"The goal - to understand how the brain works and to derive from this also insights into other fields"

This is what Prof. Elon Vadia, head of the Amond and Lili Safra Center for Neuroscience at the Hebrew University, said at the chip club meeting that dealt with the issue: cognitive chips and brain-machine interface - science fiction or emerging reality

"The goal is to understand how the brain works and derive from it insights for other fields," said yesterday Prof. Elon Vadia, head of the Amond and Lili Safra Center for Neuroscience at the Hebrew University at the meeting of the chip club that dealt with the issue: cognitive chips and brain-machine interface - science fiction or an emerging reality?

Brain research is not a new field, Prof. Vadia himself has been involved in it since he began his academic career 50 years ago, but in recent years the field known as BRAIN MACHINE INTERFACE is gaining momentum, and these days a new center for brain research is being established at the Hebrew University: "It There will be a high-tech building, inside which there will be all the most innovative means that can be used to work on neuroscience in an approach that combines computational theories, engineering and linking the brain to these components of the world, and this with the aim of understanding the brain with sophisticated means that already exist today and instilling from the brain new ways of computing in machines, in computers."

"The brain cells were only discovered 120 years ago. It was only then that the human brain began to understand what it is made of when Santiago Ramoni Cajal first saw the brain cells under a microscope and drew them.

To illustrate the processing capacity of the brain, Prof. Vadia detailed what is inside a cubic millimeter cube inside the cortex. According to him, such a unit contains 50-100 thousand units of nerve cells, each unit is a complete CPU that can process information in very special ways. Each such cube also has one hundred million synapses - or input/output units, with each such unit having approximately 20 inputs and 20 outputs. Also, each such cube contains about 4 kilometers of wires. In the complete brain (of each of us) there are 100 billion processing units, 100 trillion input/output units (a thousand times the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy), and 150 thousand kilometers of wires, almost four circles of the Earth at the equator).

"Today, methods are being developed to simulate the connectivity within the brain. We have ideas of beginning to truly understand what the principles of calculation in the brain are, how it calculates information, when I fall in love, how it produces the process of falling in love and the illusion that I have fallen in love, and when I read it gives me an illusion - which is the electrical activity of nerve cells ."

Later, Prof. Vadia showed some examples that the brain is not really ready to accept reality as it is but builds our relationship with the world according to the assumptions we have about the world. When we see a face for example, our brain scans the face very slowly - one hundred thousandths of a second, but we compare it with a template we already have in order to reduce the processing time.

"The working assumption is that the private reality of each of us does not accurately reflect real reality, but is the product of a dialogue between the brain's creativity with selected components from indicators of the outside world. The private reality is created by building a learned internal model, which calculates the relationship between the findings of the brain to the measures of the external world. Our learning is a process of updating the internal model."

"An adaptive control system based on prediction is the source of the amazing creativity of the brain." Emphasizes Prof. Vadia, who explained with a flowchart the feedback processes that take place in the brain from the moment the information is received to the issuing of an appropriate output (I can predict what will happen if I move my hand and send it to the wine glass - the glass will come closer to the mouth." We receive output about what happened in the past and predict the The future is through the completion of the expected at the cognitive level. We want to make machines that can learn as fast as our brains."

Later, Prof. Vadia showed several examples of using a computer to bypass limitations of the brain, such as a study by Prof. Amir Amadi that showed how you can translate mirrors into voices for the blind, and other experiments that show how you can run algorithms that detect electrical activity inside the brain at tremendous speed. In order to do this, it is necessary to insert microchips into the neural networks and understand its electrical activity, and thus, for example, make a person or a monkey change the activity of the brain, or just find out what the brain intends to do. "If you are sick, for example schizophrenic, I want to intervene and change the activity of the brain. If your brain is healthy but disconnected from the hand, I want to read what the brain wants to do and activate the hand accordingly."

"Already today it is possible to insert sensor arrays the size of a pin that allow disabled people to operate a robotic arm or leg crudely. We are only at the beginning of the road. To reach faraway places we need to improve the methods of obtaining information from the brain using chips that will simultaneously report the electrical activity of thousands of cells - This solution will come from the field of nanotechnology - just as we got from a computer in a whole room to an iPhone, we will get from an iPhone to a nano chip inside the brain. The second area where action is required is The field of wireless transmission: getting as much information as possible from the brain to the computer in a very wide bandwidth. Today's processors are already overloaded, but it is still difficult to transfer all the information to them in real time. I think we will see a lot of progress in this field in the next five years."

In response to the question of whether it will not be possible to misuse the brain control systems, Prof. Vadia replied: "Any technology can be misused, but we must remember what Prof. Albert Einstein and Prof. Bertrand Russell said after the use of the atomic bomb in World War II: "Remember your humanity And forget everything else."