Don’t let hype around AI distract us from our progress in brain studies

In 2023, India followed this up with its pioneering soft landing near the south pole of the moon of Chandrayaan-3 (bit.ly/4aFwffb). On Sunday, Chang’e 6 landed on the far side of the moon and China’s longer-range plan is to have a crewed lunar mission by 2030, followed by a permanent lunar base. Nasa’s crewed Artemis III mission is scheduled to land on the moon in 2026. 

Isro has not prioritized humans in space, but still has plans to send humans into low-earth orbit this decade and land on the moon by the end of the next one. In partnership with private sector firms like Space X, Nasa is also working on rocket reusability; making a fully reusable transportation system designed to carry crew and cargo to and from Earth’s orbit, the moon, Mars and further.

New depths have also been gained in deep-sea exploration (bit.ly/4bCJFtD). Even though last year’s implosion of the Titan submersible received much attention, both crewed and unmanned submersibles have made significant progress has been made in plumbing such depths. 

Crewed missions from the US and China have recorded depths greater than 10,000 metres on several dives. An international project is now on to map 100% of the ocean floor, about 20% of which has been completed so far.

An unexpected field of scientific development culminated in the Nobel Prize for Physiology in 2023. Operation Warp Speed catalysed the use of messenger RNA for vaccines to target the Sars-Cov-2 virus. Research is ongoing on new vaccines that utilize the mRNA method of delivery. 

Also read: Perseverance counts: A Nobel for mRNA vaccines is welcome

Old style vaccines use a weakened or dead version of the actual virus combined with an adjuvant to stimulate an immune response against a disease, while mRNA vaccines use a genetic code to message the body’s cells to produce proteins that re-train the immune system. This plug-and-play method reduces development time and costs, and could see wide applicability.

Ever since then US President Barack Obama launched the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies Initiative, there has been much progress on studying the human brain. While there is much hype around artificial intelligence and its implications, the study of the human brain is even more exciting.

Although some of the underlying ideas were expressed by Nikola Tesla a century ago, a futuristic concept called the Global Brain Initiative regained some traction when Elon Musk set up a company called Neuralink to create a brain-computer interface (BCI) with significantly greater bandwidth than traditional human interface devices. In Musk’s telling, AI will rapidly outpace human abilities in most domains and an advanced BCI would enable human cognition to remain relevant.

The first Neuralink brain implant was delivered and installed a few months ago in the brain of 31-year-old Noland Arbaugh, who is quadriplegic. A robot was used to surgically place a BCI implant that could engage the brain’s motor cortex. The implant was attached to the brain using probes. 

The probes are composed of polyimides, a biocompatible material along with a thin gold or platinum conductor. Each probe contains up to 96 wires, each of which contains 32 independent electrodes, making up a system of 3,072 electrodes per formation.

Initially, it served its purpose of enabling Noland to control a computer cursor and keyboard using his thoughts alone. When he thought ‘left,’ the cursor moved accordingly and completed the start function as directed. More recently, the performance of the chip has begun to fade, though Noland admits that it has “already changed my life." 

Surprisingly, the limiting factor is not the linkage between biological neuro signals and electronic ones understandable to a computer. In other words, the simple conversion of thoughts to electronic signals is not as big a challenge as one may think.

The real challenge is that thoughts have a much greater information density than pure electronic signals and the ability to deep compress the ‘thought data’ into a format that can wirelessly be transmitted from a chip to a computer awaits a solution.

Beyond Neuralink, brain research has made progress from cells to circuits, in terms of promising directions for cures for certain neurological diseases and in the emerging field of neuro ethics.

Also read: Neuralink’s first brain-chip implant appeared flawless. There was a problem

Closer home, the Centre for Brain Research at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, endowed by Sudha and Kris Gopalakrishnan, is working to minimize the burden of neuro-generative disease through prevention, early diagnosis and scientifically proven interventions.

The Department of Biotechnology’s own National Brain Research Centre was established 30 years ago, and it has managed to stay abreast of cutting-edge developments, particularly in the fields of neuro-diseases and neuro-chemistry. With 100 million people over 65 years of age in India, discoveries related to the Indian gene pool that could mitigate neuro-generative disease would be a welcome ‘no-brainer.’

P.S: “Our own brain, our own heart, is the temple," said the Dalai Lama.