processors are perfected and made free.
Instead, a regular digital computer would "task" the QM processor.
The notion that the human brain uses QM information processing (which I subscribe to) does not imply that most of the brain uses QM processing. Most of what the brain does is best done with digital processing - and the sort of signalling that is commonly seen among neurons and along axons.

As I understand it from the OP he's talking about somehow getting a human brain to run a computer program like a computer does.

You were replying to Warpspeed13, the OP.

 

[Warpspeed13]

Lol. Ya I understand that it's not currently possible. What I mean rather than simply know binary, to intuitively know it, to know it without thinking about it. The idea is that maybe since binary is a language that can be used to relay information in an understandable format that the brain would eventually start to understand information being given to it by the chip.

 

[DiracPool]

Would it be possible to have a program running on a human brain?

In the traditional computer science sense, the answer is no. The idea of the brain as a computer goes way back to the seminal paper by McCulloch and Pitts, which was instrumental in generating the later failed neural network craze of the 80's and early 90's.

McCulloch, W. and Pitts, W. (1943). A logical calculus of the ideas immanent in nervous activity. Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics, 5:115 - 133.

Even today, the smoke of that model hasn't seemed to totally clear yet, but the brain does not work like a digital computer, and neurons are not the equivalent of Boolean logic gates.

Neurons are fundamentally "integrate and fire" elements. They sum inputs over sometimes tens of thousands of synapses, some excitatory, some inhibitory, some modulatory, and they respond to that summed input by issuing a related pulse frequency. Importantly, there is NO binary code in this pulse frequency. It is simply a measure of the gross summed inputs on the cells dendrites.

The mammalian cortex is partitioned into a hierarchical geography of nested functional regions. These regions communicate with one another through a sophisticated network of similarly scale free and small-world networked fiber tracks. The communication between one region and another is accomplished through burst sequences of action potentials from one region to another. These burst sequences take the form of a collective "pulse density" of action potentials from one region to another, not individual processing through Boolean type logic in individual neurons.

What you see at every node of integration in the cortex is a pulse density to wave conversion in the target region that is inherently analog in nature, and that serves, in turn, to influence other local cortical regions, or nodes, and importantly, to feedback on the projection region. This nonlinear feedback serves to place the target cortex into a basin of attraction whereby the near limit cycle attractor that emerges from the collective activity of hundreds of million of neurons is the "answer" or the percept of the input.

This is quite unlike how a computer works and subsequently you cannot enter some binary code into the brain and think it would do anything because the "hardware" of the brain is not equipped to process that type of program. The programs that make the brain run are raw sensory-motor experience, which are stored in the brain in a fundamentally different fashion that computer programs.

 

[Simon Bridge]

Ya it's kind of like like the question equivalent of making a wish with a genii. I'm guessing that to word this one perfectly I would have had to know enough about the topic that I would have known the answer already.

Only you don't need perfect wording - you just need to express your ideas somewhat clearly. There are enough people skilled at figuring out what people are trying to ask that one of us will get it.

However, it looks like you are trying to do science by analogy - this won't work.
The kind of question you appear to be trying to ask is not something you can do from a pop-science perspective.

However I did think of something that would make things even more complicated. If the brain actually turns out to be quantum in nature with further research their could be an arbitrary number of values rather than just 1 or 0 that the neuron appears to give us.

1. the brain is already "quantum in nature" - everything is ;)
2. magnetic fields can have more than two states to, but we use them in digital computers - so that is not a restriction.

Quantum computing is a totally different kettle of piranhas though.
Stick to simpler models until you have a better understanding of the field.

Lol. Ya I understand that it's not currently possible. What I mean rather than simply know binary, to intuitively know it, to know it without thinking about it.

Yes - humans can do that already. It just takes a lot of practice.
Put it another way - how would you tell the difference between knowing binary "intuitively without thinking about it" and being so highly skilled and practiced?

The idea is that maybe since binary is a language that can be used to relay information in an understandable format that the brain would eventually start to understand information being given to it by the chip.

The brain can already understand the information given to it by chips - provided the appropriate technology is used to make the interface.

You are thinking of the post #1 "using nurons to store data" article?
i.e. digital data is stored in a brain like the article suggests and the brain in question understands the data ... ?

As described, that's a "no". To get, say, send a jpeg to a brain in a machine retreavable way and the person whose brain it is perhaps gets a memory of seeing the picture represented by the jpeg would require a lot more work. We'd need to know how the brain stores and retreives imagery as memories - the "chip" would have to do a lot more work directly fitting the image into the visual memory (though I think there is some work in this area for making prosthetics for blind people.)

The current approach is simply to render the jpeg on a screen, and the person looks at it.
The "chip-based" approach I think you are thinking of would basically do the same thing but bypass the eyes and optic nerve.

Once done - the memory image and the jpeg will be different things.

 

[phinds]

Lol. Ya I understand that it's not currently possible. What I mean rather than simply know binary, to intuitively know it, to know it without thinking about it. The idea is that maybe since binary is a language that can be used to relay information in an understandable format that the brain would eventually start to understand information being given to it by the chip.

Binary is, in and of itself, utterly meaningless, so your concept makes no sense to me. Binary is associated with various meanings as arbitrary conventions exactly as are the words in ANY language (well, aside from Onomatopoeia such as "hiss" which are only somewhat arbitrary).

 

[Simon Bridge]

Technically "binary" is not a language - it's more like the pen-strokes that can be combined to make letters or pictures and so on ... the machine language of a CPU is usually written in binary inside the machine architecture, and different machines have different machine languages.

I don't think anyone expects the machine language of a brain would to be written in anything like binary inside the brain "architecture" or even for it to be written in any way similar to the machine language of a digital CPU.

But I think I can kinda see what OP is trying to get at here.
It links back to the experiment in the first post: if you used a brain to store some data in the manner of that experiment, is it in principle possible for the brain's owner to subsequently understand the data thus stored. i.e. could data be added to someone's conscious mind bypassing the usual external sensors?

@Warpspeed13:
Am I close?

 

[phinds]

But I think I can kinda see what OP is trying to get at here.
It links back to the experiment in the first post: if you used a brain to store some data in the manner of that experiment, is it in principle possible for the brain's owner to subsequently understand the data thus stored. i.e. could data be added to someone's conscious mind bypassing the usual external sensors?

Sure. That's a reasonable question. BUT ... my point is that assuming that such information should be stored in binary seems like a bad idea. I think that just complicates the retrieval when you are talking about something as associative as the brain. We already HAVE a mechanism (even if we have no understanding of the details) for storing words, images, sounds, etc. Why complicate things by throwing "binary" into the mix?

 

[Simon Bridge]

This is fair - though I suspect "binary" is being used here in terms of "machine language" ... it would be reasonable to bypass the brain's standard IO by using the brains machine language (whatever that turns out to be: probably not binary) to get data into the brain "directly", so to speak, in an owner-retrievable format.

This would have a valid use in the cases where the brain's stdio is not working well - maybe the person is Blind?
Ten it would be useful to be able to get visual information into their brains in a way that bypasses whatever is malfunctioning in their visual system.

But I really need confirmation from OP before continuing on this line.
I don't know for sure that this is what is intended since it is somewhat besides the initial wording.

 

[Warpspeed13]

Ya you've pretty much got it but I was thinking since their is very little understanding of the brains io it might be faster to make the brain adapt to the machine, and eventually (assuming the adaptability seen in the rat experiment extends this far) have the brain convert the signals to its own format on the fly. That way functional prototypes of things such as bionic limbs that provide tactile feedback could be fast tracked since their would be no need to fully understand the brains io to design them.

 

[phinds]

Ya you've pretty much got it but I was thinking since their is very little understanding of the brains io it might be faster to make the brain adapt to the machine, and eventually (assuming the adaptability seen in the rat experiment extends this far) have the brain convert the signals to its own format on the fly. That way functional prototypes of things such as bionic limbs that provide tactile feedback could be fast tracked since their would be no need to fully understand the brains io to design them.

Without that understanding of the brain, how would you propose to create ANY kind of meaningful interface of the sort you seem to intend?