Monthly Archives: July 2023

UN says unregulated neuro technology poses risks to those who use it

The UN is advising against neurotechnology using unregulated AI chip implantations, saying it poses a grave risk to peoples mental privacy. Unregulated neurotechnology could pose harmful long-term risks, the UN says, such as shaping the way a young person thinks or accessing private thoughts and emotions.

It specified its concerns centered around unregulated neurotechnology, and did not mention Neuralink, which received FDA approval in May to conduct microchip brain implant trials on humans.

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Elon Musk, who co-founded Neuralink, has made big claims, saying the chips will cure people of lifelong health issues, allowing the blind to see and the paralyzed to walk again. But the implications of people using unregulated forms of this technology could have disastrous consequences by accessing the thoughts of those who use it, the UN said in a press release.

Neurotechnology could help solve many health issues, but it could also access and manipulate peoples brains, and produce information about our identities, and our emotions, UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay said in the release. It could threaten our rights to human dignity, freedom of thought, and privacy. There is an urgent need to establish a common ethical framework at the international level, as UNESCO has done for artificial intelligence.

The UNs Agency for Science and Culture is developing a global ethical framework focused on how neurotechnology affects human rights as it quickly advances in the public sector.

The primary concern is neurotechnology will capture the reactions and basic emotions of individuals, something that would be very tempting for data-hungry corporations. The problem gets more complexwhen neural data is generated unconsciously, meaning the individual has not given their consent for that information to be gathered. If sensitive data is extracted, and then falls into the wrong hands, the individual may suffer harmful consequences, UNESCO said in its release.

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If the brain chips are implanted in children while they are still neurologically developing, it could disrupt the way their brain matures, making it possible to transform their minds and shape their future identity permanently.

According to UNESCO, one in eight people live with a mental or neurological disorder worldwide, and the World Health Organization (WHO) says it affects up to one billion people globally. Neurological disorders include epilepsy, Alzheimers disease, stroke, brain infections, multiple sclerosis, and Parkinsons Disease.

UNESCO said in a separate press release that using Neurotechnology to relay information to computers, could expose those with the implant to manipulation and reduce their privacy. It said: Without ethical guardrails, these technologies can pose serious risks, as brain information can be accessed and manipulated, threatening fundamental rights and fundamental freedoms, which are central to the notion of human identity, freedom of thought, privacy, and memory.

UNESCO did not immediately respond to Gizmodos request for comment.

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UN Warns Unregulated Neurotechnology Threatens 'Freedom of Thought' - Yahoo News

When do you first hear there could be treatment that included neurotechnology?

I still wanted to be a ballet dancer. I would have jumped at anything, just for the opportunity to get my dance career happening again. The brain operation was supposed to fix me. It was an EEG (electroencephalogram), but on the brain, not just on your head. Then there was a tube down your throat to a device in your chest that would gather the data. And there was another a device outside the body that had three lights that would beep and flash red before a seizure. So you knew when its time to go and lie on a couch.

What were your first impressions when you had it fitted?

I didn't like it from the get go, because it was flashing too much for me. I didn't realise how many seizures I was having. The device would beep for me every two seconds. The red light went on, Id take the device out and turn it off, and it just went off again. It made me depressed at university. I didn't tell any of my lecturers that I had it, I started hiding my epilepsy. And the depression got worse and worse and worse.

I felt like there was someone in my head, and it wasn't me. And I just got more and more depressed. I didn't like it at all.

When did you think about getting it removed?

I didn't believe that it was working, because it was going off all the time. I went into hospital, and they checked it, and the device was fine. That's when they realised how many seizures I was actually having. When I realised I was having more than 100 seizures a day, I wanted to throw the thing out the window. I just hated it, and wanted it gone.

With the amount of time it was going off for me, I felt like I had two choices. I could follow the device and rent a hospital bed for life and just lie down forever. Because that's what this device is saying, my life has gone. Or I could throw it out the window and say, I'm going to live my life still, and have a few seizures along the way, but have a life as well.

What advice would you have for other epilepsy patients who are considering neurotechnological treatments?

I would really say to someone who had epilepsy as badly as me, it's not the right thing for you. It will just make you feel like it's not worth living a real life anymore. I think that there needs to be a bigger conversation about the negativity. And there needs to be a lot more said before somebody makes that decision.

But I would say I've heard positive stories as well, from people who felt the treatment changed their lives. For someone who has one seizure every three months, I feel maybe it would help because they could go and sit on a couch. But if youre having as many seizures as me, you've got to think of the negatives as well. You're going to just constantly, suddenly have had this sound coming out of you. You're constantly going to have a someone in your head, and it's not you.

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I felt like there was someone in my head, and it wasn't me. - UNESCO

By Anne Trafton|MIT News Office

The brain and the digestive tract are in constant communication, relaying signals that help to control feeding and other behaviors. This extensive communication network also influences our mental state and has been implicated in many neurological disorders.

MIT engineers have designed a new technology for probing those connections. Using fibers embedded with a variety of sensors, as well as light sources for optogenetic stimulation, the researchers have shown that they can control neural circuits connecting the gut and the brain, in mice.

In a new study, the researchers demonstrated that they could induce feelings of fullness or reward-seeking behavior in mice by manipulating cells of the intestine. In future work, they hope to explore some of the correlations that have been observed between digestive health and neurological conditions such as autism and Parkinsons disease.

The exciting thing here is that we now have technology that can drive gut function and behaviors such as feeding. More importantly, we have the ability to start accessing the crosstalk between the gut and the brain with the millisecond precision of optogenetics, and we can do it in behaving animals, says Polina Anikeeva, the Matoula S. Salapatas Professor in Materials Science and Engineering, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences, director of the K. Lisa Yang Brain-Body Center, associate director of MITs Research Laboratory of Electronics, and a member of MITs McGovern Institute for Brain Research.

Anikeeva is the senior author of thenew study, which appears today inNature Biotechnology. The papers lead authors are MIT graduate student Atharva Sahasrabudhe, Duke University postdoc Laura Rupprecht, MIT postdoc Sirma Orguc, and former MIT postdoc Tural Khudiyev.

Last year, the McGovern Institute launched the K. Lisa Yang Brain-Body Center to study the interplay between the brain and other organs of the body. Research at the center focuses on illuminating how these interactions help to shape behavior and overall health, with a goal of developing future therapies for a variety of diseases.

Theres continuous, bidirectional crosstalk between the body and the brain, Anikeeva says. For a long time, we thought the brain is a tyrant that sends output into the organs and controls everything. But now we know theres a lot of feedback back into the brain, and this feedback potentially controls some of the functions that we have previously attributed exclusively to the central neural control.

As part of the centers work, Anikeeva set out to probe the signals that pass between the brain and the nervous system of the gut, also called the enteric nervous system. Sensory cells in the gut influence hunger and satiety via both the neuronal communication and hormone release.

Untangling those hormonal and neural effects has been difficult because there hasnt been a good way to rapidly measure the neuronal signals, which occur within milliseconds.

To be able to perform gut optogenetics and then measure the effects on brain function and behavior, which requires millisecond precision, we needed a device that didnt exist. So, we decided to make it, says Sahasrabudhe, who led the development of the gut and brain probes.

The electronic interface that the researchers designed consists of flexible fibers that can carry out a variety of functions and can be inserted into the organs of interest. To create the fibers, Sahasrabudhe used a technique called thermal drawing, which allowed him to create polymer filaments, about as thin as a human hair, that can be embedded with electrodes and temperature sensors.

The filaments also carry microscale light-emitting devices that can be used to optogenetically stimulate cells, and microfluidic channels that can be used to deliver drugs.

The mechanical properties of the fibers can be tailored for use in different parts of the body. For the brain, the researchers created stiffer fibers that could be threaded deep into the brain. For digestive organs such as the intestine, they designed more delicate rubbery fibers that do not damage the lining of the organs but are still sturdy enough to withstand the harsh environment of the digestive tract.

To study the interaction between the brain and the body, it is necessary to develop technologies that can interface with organs of interest as well as the brain at the same time, while recording physiological signals with high signal-to-noise ratio, Sahasrabudhe says. We also need to be able to selectively stimulate different cell types in both organs in mice so that we can test their behaviors and perform causal analyses of these circuits.

The fibers are also designed so that they can be controlled wirelessly, using an external control circuit that can be temporarily affixed to the animal during an experiment. This wireless control circuit was developed by Orguc, aSchmidt Science Fellow, and Harrison Allen 20, MEng 22, who were co-advised between the Anikeeva lab and the lab of Anantha Chandrakasan, dean of MITs School of Engineering and the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Using this interface, the researchers performed a series of experiments to show that they could influence behavior through manipulation of the gut as well as the brain.

First, they used the fibers to deliver optogenetic stimulation to a part of the brain called the ventral tegmental area (VTA), which releases dopamine. They placed mice in a cage with three chambers, and when the mice entered one particular chamber, the researchers activated the dopamine neurons. The resulting dopamine burst made the mice more likely to return to that chamber in search of the dopamine reward.

Then, the researchers tried to see if they could also induce that reward-seeking behavior by influencing the gut. To do that, they used fibers in the gut to release sucrose, which also activated dopamine release in the brain and prompted the animals to seek out the chamber they were in when sucrose was delivered.

Next, working with colleagues from Duke University, the researchers found they could induce the same reward-seeking behavior by skipping the sucrose and optogenetically stimulating nerve endings in the gut that provide input to the vagus nerve, which controls digestion and other bodily functions.

Again, we got this place preference behavior that people have previously seen with stimulation in the brain, but now we are not touching the brain. We are just stimulating the gut, and we are observing control of central function from the periphery, Anikeeva says.

Sahasrabudhe worked closely with Rupprecht, a postdoc in Professor Diego Bohorquez group at Duke, to test the fibers ability to control feeding behaviors. They found that the devices could optogenetically stimulate cells that produce cholecystokinin, a hormone that promotes satiety. When this hormone release was activated, the animals appetites were suppressed, even though they had been fasting for several hours. The researchers also demonstrated a similar effect when they stimulated cells that produce a peptide called PYY, which normally curbs appetite after very rich foods are consumed.

The researchers now plan to use this interface to study neurological conditions that are believed to have a gut-brain connection. For instance, studies have shown that autistic children are far more likely than their peers to be diagnosed with GI dysfunction, while anxiety and irritable bowel syndrome share genetic risks.

We can now begin asking, are those coincidences, or is there a connection between the gut and the brain? And maybe there is an opportunity for us to tap into those gut-brain circuits to begin managing some of those conditions by manipulating the peripheral circuits in a way that does not directly touch the brain and is less invasive, Anikeeva says.

The research was funded, in part, by the Hock E. Tan and K. Lisa Yang Center for Autism Research and the K. Lisa Yang Brain-Body Center, the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, the National Science Foundation (NSF) Center for Materials Science and Engineering, the NSF Center for Neurotechnology, the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, a National Institutes of Health DirectorsPioneer Award, the National Institute of Mental Health, and the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.

Reprinted with permission of MIT News.

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Unraveling Connections Between the Brain and Gut - The Good Men Project