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Welcome Greg Gage and Tim Marzullo of Backyard Brains! (hereafter annotated as “BB”)
- The focus of BB is to make simple to use electronics so that neuroscience is taught sooner in students’ lives.
- The Spiker box is a signal chain with bio instrumentation amp, then bandpass filtering, then an amplifier to output through a speaker
- It turns out that plants also have electrophysiology (action potential firing). Especially
- The cortex is done in layers, so the polarity lines up and the signals are detectible
- The human brain initiative is part of a push from the Obama administration. It’s meant to increase the understanding of the brain.
- Tim did some predication of the future:
- 2035 neuromotes, silicon wrapped in biocompatible material.
- 2165 is the completely controllable to the single neuron layer.
- There is a bluetooth kit to control bugs by manipulating their antennae. It’s called The Roboroach; it uses similar science as to the experiments by Luigi Galvani on frog legs.
- Greg gave a TED talk about the human to human interface
- Chris knew what the Myelin sheath is; a coating over neurons that allows signals to travel faster.
- Squid giant axon and the entire equation is governed by the telegraphers equation.
- Communication between axon of one neuron and the dendrite of the next is done via neurotransmitters. Check out the diagram of a neuron on wiki.
- The Spiker box can also act on the output of electromyograms.
- Chris had a chance to meet Greg and see some of the electronics in action (with bugs) with Hackaday in Ann Arbor, MI.
- On the educational front, BB’s goal is to make more experts via their tutorials and kits.
- For neurological disorders, doctors are starting to look at using electroceuticals instead of pharmaceuticals.
- Ben Krasnow did a video about creating his own TMS.
[tube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUW7dQ92yDU[/tube] - Chris confused DBS (where they install an electrode) vs TMS (where there is an external magnetic field).
- BB has done some educational based research papers.
- They have been working with marine biology in Woods Hole. Aneonomes and jellyfish have loose neural nets and there is very little understood about them.
- BB got a fellowship from Chilean gov’t (Startup Chile). They also have worked with folks from the Santiago Maker Space.
Perfect line of work for sociopaths
Great interview. Many plants have neurotransmitters in them like dimethyltryptamine. Greg & Tims studies are phenomenal. Keep up the great work guys.
73
Detecting stray voltages used by utility companies is a technology that may be promising for neural reading outside of the body. The system treats objects as antennas and uses a very sophisticated receiver and DSP techniques to capture objects with as little as 1V rms from 6 meters away. Since it is configured for line voltage frequencies (whose power frequencies is very close to that of neural pathways apparently…) I would image the tech would be a good start. Namely the concept and DSP algorithms.
The company is called Power Survey Company and the truck equipped device is the SVD2000.
Thought I’d pass on the knowledge.