“The next big wave of scientific innovation is the human brain,” says Miguel Nicolelis

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Physician and neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis explains that all cognitive attributes, including intelligence, are an organic, analogous property of our biological makeup. “People try to force the analogy that the brain is a computer,” he says.

The specialist currently heads the Nicolelis Institute for Advanced Brain Studies, which aims to treat more than one billion people suffering from neurological diseases. Internationally recognized, he was named one of the 20 greatest scientists of our time by Scientific American magazine in 2004.

He spoke about this and other topics related to neuroscience during episode 8 of the AcelerAI program, on the XP Educação channel , presented by Diogo França, CTO and head of products at Faculdade XP.

“The brain is not a computer. It has neither rcs database nor software; it computes with its structure. And it computes continuously. The brain’s electromagnetic field is a continuous field,” he adds. “This continuous structure of the brain is impossible to reproduce in digital logic. Digital logic tries to approximate, to copy,” he states.

Impossible to reproduce
“When we learn something new, for example, like our conversation, it is literally changing the microstructure of the neurons in our brains,” comments Nicolelis about how dynamic the central nervous system organ is and how impossible it is to reproduce it technologically.

“It is obvious that if you want to apply big data or data mining to improve medical diagnosis, estimate the chance of having diabetes, cancers, all these mathematical computational advances are welcome,” he explains.

Next deep tech
“But I have objections to when text processing systems start to suggest words and systems based on your history,” he says. “For us, who have been writing for years, that’s fine, it won’t change because we already have our grammatical and vocabulary universe formed. But for a child who is learning to write or read, this will be detrimental because it will restrict them,” he explains.

Nicolelis also states that the human brain is extremely dependent, both in its development and maintenance, on social interaction. “We depend on this to maintain our mental health,” he states.

Furthermore, he believes that neuroscience will be much more talked about than artificial intelligence. “The next big wave of deep tech is the human brain. It is the connection of several areas of knowledge: neuroscience, computer science, engineering, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, mechatronics and even cutting-edge mathematics,” he says.

“We have several ideas about how the brain can really be the frontier for multiple industries, which have not even realized that neuroscience is permeating their business plans,” he highlights.

For the scientist, “neuroscience can definitively influence several vital industries in the future of humanity”.