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.
>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.
It's interesting to me that hair or skin colour make such a difference when it's only a mm or two out of a far thicker solid lump of brain, bone and so on.
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.
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."
13 comments
[ 11.6 ms ] story [ 51.2 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoli_Bugorski
https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/a-3d-illustration-sh...
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.
Sunlight contains copious amounts of 800-nm light, so this is probably completely non-hazardous.
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
"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."