Understanding how the human brain works will give engineers a better understanding to simulate its activities. Such stimulations will offer a more accurate method for testing potential biotechnology solutions to brain disorders such as neutral implants or drugs. Neurological disorders can one day be rectified by technology innovations that will allow inserting of new materials into human bodies to do the jobs of damaged or lost nerve cells.
There are already cases of applications using artificial intelligence have benefited from simulations based on brain reverse engineering. Some applications are AI algorithms used in machine vision systems in automated factories or in speech recognition. As the technology incresaes, future AI software should be able to guide devices that can enter the human body to perform medical diagnoses and treatments. Parkinson's disease is also using the technology of "neutral prostheses' in the form of cochlear implants to treat hearing loss and stimulating electrodes to treat it.
Although there are already ways to interact with the human brain and simulating it to perform tasks, there is still a long way to go to fully understand and know how to use the brain. Detailed information of the brain's secret communication code still remain to be deciphered. Moreover, it will be difficult to realise out and analyze all the complexities of the nerve cells such as signals, pathways, dynamics and feedback loops. Hence, the successful understanding of the brain activities will provide engineers a full idea on how to create more outstanding accomplishments.
Reference
http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/cms/8996/9109.aspx retrieved 5th October 2008
2 comments:
This is a very interesting and well summarized article. When humans can fully understand how the brain works, we will have a new set of problems, which is related to ethics to overcome. What will happen when even a person’s most private thoughts can be studied by another person?
Reverse-engineering the brain, in my opinion, is very controversial. While reverse-engineering the brain allows us to understand the brain more, but it might turn out that we can manipulate a person's mind using the technologies. Hence, strong rules on how the result of the research on reverse-engineering the brain should be formed to make sure no party has the right to use the technologies in the wrong way.
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