Will it be possible someday to replace our dead brain cells with manufactured memory circuits?
446680
i have no dought that this will one day happen...people have found on freak events, a brain cell that reacts to a picture in lab animals...i would imagation after a while they will have much better brain mapping to a cellear level...then from there they could figure out how to make a computer to read the information...but i think that is as far as it will go...i do not think that the computer will think for us or anything like that...i think it would be read only in a sense
136911
a far as prosessing power they already do...emotions on the other hand are far away. I rather believe the problem between humans and machines will come from self awareness on their part.
576352
Nanotech is indeed real. Have you never seen surveillance cameras the size of a dime, and what about tracking devices about the size of a cigarette lighter?Do you remember how many different components use to be in a regular am radio & tv set? Tubes, capacitors, resistors, coils, etc. are now on a pc circuit board in the form of an integrated circuit about 1"x1/4". The first computer ever devised needed many rooms to house. The laptop now is less than the sise of some wire bound notebooks high school kids carry.
809803
Great question. \n\nYour analogy to man-made devices is somewhat of a backwards take on things, as most machinery is actually made to mimic living things.  Nevertheless, machines or beings, both are designed to take some form of energy from the surrounding environment, and convert it into work.\n\nIn that regard, the brain is very much like a computer that controls the body, but it has one amazing difference that artificial intelligence can't approach (yet.)  The ability to recognize, store and relate patterns to one another.  This is how people are able to do simple things that are beyond the most powerful computers. \n\nWhile our brains do function in a (sort of) binary way, with the firing of neurons occurring or not occurring, they also are able to instantly interconnect experiences (which are just patterns of neurons that fire in a prescribed way based on the chemical triggers) to form new patterns which didn't exist beforehand.  In other words, WE LEARN. What's more amazing is that we can relate things INSTANTLY.  Think about how you can recall a memory from an hour ago, yesterday, or your childhood all in the same span of time.  You can also experience something in the present, instantly connect it to something that happened thirty years ago, and then immediately act on the combination of both the old and new information almost without thinking.  It's miraculous.\n\nThe ability to think like this no doubt stemmed from our animalistic past, and the need to survive previously inexperienced phenomenon, but over time, we've adapted it to be able to create, envision, and imagine things that don't yet exist.  This is something that has plagued computer scientists working on A.I. since the beginning.\n\nGetting back to your original question, I guess we should ask ourselves, does the brain exist to control the body, or does the body exist to transport the brain around it's environment.  Since, over time, intelligence seems to increase in complexity, one would have to say that the body exists to transport the brain around.  This leads us to ask, did intelligence occur spontaneously, or was the body designed to be programmed?  \n\nWith computers, the limitation to the capabilities of the software is ALWAYS the hardware.  Even though programmers always find clever ways of doing things with limited hardware, there is always a limit.  So far, this doesn't seem to be the case with the human brain.  There seems to be no limit to how sophisticated our thought processes can become.  We may only be able to remember and recall a certain amount of information, but being able to INNOVATE, and create previously unimagined connections between things seems to be limitless.  In a sense, we are able to continually "re-write" our own operating systems, based on the new things we learn.  Thank goodness too, because what a drag to think there was a limit on how much we could learn or know.\n\nFor this reason, I'd have to say that if our brains are like computers, they haven't been "programmed" with software in any conventional sense.  They are just too fluid and adaptable to be compared to something as limited as a computer.
681262
most likely not, unless you have the capablity to work on wired circuits that are finer than hair, or on components that are built into the media substrate or are surface mounted.  you will notice that flash memory mods are not built to be taken apart.
37851
I quite disagree with Darrius. The law of accelerating returns and Moore's law make it inevitable that by no later than 2040 we will have advanced so far technologically that we will be able to do all that they do in the Matrix movies and more. We won't need  a huge spike driven into a hole in the back of our heads though. (Ever hear of wireless networks?)\n\nWithin a decade or two we will be able to supplement our brains with implants allowing us to parallel process (multi-task), enjoy instant and total memory recall, and communicate via the then ubiquitous, wireless Internet with other people or computers including being able to download information. \n\nThis is just scratching the surface. Check out my source links and hang on, we're all about to go on one heck of a ride.
246421
cloning\nstem cells\ngenetic manipulation
812712
I would like a combination of the 2 with some more ram\n\n(i heard somewhere they will use mirrors to send the info instead of wires so they can send info at the speed of light. and it will be a lot more quiter)
768599
Hi. Try this link for info on the holographic storage of a mind. : http://twm.co.nz/pribram.htm and here : http://www.acsa2000.net/bcngroup/jponkp/
292711
No I don't think so. Our brains work by electro-chemical interactions.\n\nWe'd be much smarter I think if our brains worked like a quantum computer. Or, we could not make any decisions at all as all of our decisions will be in a quantum flux, and dictated only by the laws of probability. So we'd be making random decisions!!
858440
Sooner or later Hard Disk drives will be obsolete. Flash ram will not be the one to do it. It has a shelf life, and eventually goes bad. MRam is a new chip on the market that uses magnetic fields to store bits, and does. not go bad. Keep your eye out for that one Might be a good stock to get into!
58333
No, he is talking about how the raw processing power has typically doubled within 16 to 18 months.  It pretty much already has.  They have reached the limit as far as pushing the GHz limit.  Processors top out at 3.8GHz or 4GHz but with water cooling and overclocking it is possible to get them to 6GHz+ but that pretty much voids the warranty and should not be attempted unless you know what you are doing.\n\nNow they are finding more efficient ways of pushing data through the processor, better architectures, more efficient data paths, higher cache memory directly on the chip and so on.  Soon that limit too will be reached and they will have to find entirely new technologies to produce processors.  Some say optical processors, or something to replace silicon chips is making them with carbon nano-tubes.  Neural net processors are also being tested (one was taught to fly a plane - virtually).  None of these technologies will reach the mass market no sooner than 10 years but probably more like 15.
216202
depends on the organ.....\n\nFor example in your case, a brain can be bloody costly....and it would not be a transplant, it would have to be an implant to build up from scratch...\n\nIf you were to give your brain to someonelse, it would be very costly, since it is new, and never used yet....
1027249
i believe it is possible. we use less than 10 % of our brain. it is believed that if we could use more then we could fly, move things with our minds, and read peoples thoughts.
427821
However fast you think it is, once we reach that speed you can be sure that there will be a way to make it faster still!\n\nIn 1965 Gordon E. Moore (a co-founder of Intel) stated:\n\n"The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year ... Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years. That means by 1975, the number of components per integrated circuit for minimum cost will be 65,000. I believe that such a large circuit can be built on a single wafer."\n\nThis has become known as "Moores Law", which roughly states that there should be a doubling in the complexity of a chips structure every 2 years.\n\nBy and large, this has held true from 1965 to today, and with IBMs announcement that they can now use deep-ultraviolet optical lithography to print circuitry at just 29.9 nm wide it is safe to say that this law will be upheld for the next few years at least.
210354
Did you ever stop to think, maybe it isn't microprocessors that are the next step in evolution, but plastics. Our brains are supposed to have 100 billion neurons. We could make a plastic structure with 100 billion interconections (cross-linked polymer molecules) a lot sooner than a chip with 100 billion transistors. So, be nice to plastics-- they might be throwing us out tomorrow.
441296
In certain low volume and high speed circuits, transistors will always have their places. ALthough their are now many more radio chips.\nMIKE