Human Brain Explorations, From Sumerians To Neuralink

Many thanks to The Royal Society of Medicine for providing access to the necessary materials.

The three-pound organ is the most complex part of the human body, the controller of our behavior, the initiator of body movements, and the interpreter of the senses.

Enclosed in its bony shell and immersed in a protective fluid, this organ is the seat of intelligence and the source of all the qualities that define our humanity.

This is the crown jewel of the human body, the almighty human brain.

For thousands of years, philosophers and scientists have been fascinated by “the magic” of the human brain.

Until recently, the simple idea of dabbling with it seemed perilous.

Fortunately, the brain has started to relinquish its secrets.

Neuroscientists have learned more about the human brain in the last ten years than in all previous centuries, cumulated thanks to major advances in neurological and behavioral sciences.

The idea of brain transplant or consciousness transfer is no longer just a scene from “I Will Fear No Evil,” a science fiction novel by Robert A. Heinlein but an achievable reality.

This fact sheet is just an illustrated introduction to the human brain, from the early “research” days to the 21st-century discoveries and the ethical-philosophical problems humanity faces as a consequence of these discoveries: immortality, end of religions, pseudo-reality, etc.

Hominid brains have evolved and grown in size from approx. 600g (Homo Habilis) 2-3 million years, to 1500g (1.5kg).

Interestingly enough, the past 28,000 years of human existence shrank our brains by approx. 150g.

How Did We Get Here? (4000 BC To 20th Century)

4000 BC – The first known writing about the human brain is in ancient Sumerian records. 

The anonymous author details the mind-altering states caused by eating or drinking parts of the poppy plant.

2000 BC – Trepanation – a form of primitive brain surgery, widely practiced by prehistoric man, that involved boring a hole into the skull.

Trepanned skulls with evidence of healing have been found in different locations suggesting that the patients survived.

Trepanation was used to treat headaches, epilepsy, and mental illness.

450 BC – Alcmaeon of Croton, an early Greek physician, concludes that the brain is the central organ of thoughts and sensation.

Alcmaeon also suggests that the optic nerves are paths to the brain for light and that the eye contains light too. This interesting theory of the eye as “the chamber of light” was followed by many neuroscientists close to the middle of the 18th century.

170 BC – Galen, a doctor to the Roman soldiers, believes that the brain is a glandular organ that contains four important fluids – blood, phlegm, choler, and black bile.

Galen also believed that the most important mental faculties (cognition, memory, senses, and emotion) are located in the brain’s ventricles.

Galen’s theory regarding the “bodily humours” was enormously influential and remained dominant for more than a millennium.

1543 – Andreas Vesalius, an anatomist, published “On the Workings of the Human Body” (De Humani Corporis Fabrica), one of the first neuroscience textbooks.

As per Glen’s theory, Vesalius disputed that the brain’s higher functions are situated in the ventricles.

He discovered that the brains of animals have identical ventricles to humans. “Since animals have no soul, the ventricles cannot be the “secret” behind emotion and memory,” he reasoned.

1791 – Luigi Galvani, a physiologist from Italy, created the notion of “animal electricity”. He discovered that the nervous system sends information electronically.

His work was a great step toward the modern understanding of neural activity on an electrical basis.

1862 – Paul Broca, a neurological researcher, determined the location of the speech center in the brain.

Broca’s research with brain-damaged patients reassured him that the integrity of the left frontal lobe is vital to speech and damage to this part would result in aphasia.

He also pinpointed the site of the speech as being in the third gyrus of the prefrontal cortex, a section of the frontal lobe now known as Broca’s area.

1906 – Santiago Ramon y Cajal and Camille Golgi win the Nobel for their work on the structure and function of nerve cells.

Cajal was the first to isolate the nerve cells near the brain’s surface, now known as Cajal’s cells.

Their research detailed the mechanisms behind the connective processes of nerve cells and described the basic changes that neurons undergo during the nervous system functioning.

1929 – Hans Berger created the first instrument for recording and measuring the electrical activity of the human brain; the human electroencephalography. 

Known as the EEG, Berger’s invention is a common tool in brain research and is used routinely in neurology and psychiatry.

1932 – Lord Edgar Adrian and Sir Charles Sherrington won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for researching the mechanisms by which nerves transmit messages on neuron function.

1953 – Nathaniel Kleitman and Eugene Aserinsky described rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, a “phenomenon” they discovered while researching the sleeping patterns in children. Until that point, the scientists assumed that the brain was just passive and inactive during sleep.

By using an EEG to record the brain activity during sleep, they discovered that the electrical patterns were very similar to awake people.

1963 -Andrew Fielding Huxley, John Carew Eccles, and Alan Lloyd Hodgkin share a Nobel Prize for their research on neuron cell membranes and the chemical means by which impulses are repressed or communicated by the nervous system.

1967 – Ragnar Granit, George Wald, and Haldan Hartline also share a Nobel Prize in Medicine for their discoveries in physiological, chemical, and visual processes in the eye and detailing how the eye sends images to the brain.

1981 -David Hubel, Roger Sperry, and Torsten Wiesel received a joint Nobel Prize in Physiology. Wiesel and Hubel’s research on how visual data is sent from the retina to the brain. Sperry researched the specialization of functions within the cerebral hemispheres of the brain.

2000 -Eric Kandel, Arvid Carlsson, and Paul Greengard share the Nobel Prize for signal transduction in the nervous system discoveries. Signal transduction occurs when a message from a nerve cell is sent to another via a chemical transmitter, in special contact points called synapses.

Each nerve cell has thousands of connections with surrounding nerve cells, together creating the network of the human brain.

The Human Brain Project – HBP (2013)

The Human Brain Project is a large 10-year scientific research project, started in 2013, directed by Henry Markram (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) and mostly funded by the European Union, which aims to provide an unparalleled compilation of neural data, an interface to graphically navigate this data and the opportunity to achieve – never before realized – conclusions about the living human brain, all within its funding period.

The project is based in Geneva, Switzerland.

Looking deeper, the HBP lists twelve objectives, not one, from which six are very interesting to me, but I’ll detail this subject in my next article:

• Simulate the Brain – Develop ICT tools to generate high-fidelity digital reconstructions and simulations of the mouse brain, and ultimately the human brain.
• Develop Interactive Supercomputing – Develop hardware architectures and software systems for visually interactive, multi-scale supercomputing moving towards exascale computing.
• Develop and Operate six ICT Platforms; Making HBP Tools, Methods, and Data Available to the Scientific Community – Develop and operate six specialized platforms dedicated respectively to neuro-informatics, brain simulation, high-performance computing, medical informatics, neuromorphic computing, neurorobotics, and unified portal providing a single point of access to the platforms.
• Develop Brain-Inspired Computing and Robotics – Develop ICT tools supporting the re-implementation of bottom-up and top-down models of the brain in neuromorphic computing and neurorobotic systems.
• Map Brain Diseases – Develop ICT tools to federate and cluster anonymized patient data.
• Education and Knowledge Management – Implement a program of trans-disciplinary education to train young scientists to exploit the convergence between ICT and neuroscience, and to create new capabilities for European academia and industry.

Conscious Brain-to-Brain Communication (2014)

In a paper published in the journal PLOS One, neuroscientists and computer engineers at the University of Washington in Seattle described a brain-to-brain interface they built that lets two people cooperatively play a simple video game.

Earlier this year, a company in Barcelona called Starlab described transmitting short words like “ciao” encoded as binary digits, between the brains of individuals on different continents.

Memory Engineering With LTD And LTP Or Copy-Paste Emotions (2014)

Roberto Malinow, M.D., Ph.D., of the University of California, and his colleagues, switched a fear memory on and off in genetically engineered rats using a flash of light.

Optogenetic technology produced this first cause-effect evidence that memories are formed by strengthened connections between neurons.

MIT took optogenetic precision to a new level. They taught mice to fear a certain area of their enclosure where they’d get an electric shock – and then they managed to isolate not just that memory, but solely the fear component of the memory.

Then they reactivated this fear when the mice went to flirt with females – and the mice fled in terror. Imagine the power of removing the fear from traumatic memories, while leaving the memories themselves intact.

Human Donor Cells In Degenerative Diseases? (2014)

Dr. Steven Goldman – the URMC Distinguished Professor of Neuroscience and Neurology – and his team of researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Centre, injected immature human glial cells – the brain’s support cells that shape the development of the neurons – into a baby mouse.

The human glial developed into astrocytes as the mice grew and “took over”.

The glial cells “controlled” the growth of the neurons in the mice’s brains, and improved the efficiency of the mouse’s neural network, eventually “sculpting” a smarter brain.

This suggests not only that it may be possible to create smarter animals simply by injecting them with human support cells – a provoking concept in its own right – but also that we may be able to repair the brains of our fellow humans who suffer from degenerative diseases for example.

3D Printing Of Brain-like Structures (2015)

Researchers at the University of Wollongong in Australia found by feeding a bio-ink they created through a 3D printing process they could successfully replicate the human brain. 

The ink was created by harvesting immature cortical neurons from mice embryos and encasing them in a hydrogel of peptide-modified biopolymer, fed into a handheld 3D printer.

Their study found the hydrogel allowed neurons to grow and attach fibers over distances of hundreds of microns, leading to a structure similar to the cerebral cortex.

“…our brains underlie a wide variety of human experiences. For instance, criminality. What does it mean to be criminally capable? Economic behaviour. What is it that makes us fall in love? What is it that makes us form friendships?

Why do we declare war on people we’ve never met? As neuroscience advances, we’re going to start understanding all of these things in terms of brain mechanisms.” Sam Wang, Department of Molecular Biology and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute.

Augmented Reality – God Helmet (2015)

Ultimately, what is the consciousness? Altered states of mind like out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, psychedelic experiences, glossolalia or speaking in tongues, trance states, –  sometimes called spiritual or religious experiences – are all explained, to a certain degree, by modern medicine.

Originally called the Koren helmet after its inventor Stanley Koren, “The God Helmet” is a device developed by Koren and Michael Persinger, a neuroscientist at Laurentian University, to study creativity, religious experience, and the effects of subtle stimulation of the temporal lobes.

The “God Helmet” works by isolating specific patterns of brain activity using weak magnetic fields that stimulate the hemispheres of the human brain in atypical ways. The results of Dr. Persinger’s studies yielded fascinating results.

The device has been used in Persinger’s research in the field of neuro-theology, the study of the neural correlations of religion and spirituality.

Consumer devices are already on the market and the gaming industry is highly interested in this technology. Imagine a “god’s helmet” paired with a pair of augmented reality glasses.

There is no need for tactile gloves or special suits. Combining these two technologies gives a mere mortal the ability to experience the most sacred experiences of humanity, experiences of the few selected ones, in a simple computer game.

Is the physical world we believe in just an illusion? End of religions, deciphering the human brain, decoding the nature of reality?