I have a spinal condition called Syringomyelia, at the moment apart from neuropathic pain it doesn't effect my ability to walk but down the line it could (with complete paralysis been a possible outcome).

They could record the way my brain sends walk signals and if I end up paralysed they have the data to train the model.

There are multiple spinal conditions that result in paralysis after not be been paralysed, not everyone who ends up in a wheelchair gets their by an accident.

I hadn't thought of that kind of application before. Thanks.

One of my fear is an extremely big generation gap in the future when we find a transhuman-level technology that can only work if done from an early age. Exocortex interface comes to mind.

Then you would have an entire generation thinking millions of times deeper, broader, and faster than the previous one, and communication mostly broken. I sort of fear this scenario because I would be on the wrong side of it.

I'm in neuro, that scenario is centuries away. You'd peobably need a clear skull first with exotic glasses we can't even begin to understand physics-wise today. We don't even know what your brain cells mostly are. Is it 10% neurons and 90% glia, or 50% neurons and 50% glia? What are glia even doing? The only data we really get on them is via stroke studies. Neuro is exciting precisely because there is so little known about the brain still.

But we don't really need to understand something to create technology leveraging it. And we are just getting started with deep learning. And our computers are extremely slow and have tiny storage compared to what they will be.

Ok, I have this pill/wire-probe/exercise-machine, I don't really know what it does, but in some folks it seems to make them happier/healthier, that is all the info you are going to get about said thingy.

Do you use it?

Bio is like that. We really don't know what is going on with a body most of the time. When we try to leverage it, it gives totally nutto results. Like, yeah, water is good for you! Like, maybe we should make it inhale-able! Or yeah, caffeine is alright, makes you wake-up! You should just take NoDoz and never sleep again!

Those are absurd examples, but I hope they illustrate that in bio, 'leveraging' something typically means you are gonna die either real soon or you are gonna get cancer. Fen-phen is a great example of 'leveraging' something in bio [0]. Yeah, you loose weight, but then you blow your heart valves out and end up as worm food.

So when you say that we can just throw computers at the problem, you make a huge mistake with that idea. Your input data is everything. You have to run a LOT of experiments in the real world to get the right data, not just noise you think is data. Living things are really good at staying alive until they aren't. They are not just noisy, they are also altering the experiment along with the experimenter. Homeostasis is a real thing and bodies and living things try to stay happy, healthy, and alive. Like, here is the thing, your experimental test-bed is alive and thinking and is, in some cases, trying to experiment-on/kill-you right back. Try feeding that into a computer! You have 300k+ dependent variables (that you know of) and 10 equations (if you trust those other authors). You are trying to find the mean of N interacting Poisson/Gaussian data sets (you hope they are normal) in N dimensional space and you know that you don't know all the variables and you can only do this on 5 rats.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenfluramine/phentermine

Yes

But maybe it is. You can also put people on a VR environment and have them "walk" there (see experiments by Nicolelis et. al.) and try to capture signals like that

This might still be useful medically.

Let's guess that each person's unique representation for walking does not change, or changes slowly. That seems reasonable since it is at least partially based on the physical arrangement of neurons.

We could bank it on a regular basis--recording via a device we wear around for a month every 5 years, for example. Then if we are paralyzed, the most recent recording is used to map an implant.

Personally, I will not surprised if we find that each person's nervous system is so different from the next that nothing significant is generalizable. Rather than each person running an "OS on standard hardware" we might find that a more accurate analogy is that each person has constructed their own custom logic circuit and then wrote custom software on top of that.

As a person who knows next to nothing about the inner workings of the brain, the few books I read hinted of this. Apparently, learning changes the brain's physiology? anybody knows about good books on understanding how the brain works - as far as we know today?

Indeed, the research is a bit unfair. Its not difficult to understand old signals and they reuse it to generate motor effects.

The other thing has been done as well though: Obama shook a robotic arm's hand, the arm was being controlled by a paralyzed man; he learned the proper 'thoughts' for generating movement himself and the researchers didn't have recordings of the man moving prior to his accident leading to paralysis

There 's plasticity involved, and the problem that brain circuits continuously remap. They can be retrained though. I think they had similar problems with the BrainGate BMI many years ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrainGate).

That's why you should backup early and often your neuronal imprint. Cyberpunk is one step closer.