The title made me think of Anatoli Bugorski, a Soviet scientist who in 1978 survived a high-energy proton beam from a particle accelerator passing through his head.
There's a lot of pieces of the physics of that story I don't quite understand. The main one is that (IIUC) one of the reasons the damage wasn't as bad as it could have been is that at the relativistic speeds the protons were travelling at, his head was extremely space-dilated, so they were basically blasting through tissue paper. But I would expect that tissue paper to have all the mass of a human head dilated into a thin disc, so the density would be far, far higher... Is density not a factor in proton-beam interactions with the material its interacting with (or is it more "it is, but total distance is a much larger factor")?
genocidicbunny · 2h ago
Interestingly, one of the things studied at the institute where this happened is proton therapy.
brenainn · 3h ago
Me too! Amazing that he's still alive.
FirmwareBurner · 1h ago
Yes but ...
"In 1996, Bugorski applied unsuccessfully for disability status to receive free epilepsy medication. Bugorski showed interest in making himself available for study to Western researchers but could not afford to leave Protvino."
>The group measured the times that millions of photons took to travel from a 1.2-watt laser emitting 800-nanometer wavelength light into one side of the head to a detector on the other side.
Sunlight contains copious amounts of 800-nm light, so this is probably completely non-hazardous.
ben_w · 3h ago
While it's almost certainly safe or it wouldn't have passed the ethics committee, what you say is an insufficiently detailed description of setup to determine if it's fine or not.
1.2 watts over your entire head is fine.
1.2 watts in a 800nm-diameter cylindrical path is "for some reason we decided to make the outer few millimetres of your skin explode, but we had to be in contact with your skin to manage that because that power density of laser would have ionised the air before it reached you".
astrobe_ · 1h ago
What can one actually do with a 1 Watt laser? That's a good question to ask to an AI: "A 1-watt laser can be used for various applications, such as cutting materials, engraving, and even lighting cigarettes. However, it poses significant risks, including the potential to cause instant and permanent eye injuries, so safety precautions are essential".
So it looks like it packs some... Power. But I guess the frequency of the light makes all the difference, or maybe exposure duration?
cogman10 · 41m ago
Energy is what your looking for.
Static electricity discharges at around 400 to 600W. Yet it's for an extremely brief amount of time. Sub millisecond usually) so the actual energy transferred is minimal.
It takes around 1Wh to heat a liter of water 1 degree just to put things in perspective.
luguenth · 4h ago
Wearing a tin foil hat is getting real world applications
amelius · 3h ago
But how do you stop the neutrinos?
thrance · 3h ago
Just make your tinfoil hat a few light-years thick.
davidmurdoch · 3h ago
You could also wear a black hole as a helmet!
adolph · 2h ago
The authors suggest black foamboard with cloth and a laser safety curtain is sufficient. Better safe than sorry though.
To prevent light from reaching the detector from sources other than light
transmitted through the head, the experiment was performed in a light-tight
enclosure that surrounded the head. The enclosure was built using black
foamboard and covered with two layers of black cloth and a laser safety
curtain.
These Cornell box path tracers are getting out of hand
bbor · 2h ago
This is a very interesting experiment, and props to the team involved! Exploring the frontiers of the possible is almost always worthwhile.
That said, in my humble (amateur!) opinion the framing from IEEE leaves a little to be desired, for one simple reason: they don't mention that most of what we're looking for is in the cortex (outer layer) of the brain, anyway!† And it kind of has to be, AFAIK... Namely;
fNIRS[1] is one of the four main brain imaging technologies (that I know of?): EEG, fMRI, fNIRS, and ultrasound. Like fMRI (& ultrasound?), fNIRS measures the oxygenation levels of different parts of the brain, which has been shown to be a close analogue for brain activity (more activity => more respiration, just like muscles). In this context, it's not enough to simply receive the signal you sent through -- you want to infer which emitter the signal came from so that you can infer the oxygenation levels of the regions it passed through/reflected-off-of.
All of that is a very amateur, high-level overview, but hopefully it clearly supports my underlying point/question: how could you possibly make this work with a cross-head emitter-detector setup?? It seems impossible to disentangle more than one emitter's signals, and I'm not sure how you'd map oxygenation levels without more than one. The diagram in the article seems to support this confusion, given how chaotic it is.
Then again, fNIRS and EEG both already rely on some serious statistical wizardy to turn 16-128 1D time series into a 3D model of activity, so perhaps I'm underestimating our tools! For example, the addition of frequency modulation to the fNIRS setup is an ongoing area of frontier research, which seems insanely complex to me.
P.S. In case any of the hackers here haven't heard yet: BCI (Brain-Computer interaction) is blowing up right now thanks to the unreasonable efficacy of LLMs for decoding brain activity[2][3][4], and it's a very hackable field! There's a healthy open-source community for both fNIRS[5] and EEG[6], and I can personally highly recommend the ~$1000 Unicorn EEG system[7] for hackers.
> That said, in my humble (amateur!) opinion the framing from IEEE leaves a little to be desired, for one simple reason: they don't mention that most of what we're looking for is in the cortex (outer layer) of the brain, anyway!† And it kind of has to be, AFAIK...
I have friends who do research in this area pretty heavily and my impression is the same, that it's pretty limited to the outer layers of brain, and not super high in resolution.
There are advantages but they are more practical than anything else. Of course, practical can be critical but there a large percent of applications where it would have little utility. But hopefully things will improve.
Onavo · 2h ago
Did they figure out the dark hair issue? It's been a major problem for fNIR systems.
No comments yet
shadowgovt · 1h ago
The next time someone asks me about quantum light effects, I'm going to try to remember this story.
"The quantum nature of light is why it's possible to shine a bright light through a human head without setting that head on fire... As long as it's the right color."
echelon · 3h ago
There have to be ways of getting high space and time resolution signal capable of reconstructing people's exact thoughts, memories, and senses.
Non-invasively. No "below threshold of detection". Beyond anything our scientists say is possible.
We're just not advanced enough as a species to do it yet.
We need to keep pushing these boundaries.
short_sells_poo · 2h ago
This would likely require completely new forms of physics and interacting with matter I'm afraid. It simultaneously requires extremely high resolution and high penetration (we need to see deep into the brain). You'll need to be able to measure the state of neurons and connections - probably down to the quantum level - and do this real time, and then record the data that you collected.
I suppose you could flood the brain with nano-machines which would latch onto all the bits and pieces and collect the data? But where would they store it? How would we get them all back out again?
I don't think it's possible to do this with our current understanding of physics. This is not a question of needing better technology, but needing a whole new universe with different physics altogether.
I'm not even sure what is more far fetched, this or superluminal travel. I'm actually leaning towards the former :D
1970-01-01 · 3h ago
The 2nd photo is named exactly as it looks; This isn't a parody?
It's very common to have a CMS feeding images to an LLM that extracts the contents and gives image files a meaningful file name and alt tag.
hagbard_c · 3h ago
Looks like they used the ALT attribute as file name, maybe by feeding the image to a model which spit out this description. I do not see this as a sign of a hoax.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoli_Bugorski
"In 1996, Bugorski applied unsuccessfully for disability status to receive free epilepsy medication. Bugorski showed interest in making himself available for study to Western researchers but could not afford to leave Protvino."
This is just sad all around through and through.
Sunlight contains copious amounts of 800-nm light, so this is probably completely non-hazardous.
1.2 watts over your entire head is fine.
1.2 watts in a 800nm-diameter cylindrical path is "for some reason we decided to make the outer few millimetres of your skin explode, but we had to be in contact with your skin to manage that because that power density of laser would have ionised the air before it reached you".
So it looks like it packs some... Power. But I guess the frequency of the light makes all the difference, or maybe exposure duration?
Static electricity discharges at around 400 to 600W. Yet it's for an extremely brief amount of time. Sub millisecond usually) so the actual energy transferred is minimal.
It takes around 1Wh to heat a liter of water 1 degree just to put things in perspective.
That said, in my humble (amateur!) opinion the framing from IEEE leaves a little to be desired, for one simple reason: they don't mention that most of what we're looking for is in the cortex (outer layer) of the brain, anyway!† And it kind of has to be, AFAIK... Namely;
fNIRS[1] is one of the four main brain imaging technologies (that I know of?): EEG, fMRI, fNIRS, and ultrasound. Like fMRI (& ultrasound?), fNIRS measures the oxygenation levels of different parts of the brain, which has been shown to be a close analogue for brain activity (more activity => more respiration, just like muscles). In this context, it's not enough to simply receive the signal you sent through -- you want to infer which emitter the signal came from so that you can infer the oxygenation levels of the regions it passed through/reflected-off-of.
All of that is a very amateur, high-level overview, but hopefully it clearly supports my underlying point/question: how could you possibly make this work with a cross-head emitter-detector setup?? It seems impossible to disentangle more than one emitter's signals, and I'm not sure how you'd map oxygenation levels without more than one. The diagram in the article seems to support this confusion, given how chaotic it is.
Then again, fNIRS and EEG both already rely on some serious statistical wizardy to turn 16-128 1D time series into a 3D model of activity, so perhaps I'm underestimating our tools! For example, the addition of frequency modulation to the fNIRS setup is an ongoing area of frontier research, which seems insanely complex to me.
P.S. In case any of the hackers here haven't heard yet: BCI (Brain-Computer interaction) is blowing up right now thanks to the unreasonable efficacy of LLMs for decoding brain activity[2][3][4], and it's a very hackable field! There's a healthy open-source community for both fNIRS[5] and EEG[6], and I can personally highly recommend the ~$1000 Unicorn EEG system[7] for hackers.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_near-infrared_spect...
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-025-07731-7
[3] https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.14030v2
[4] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2401.03851
[5] https://openfnirs.org/2024/01/01/continuous-wave-spectroscop...
[6] https://openbci.com/
[7] https://www.gtec.at/product-configurator/unicorn-brain-inter...
†: As a human, you're not even a brain piloting a skeleton -- you're a 3mm wrap around the basic mammalian brain! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebral_cortex
I have friends who do research in this area pretty heavily and my impression is the same, that it's pretty limited to the outer layers of brain, and not super high in resolution.
There are advantages but they are more practical than anything else. Of course, practical can be critical but there a large percent of applications where it would have little utility. But hopefully things will improve.
No comments yet
"The quantum nature of light is why it's possible to shine a bright light through a human head without setting that head on fire... As long as it's the right color."
Non-invasively. No "below threshold of detection". Beyond anything our scientists say is possible.
We're just not advanced enough as a species to do it yet.
We need to keep pushing these boundaries.
I suppose you could flood the brain with nano-machines which would latch onto all the bits and pieces and collect the data? But where would they store it? How would we get them all back out again?
I don't think it's possible to do this with our current understanding of physics. This is not a question of needing better technology, but needing a whole new universe with different physics altogether.
I'm not even sure what is more far fetched, this or superluminal travel. I'm actually leaning towards the former :D
https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/a-3d-illustration-sh...
It's very common to have a CMS feeding images to an LLM that extracts the contents and gives image files a meaningful file name and alt tag.