#borg chic

Krista and Tatiana Hogan of the city of Vernon in British Columbia are seven-year-old sisters fused at the head. Craniopagus twins are extremely rare in any event, but the Hogans appear to be utterly unique in that they aren’t just fused at the skull or the vascular system. They are fused at the brain – more specifically at the thalamus, which acts as (among other things) a sensory relay. They share a common set of sensory inputs. Tickle one, the other laughs. Each sees through the other’s eyes; each tastes what’s on the other’s tongue. They smile and cry in sync. There’s anecdotal evidence that they share thoughts and, although they have distinct personalities, each uses the word ‘I’ when referring to the other. The Hogan twins are two souls with one sensorium. All because they’re fused at a sensory relay. But the thalamus is lower-brain circuitry. Dial-up, not broadband. Suppose the twins were fused at the prefrontal cortex instead? If two hemispheres can each run separate, standalone programs – yet fuse to form a single coherent entity – what about the fusion of complete brains, a single contiguous porridge of neurons spread across two heads? Given a slight developmental tweak to the left, would we still be talking about two souls, or a single conscious being with twice the neuronal mass of a normal human brain? Whether you instil sights, sounds, political opinions or a craving for a certain brand of beer might come down to where you aim the beam There are other ways to put our heads together. Neurosilicon interfaces, for example. We’ve had those for more than a decade now. In labs around the world, neuron cultures put robot bodies through their paces; puddles of brain tissue drive flight simulators. At Clemson University in South Carolina, Ganesh Venayagamoorthy is busy teaching tame neurons to run everything from power grids to stock markets. DARPA has thrown its weight behind the development of a ‘cortical modem’, a direct neural interface wired right into your gray matter (we’re already using implants to reprogram specific neurons in other primates). But DARPA may have already been scooped by Theodore Berger, down at the University of Southern California. Way back in 2011, he unveiled a kind of artificial, memory-forming hippocampus for rats. The memories encoded in that device can be accessed by the organic rat brain; they can also be ported to other rats. It won't be long before such prostheses scale up to our own species (that is in fact the explicit goal of Berger's research). If the prospect of surgery squicks you out, Sony has registered blue-sky patents for technology that plants sensory input directly into the brain using radio waves and compressed ultrasound. They’re selling it as a great leap forward for everything from gaming to telesurgery. (For my part, I can’t help remembering that neurons fire pretty much the same way whether they’re processing sensory input or religious belief. The difference between instilling sights, sounds, political opinions – why not an irresistible craving for a certain brand of beer? – might come down to little more than where you aim the beam.) None of these efforts are explicitly designed to connect one human mind to another. What they’re pioneering is an interface, the ability to translate thoughts from meat into mech and back again. What we are seeing, in other words, is the genesis of a new kind of corpus callosum that extends beyond the confines of a single skull. We’re still in the Precambrian. Grau’s emailed brainwaves amount to a fancy kind of semaphore that happens to bypass the eyeballs. Pais-Vieira’s hive mind was a pair of distinct rat brains, pimped out so that a spark in one would trigger a poke in the other – a stimulus that would have been meaningless to the recipient if he hadn’t already been trained to respond in a certain way. That’s not integrated awareness, or even telepathy. It’s the difference between experiencing an orgasm and watching a signal light on a distant hill spell out oh-god-oh-god-yes in Morse Code. So it’s early days yet. But it may be later than you think. ... Google’s ‘DeepMind’, a general-purpose AI explicitly designed to mimic the brain, is a bit too close to SyNAPSE for comfort (and a lot more imminent: its first incarnations are already poised to enter the market). The bandwidth of your cell phone is already comparable to that of your corpus callosum, once noise and synaptic redundancy are taken into account. We’re still a few theoretical advances away from an honest-to-God mind meld – still waiting for the ultrasonic ‘Neural Dust’ interface proposed by Berkley’s Dongjin Seo, or for researchers at Rice University to perfect their carbon-nanotube electrodes – but the pipes are already fat enough to handle that load when it arrives. And those advances may come easier than you'd expect. Brains do a lot of their own heavy lifting when it comes to plugging unfamiliar parts together. A blind rat, wired into a geomagnetic sensor via a simple pair of electrodes, can use magnetic fields to navigate a maze just as well as her sighted siblings. If a rat can teach herself to use a completely new sensory modality – something the species has never experienced throughout the course of its evolutionary history – is there any cause to believe our own brains will prove any less capable of integrating novel forms of input?