Can We Create An Artificial Brain? | HuffPost The WorldPost

Dr. Miguel Nicolelis is not the kind of person youd expect to say that something is impossible. After all, he developed a brain-connected exoskeleton that enabled a paraplegic man to deliver the opening kick at the World Cup last year. He used brain implants to give rats a sixth sense (perception of infrared light). And he connected the minds of monkeys, allowing them to accomplish tasks together -- a technology he says could eventually be used to connect human minds into a "brain net."

Yet in his latest book, The Relativistic Brain: How it works and why it cannot be simulated by a Turing machine, the director of neuroengineering at Duke University says that its impossible to emulate a human brain in a computer and that efforts to do so are dangerously misguided.

The brain is not a mechanism; its an organism," Nicolelis said to The WorldPost. "And organisms are not built; they evolve according to evolutionary pressures and events that cannot be reasonably predicted."

He is concerned that if we assume that artificial intelligence will one day emulate human intelligence, we will ourselves become more machine-like and will undercut our own biological intelligence.

I think were facing a big danger -- if we keep relying so much on computers, we will begin to resemble our machines, the Brazilian-born neuroscientist warned. Our brains will assimilate to the way computers operate, causing a significant reduction in the range of behaviors that we normally produce.

Technology can change our brains, Nicolelis says, because our brains are plastic, meaning neural pathways change in response to our environment and behavior -- a phenomenon scientists call neuroplasticity. If we want to preserve our culture and our way of living, he says, we need to keep track of how technology may be harming aptitudes of the brain.

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