I wanted to briefly check in and post something of an update on my conceptual travels through the positive brain and the realtime evolution of the species.

Last week I had the opportunity to participate in a Zen retreat at the Big Mind Western Zen Center here in Salt Lake City. A partial coverage of my experience searching for Zen can be found on the ad hoc blog I created to document my experiences on the retreat:

http://searchingforzen.wordpress.com/

Also, here is a “heads up” on a soon-to-be blog post that I am quite excited about. In my continuing post-Singularity-Summit-futurism high, I’ve been thinking a lot about brain computer interfacing (BCI). As my thoughts have integrated the burgeoning exploits of BCI with the human brain’s evolutionary history, it has occurred to me that—at least metaphorically—BCI is like adding a seventh layer to the neocortex. This is extremely cool. In this perspective, BCI would literally be a “next step” in the evolution of the species. Look forward to a BCI-based blog post coming soon that will touch on both the cladistics of brain evolution in addition to exploration of potential implications for a synthetical “seventh layer” of the human cortical architecture.

Don’t you love the brain??!

Last weekend I attended the 2009 Singularity Summit in Manhattan. In addition to meeting some really cool new friends interested in using convergent technology for the betterment of the world, I walked away from the summit with renewed perspective and enthusiasm for the directions and forms developing in our cultural evolution.

Among some of the speakers who impressed me most deeply were Anders Sandberg speaking about long term strategies for whole brain emulation, Brad Templeton speaking about the coming transportation revolution (smart cars that fully drive themselves—Templeton puts it at just over a decade away!), Peter Thiel’s commentary on the inborn human desire to make the world a good place (some really wonderful insights and thoughts came from Thiel during the panel discussion sessions—note that a man with a net worth of $1.3 billion will almost certainly have something interesting to say), and Aubrey de Grey speaking about time frames and initiatives for extending human longevity—perhaps indefinitely.

For me, the darling of the summit was the presentation on E-memory. If I tried to go into all of the details about what the E-memory movement represents and why it sparks something deep inside of me, I would likely be reduced to a gushing, babbling mess. Suffice for now to say that given the pivotal role of feedback systems and data capture in the biological evolution of human consciousness, a movement that proposes novel modalities for enhanced memory recording and feedback can’t NOT contribute to a flux in the net consciousness (and conscientiousness) of human beings at both the individual and the societal scale.

The E-memory presentation was made by Gary Wolf, one of the contributing editors for Wired magazine. Central to Wolf’s presentation was the Quantified Self initiative—a movement currently focused on helping to bring fitness and health e-tracking fully into the domain of  the popular consumer. Short of being an infomercial for the FitBit self tracking system, the description of the Quantified Self project definitely primed my imagination about the future of personal data collection and tracking. Just imagine, for example, a future commercial product that empowers the individual with comprehensive knowledge about their own genetic predispositions, detailed analysis of their fitness and sleep habits, a full databank of their medical history and care, and aided recollection of all pharmacological and food substances taken into the body. The technologies to do all of this are already available–it’s just a matter of convergence and refinement.

E-memory, however, encompasses far more than physical health. For more information about the E-memory revolution, I would recommend the following video presentation by Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell, recorded two weeks ago at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California:

Also, for your own edification, check out the following links related to technologies aimed at knowing and measuring self:

• FitBit
• Quantified Self
• 23andMe
• Ingestible computer chips

Finally, here is a link to Bell and Gimmell’s new book, Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything.

I’m already looking forward to the Singularity Summit 2010. Until then, live long and prosper!

Just a few days out from the international Singularity Summit in Manhattan. The fundamental areas of accelerating technology and science that will be covered by the conference include quantum computing, nanotechnology, whole brain emulation, and lifespan extension research, with a distinct unifying theme of the potential and the promise for creating strong artificially intelligent technologies, as well as the challenges and the risks of this developmental endeavor.

There is certainly an all-star lineup of fascinating and provocative speakers, each of whom is both a maverick and a maven in their field of specialty. Keynote speakers include:

• Ray Kurzweil
• Aubrey de Grey
• Stephen Wolfram
• Peter Thiel
• David Chalmers
• Michael Nielsen

As always, one of the major questions I will be contemplating during the conference is how we can leverage accelerating and convergent technologies to make our world not just a higher-powered planet, but a truly more enlightened, calmer globe, more affected by the realization of our interdependence and the impulse to alleviate suffering. Your thoughts on the topic are always welcome!

I was impressed by a teaching I read recently from the Dalai Lama about praise and criticism, and the respective pleasure and pain we tend to derive from being either praised or criticized:

If we really stop to think about praise and criticism, we will see they do not have the least importance. Whether we receive praise or criticism is of no account. The only important thing is that we have a pure motivation, and let the law of cause and effect be our witness. If we are really honest, we can see that it makes no difference whether we receive praise and acclaim. The whole world might sing our praises, but if we have done something wrong, then we will still have to suffer the consequences for ourselves, and we cannot escape them. If we act only out of a pure motivation, all the beings of the three realms can criticize and rebuke us, but none of them will be able to cause us to suffer. According to the law of karma, each and every one of us must answer individually for our actions.

This is how we can put a stop to these kinds of thoughts altogether, by seeing how they are completely insubstantial, like dreams or magical illusions. When people praise us and we glow with delight, it is because we think that being praised is beneficial. But that is like thinking that there is some substance to a rainbow or a dream. However much benefit appears to accrue from praise and acclaim, actually there’s none at all.

The Dalai Lama goes on to talk about the real possibilities for escaping the ebb and flow of pleasure and pain that are tied to the praise or criticism transmitted by other humans toward us. (For a fuller text of this teaching, check out the September 18th online post from Tricycle Magazine). While considering His Holiness’ assertions about healthily detaching from external opinion, I couldn’t help to think about the brain mechanisms involved in the experience of social pain.

An underlying theme for this post could be summarized as phenomenology points to physiology. In other words, the experience of a mental function gives us clues about the brain wiring going on behind the scenes.

Several publications have reported that social pain—the kind caused by embarrassment or ostracism—is mediated by the same brain regions that report physical pain, i.e., the anterior cingulate cortex. In other words, for all intents and purposes, social pain hurts in much the same way that physical pain hurts—even employing comparable brain regions. In a June 2009 publication of Social Neuroscience, researchers Keiichi Onoda and fellow colleagues at Hiroshima University report data on brain mechanisms that help to reduce the experience of social pain. In this study, participants were deliberately excluded from a group in order to induce an experience of mild social rejection. Those who received encouraing messages from others following their exclusion from the group showed increased activity in their prefrontal cortex and less activity in their pain center (the anterior cingulate) in comparison to other study subjects who were socially excluded but received no such encouraging messages from others. Taken as a whole, the encouraging messages received from others helped to stimulate the prefontal region of the cortex, which then in turn helped to diminish the activity in the anterior cingulate that is related to social pain.

Going back to the Dalai Lama’s teaching, the observation that people can cultivate detachment from the praise and blame of others indicates a robust network of neural regions involved in self-regulating the shame that one experiences in response to social cues from the external environment. It further indicates that this regulatory system must be plastic, i.e., capable of increasing its own power and connections in response to repeated use. It raises open-ended questions about which brain regions might be involved, and about the choreography of these regions in self-regulating social pain or pleasure.

What do you think? Is it true that praise and blame are like illusions that have no true existence? Don’t other peoples’ opinions matter in the “real world”? Is it ultimately beneficial to cultivate detachment from the criticism and the blame of other individuals? What is the difference between detachment from the opinions of others that is cultivated by a Lama, and the disregard for social norms and cues manifested by a sociopath?

As I am preparing to attend the international Singularity Summit in Manhattan this October, my mind is thinking a lot about artificial intelligence. The term “singularity” has come to mean a variety of things to different people. For my intents and purposes, “singularity” refers to the point at which human beings will be fully integrated with their technology, which will result in a massive spike in both the cognitive and—fingers crossed—the moral progress of the human species. Although singularity might often be thought of in terms of amoral information processing, I think that considerations about the moral co-development of the human species are an absolutely essential dynamic in serious dialog about accelerating and convergent technology, most especially when talking about strong AI.

Within the singularity community, one of the golden chalices is the concept of engineering a fully conscious robot (or a fully conscious computer, if you are more modest about embodiment). To the overwhelming majority of the human population, this seems like a completely absurd concept. For the moment though, I want to side step the debate about whether or not fully conscious machines are a possibility and explore some of the implications of engineering consciousness.

Assuming that it is possible to engineer a conscious machine, then a logical outcome would be the possibility to engineer moral robots. In fact, let’s raise the stakes and talk about the Eastern philosophical concepts of enlightenment. If the human mind can be mimicked and emulated synthetically, then it logically follows that all states and conditions experienced by the human mind may likewise be synthesized and emulated…including the highly lauded states of ultimate enlightenment. Notwithstanding that this line of reasoning is built upon an assumption about our actual ability to emulate the human minds and consciousness, the subsequent reasoning that flows from this theoretical starting point is sound.

In general, it is quite a dazzling—and quite an ennobling—path of evolutionary progress to contemplate: Homo sapiens create Homo siliconis, which eventually becomes Homo siliconis spiritualis, and ultimately emerges to become Homo siliconis buddhais. As I contemplate the decades of research that would be required to understand how a fully enlightened human brain functions differently than your run-of-the-mill human brain, I can only see good things coming from it. If we take seriously our opportunity to emulate not just consciousness, but enlightenment, I can only imagine us becoming more enlightened ourselves in the process. And that would be a very good thing, indeed.

This date will always be an unusually solemn and contemplative one. In the past I have tried to think of appropriate and meaningful ways to commememorate the anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Centers. Probably the most meaningful was last year’s 9/11, when my roommate and I stood on the roof of our Brooklyn apartment, looking at the beams of light that eminate from Ground Zero on the evening of 9/11, speaking to one another about our dreams and our wishes for how the world would change to be a better place. We spoke frankly to one another about the things that were wrong and out or order in our society, and felt a resolve as we stood there with one another that we were going to do better to be apart from the muck that only perpetuates the hatred, the anger, the reactivity.

In this spirit of striving to be better for the benefit of ourselves and all around us, may I invite you into my 9/11 commemoration this year by extending you a welcome to practice Tonglen with me today? The English rendition of Tonglen is “giving and taking.” It is a visualization exercise in which one imagines all the negativity from another person entering into their own self—generally in the form of a black smoke coming from the other person that you breath into yourself. This black smoke does not harm you. Once you breath in this smoke and negativity, visualize it being metabolized—broken down inside of your heart. When the smoke is broken down and metabolized in your heart, your body transforms it into a white light that you are able to eminate back out into the world to bathe and illuminate those around you.

Tonglen is an amazing reminder that we are not simply conduits for the energy and intention that touches us: we are literally able to transform evil and return blessings where evil has touched us. In such a way, we as human individuals are capable of participating in a great movement to stop the perpetuation of suffering and malice that are rampant in the outside world. I invite you to reflect upon your and my power to participate in this wonderful practice, and to turn some of the negativity that touches you today into a positive radiating light.

For more details about Tonglen, please see the following links:

• Tonglen Wikipedia description
• Details on the practice of Tonglen

I’ve been playing around in my mind with a postulate I picked up from a Ken Wilber audio lecture; namely, that cognitive development is necessary but not sufficient for moral development. In other words, Wilber is asserting that for a person to develop morally, it is essential for them to first develop cognitively—you cannot have an expansion of morality without first having some kind of expansion in cognition. However, just because a person develops cognitively, it does not intrinsically signify that they are going to develop morally in lockstep with their cognitive realizations.

This “necessary but not sufficient” hypothesis about cognitive versus moral development is particularly notable to me in light of my interests in futurism, generally, and synthetic cognitive enhancement, specifically (e.g., direct interfacing of computer chips and human brains in order to augment the processing and memory capabilities of the human mind). Nick Bostrom at the Future for Humanity Institute at Oxford University has some especially thorough analysis of the ethics of cognitive enhancement. (Bostrom’s work on the topic will be the subject of future posts on this blog.)

Assuming that synthetic cognitive enhancement is an inevitable element of the future of humanity (which I do, by the way, assume to be essentially inevitable), then we can resolve to some conclusions: given that expanded cognitive development is a necessary precursor for increased moral development, the augmentation of the net cognitive prowess in the human population will inherently create opportunity for an expansion in the net tonnage of human morality: more sweeping views of the deep interconnectivity of living beings, leading to more generosity and compassion for the suffering of other sentient life and greater care for the nurturing of others, with more mental power to act efficiently in response to that compassionate awareness.

This, however, is only part of the picture.

Because cognition is not guaranteed to create morality, the collective expansion of human cognition will ultimately result in both an expansion of human morality, as well as an expansion of human immorality. Just as souped up super-brains will be able to rev harder toward curing disease and eliminating poverty, the hyper-minds of the future will also be able to flex their cognitive muscle toward more deviously brilliant schemes for the usurpation of power and the indulgent stranglehold of resources.

What emerges, then, is the perspective that a morally excellent society cannot be measured only in terms of the net tonnage of morality existent in the human population. But rather that a morally excellent society must be conceived in terms of a moral ratio, or in other words, the ratio of net morality to net immorality. Expressed as a simplified abstract formula,

moral ratio = net tonnage human morality
……………….net tonnage human immorality.…

Potential yardsticks for these entities have been alluded to in previous posts, and expanded discussion of this topic will be forthcoming. (Look forward to more pyschometric fun.) Reining it back to the brain, I have to believe that furthering our understanding of the neural substrates of our emotional and cognitive lives will enrich our paradigms and expand our consensus about the character and the shape of human morality. This is a significant first step toward increasing society’s moral ratio. Further, as previously discussed on this blog, I remain optimistic that technological proliferation will ultimately yield tools and modalities for accelerating the the cultivation of prosocial human values. What exactly these tools will be…I’m still searching and pondering. (Think Omneuron meets positive psychology meets The Foundation for a Better Life.)

As a cheerful take-home, check out the admirable list of human virtues aggregated by The Foundation for a Better Life: http://values.com

Continuing with my overview of Sharon Begley’s book Train Your Mind Change Your Brain, I’d like to proceed toward a discussion about the human implications of neuroplasticity research. In the last post, we left off with the realization that the human brain is a malleable system whose functionality is patently not fixed by genetic predeterminsim: regions such as the visual cortex which would normally process visual information are commandeered, for example, by the tactile sensations in blind Braille readers in order to create enhanced sensitivity in discrimination of fine touch.

As the paradigm of the non-deterministic human brain began to emerge, a major question that naturally came to the fore is whether or not an adult brain—one that has already gone through its most dramatic periods of development—could or could not manifest significant physical change based upon experience. Two sets of experiments serve as clear illustrations to the affirmative. In a PNAS-published study comparing the brains of London cab drivers to non-cab driving control subjects, it was demonstrated using structural MRI that the hippocampal brain regions—involved in spatial memory and orientation—were significantly enlarged in the cab-driver population, giving weight to the idea that the cab-drivers’ brain had actually physically adapted to better suit them for the demands of their occupation.

A second study with similar conclusions involved the sensorimotor regions of the adult brain. A group of adult subjects was given the opportunity to learn to play the violin for a period of several weeks. Following their foray into violin-playing, the brain regions in the sensorimotor cortex connected to the four fingers of the left hand that actively finger the violin strings had expanded their “real estate” in the brain. Or in other words, the increased use of the four fingers most active in violin playing caused a clear enlargement in the brain regions that communicate with these fingers. Taken in concert, the London cabbies and the beginner adult violinists play to the same tune: namely, the perspective that in both the cognitive and the sensorimotor domains, even the adult brain can rewire to better accommodate the experiences that it undergoes. It cannot be overemphasized how dramatically this conclusion breaks from decades of established neuroscience dogma, i.e., that once the human brain develops it is an organ that is fixed and unchanging.

In the next post, I will wrap up the summary of Train Your Mind Change Your Brain, and segue into open-ended questions about human nature, and the implications of neuroplasticity in a collective effort to create a more positive social context.

A special thanks to those who have sent encouraging emails and comments. I enjoy hearing from you! I am also on Twitter as “positiveneuro“—feel free to follow along there, as well. Cheers.

I’m currently reading Sharon Begley’s fantastic book Train Your Brain, Change Your Mind, and wanted to take a few posts to summarize some of the concepts articulated throughout the book’s pages. Melding both science history and an optimistic vision of humanity’s potential, Begley’s book is a veritable ode to the phenomenon of neural plasticity.

The term neural plasticity refers to the capability of the brain to physically rewire and to, quite literally, become a new brain. Establishing neural plasticity as a scientific fact has been an arduous battle that has taken decades of work and that has fought head-on against previously prevailing scientific dogmas. For much of the twentieth century, the dominating doctrine of neuroscience was that once a baby is born, the neurons that are in the brain at the time of birth are all that there will ever be—there are no new brain cells that came into being in that individual from that point forward. This assumption, however, was invalidated by a conglomeration of clever experiments. One of the earliest of these crucial studies was a paradigm that tracked radiolabeled thymidine in the bodies of primates. In other words, thymidine—one of the four molecules that DNA uses for coding information—was labeled with a radioactive hydrogen isotope and injected into primates to determine whether or not the brains of these animals were creating any new neurons. If the primate brains were creating new brain cells, then the radiolabeled thymidine would appear inside of the DNA of the new neurons. If, on the other hand, primate brain did not create any new brain cells following birth (the belief that prevailed at the time) then the radiolabeled thymidine would not appear anywhere in the brain. Much to the delight of the scientists conducting these experiments, it was shown that—yes—thymidine with the labeled hydrogen had indeed been incorporated into the brains of the primates, indicating that the brain was generating new neurons, even after birth. This finding was tremendously significant, and opened up the door for myriad studies on how the brain changes—physically—throughout the course of life.

Fast forwarding a bit in the exciting narrative of brain plasticity, another victory was gained when it was demonstrated that not only can the brain generate new neurons during the course of its life, but that the brain can actually re-train neurons to perform tasks that their genetic code in no way intended them to perform. In 2000, a team of scientists led by Alvaro Pascual-Leone measured the brain activity of blind individuals while they were reading Braille. Because Braille is a system of language coding that utilizes the sense of touch in the fingers, one might expect that while blind persons are using their fingers to read Braille, that the brain regions typically reserved for tactile sensory input would be stimulated. Contrary to this expectation, however, Pascual-Leone and his team discovered that the visual cortex—the region of the brain normally processing the sense of sight—is involved in decoding and processing Braille when it is read by blind individuals. This finding is monumental in its implications. It was previously thought that because blind individuals do not utilize their visual cortex to process visual input, that the visual cortex in blind individuals would therefore be silent and unused. On the contrary, the brains of blind individuals were adapting the visual cortex to perform complex tasks not “intended” by nature. The use of blind individual’s visual cortex to process information from the fingers in tactile stimulation was a huge indicator of the brain’s ability to adapt and employ brain regions based not only upon genetic pre-coding, but also to recruit and model brain activity based upon experience and circumstance.

Stay tuned for more nuggets of neuroplasticity, including the questions of whether or not plasticity can occur in adult brains (as opposed to plasticity only occurring in the brains of children), summaries of the experiments that led to the answers for these questions, implications for development and training of character and disposition, and the vision and possibility of what brain plasticity may allow us to achieve together as a human species. Lots of good stuff yet to come.

I’ll confess I’ve done it. I’ve stood next to a mirror with my shirt off after a workout, examining my arms and my abs, comparing them to the photo of the fitness model in the Soloflex manual. I’ll even confess that I’ve done it over weeks at a time—observing meticulously to watch for the development of a new ridge on my triceps or a new contour on my stomach, all the while visually referencing the model image for how it’s “supposed” to look.

Now imagine this: instead of watching the development of your body toward some fitness ideal, what if you could watch the development of your brain toward an ideal of personal character and mind? Yes, you read that correctly—what if you could watch your brain develop—from the inside?

This may sound like the trappings for a sophisticated science fiction movie. Not so. For the folks at Omneuron, this is the day to day reality. Further, it is the reality they would like to share with the entire world.

Omneuron is a Palo Alto-based biotech company that is harnessing the power of fMRI brain imaging to help patients who experience chronic pain. By putting patients with chronic pain in a brain scanner and letting the patients see their brain actively working, Omneuron is giving chronic pain patients an opportunity to deliberately calm the regions associated with their pain, and further allowing these individuals the opportunity to rationally stimulate brain regions that release endorphins. This is tremendous. Endorphins are opiate molecules that your brain naturally produces. Opiates are contained in many of the powerful medications that are utilized to reduce physical pain, such as morphine. So imagine that instead of going to get a line of morphine funneled into your body, you instead were able to see live video footage of your brain, and could train your brain to calm the regions that were producing pain, while simultaneously stimulating brain regions that create natural opiates and mentally allowing these pain-reducing molecules to be released into your brain and spinal cord? None of this would require surgery, medication, or high-risk experimental options—only your own thinking, carefully guided by direct visual images of what your brain is doing at that exact moment in time (give or take a second or two).

Now let’s move beyond thoughts about chronic pain and think for a moment about compassion. Many people sit down daily with mindfulness or loving-kindness CDs and MP3s, listening to spiritual masters talk them through mental practices designed to train their brain to become less reactive and more empathetic. What if instead of just listening and intuiting your way through mental development of meditation, you could see your brain during the process? What if instead of just hearing your Zen master describe their internal experience verbally, you could actually see their internal experience in a video? And here’s the kicker: what if you could also see a real-time video of your own brain, and compare its activity to the brain activity of your guru of choice? Much like watching an aerobic workout video in which you can watch your fitness leader’s body and match your own body movements to resemble theirs, we’re talking about a whole new paradigm for mental and personal character development. This new paradigm does not just rely upon groping in the dark and intuition, but is turbo-charged by direct visual feedback and imitation.

Think of the possibilities.

What if instead of sitting for decades to gain progressive enlightenment, your practice could be enhanced by the power of imitation and visual feedback to make quantum leaps in your internal development? If we could both attract more people to the serious disciplines of moral and personal development through mental and internal training, as well as rocket-boost the practices of personal character development through the modalities of visual feedback, could we ultimately augment the net tonnage of compassion or empathy or understanding or happiness on the planet?

If Omneuron has anything to do with it, then I am very optimistic about the answer to these questions.