hjalli.com – Hjálmar Gíslason

Once I was going to write a book. As a matter of fact I started writing a book. The subject was brain technologies from technical, philosophical, historical and futuristic standpoints.
As all of my time now is devoted to developing Spurl.net further, I realized that this book is not going to be finished. At the same [...]

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Scientific American’s latest special issue is Scientific American Mind. It is a collection of very informative and interesting articles on the latest in brain science, philosophy of mind and brain technologies.
There is a brilliant article on “idiot savants” – people that have autism or received serious brain damage so that they do not function [...]

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An article on Brain-Computer Interfaces
- Transforming Thoughts Into Deeds Wired News

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This article discusses where monkeys’ language abilities end and the realm of humans begins.
Puzzled monkeys reveal key language step – New Scientist

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I mentioned in the Trendwatch the other day that Popular Science has a cover article in January about Brain-Machine Interfaces. Well, the article is now online, and it is a brilliant one. Wetware has mentioned much of the research discussed in the article before (see the Brain technologies category), but Carl Zimmer’s article is [...]

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Do you remember the “scribbling rat neurons“, Wetware wrote about a few weeks ago? In that project, neurons from a rat’s brain were used to control a robot arm, holding a pencil. To add a little dramatic effect, the “brain” and its “body” were on two different continents.
While this sort of thing gives some [...]

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BBC yesterday posted an article about blind people who restore rudimentary vision using a system that turns the input from a head mounted camera into sound. The result has enabled a blind woman to distinguish similar objects, roughly make out obstacles in her environment and detect whether the lights in a room are on [...]

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The single thing in the philosophy of mind that has surprised me the most is the importance of human language in thinking. Its importance in communication is of course quite obvious, but in the inner language we use to “talk to ourselves” its role is more open to dispute. I won’t go too [...]

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