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Max Hodak - The hard problem of brain-machine interfacing

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There’s currently a widespread belief in society that the trouble with brain-machine interfacing is understanding the ‘neuronal code’: what the brain is saying and how it encodes information about its world. There are over one hundred billion neurons in a human brain talking amongst themselves in a hidden language our best neuroscientists are only beginning to understand. This is partly true. Yes, we’re beginning to understand the neural code; and yes, some of our best neuroscientists are involved with that effort; but no, that’s not the hard part. The problem is that from all of our experience so far, decoding neural signals just isn’t that difficult: almost as soon as the recording technology has been available, we’ve always found that there’s enough information encoded in the reachable neurons for there to be a usable correlation (or at least a correlation can be trained*) for classic machine learning methods to make sense of the noise with no special information about the brain nee

Max Hodak - The hard problem of brain-machine interfacing Max Hodak - Writings The hard problem of brain-machine interfacing June 2009 There’s currently a widespread belief in society that the trouble with brain-machine interfacing is understanding the ‘neuronal code’: what the brain is saying and how it encodes information about its world. There are over one hundred billion neurons in a human brain talking amongst themselves in a hidden language our best neuroscientists are only beginning to understand. This is partly true. Yes, we’re beginning to understand the neural code; and yes, some of

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