BrainStream: Bio-Tech Augmentation or Full Techno-Cyborgian Implants?

[bkdelong]

Woah. Two BrainStreams in one week. A new record for the last year or two.

(And, yes, I REALLY like to be overly-bombastic in my grammatically-crippled word-creation when I do these things. It's my little "cherry on top".)

I do this silly thing when I get into large crowds. I "shut down" the fast spinning, erratic, multitasking hard drive that is my brain and go into "navigation and evasion" mode. It sounds very technical and like I'm programming a navigation computer but, in many ways, that's how I treat my brain.

I stop thinking about everything else, and imagine red tracking circles with labeled lines coming off them - much what one would expect to see in a Sci-Fi movie where the first-person view is replaced by what is assumed to be a Heads Up Display (HUD); be it a visor or cyborg eye.

I then pretend to analyze the traffic flow, predict the gap lengths and times and program a route that will enable me to keep moving at my present speed and manage to avoid plowing into someone. This is mostly done in T stations on the Green and Red lines, sometimes in Malls and, recently, walking through Times Square from The Roosevelt Hotel to Penn Station.

Anyway, the visualization seems to work well for the most part and unless I'm incredibly overtired it's one of the few times I can fully override my ADHD. The other is when something puts me in "incident response" mode but when that happens, it's VERY, very hard for me to "stand down" and focus on my usual tasks.

Times like those, I would KILL for augmented-reality, gesture-recognition, multi-input touch interfaces containing a symbiont AI that almost predict what I want to do before I move my hands in place. But I digress.

It occurred to be on the Green Line between North Station and Government Center this AM that, really, all I needed was an implant that translated the signals my brain was sending out to my various body parts (and vice-versa) and converted them to imagery sent to my visual cortex.

Think about it: you see the calculations, a message saying "go now" based on your instinctual urge to go. You see someone you think you recognize and the implant captures, sharpens and enhances the weak memory solidifying it into something recognizable.

In work/infosec terms - I need a good dashboard and reporting GUI for my Body Event and Information Management (BEIM), e.g. my brain. I mean, what does one's brain do but correlate the various events and information going on in your body in order to manage fast remediation and incident response. It just happens to be able to do it far faster than any SEIM correlating across a WAN EVER could (Security Event and Information Management and Wide Area Network for those still playing along). I wonder how many events-per-second the average adult human brain can manage.

(I can't believe I'm thinking about this from an information security perspective. It takes ALL the fun out of it.)

Since we don't truly understand our own bodies and rely on doctors to "diagnose" such an interface may be valuable to help us understand everything from when our blood sugar is low to some other impending or current medical event is occurring that needs addressing. It wouldn't hurt to map out what's going on in the body and basically providing our conscious self with insights that would allow us to make course correction for self-repair. Don't want it in live mode? Bluetooth/RFID/Broadcast-your-own-protocol to an external device for storage and later reading.

Based on your Personal Privacy Preferences and the degree of urgency for each potential issue, you could immediately upload certain information to your doctor for translation and action. Of course, with such diagnosis tools at your disposal, the need for a doctor to fully manage your health would become far less. I wouldn't say irrelevant but who knows.

I just don't know enough about the feature set of current nanoprobic body sensors (do any actually exist yet?) to see how much information we can gather about the body with something microscopic and untethered. heck...has any research even been done on broadcasting signals from a nanoprobe deep inside the human body to a device on the outside? Perhaps relaying through the nervous system? What if that's compromised? Maybe a set of waypoints along the way?

Ah, mad science. Love it.