Reborn in 2010, the AI ​​in my mind is too powerful.

The Human Connection Project—this name sounds very misleading and will inevitably remind anime fans of the Human Instrumentality Project.

But in reality, it's just research on the human brain; the name comes from connectomics.

Connectomics is an emerging field that maps and studies the neural connectome, aiming to characterize the complete circuitry of the connections in an organism's nervous system.

This thing sounds complicated, but it's actually not simple at all.

The concept of connectomics can be traced back to the first map of the nervous system of Caenorhabditis elegans published in 1986, but its development has been slow since then.

After all, Caenorhabditis elegans is completely transparent and has a simple nervous system. Even so, twenty years later, humans still haven't been able to completely map all of its neurons.

It wasn't until 2010, when Seung Hyun-jun, a pioneering Korean-American neuroscientist in the field of connectomics, proposed the groundbreaking concept of "I am my connectome" in his famous TED talk, that this science gained more attention.

Simply put, he believes that connective tissue determines uniqueness.

A person's uniqueness, memory, personality, and even self-awareness are essentially determined by all the connections between neurons in the brain—the connectome—rather than by a fixed genome.

If we say that genetic settings are the foundation for determining physiological characteristics.

The connectome is dynamic and constantly changing, shaped by both genetics and life experiences. Throughout your life, learning, memory, emotional experiences, and behavioral changes continuously reshape your connectome.

All your actions are constantly adjusting the strength of existing connections, creating new synapses or eliminating old ones, growing new neuronal branches or retracting existing ones, generating new neurons or killing old ones.

All differences in mind and thought stem from differences in connective tissue. Each person's brain connection patterns are unique, dynamically encoded, creating individual differences.

However, despite the great theoretical significance of the connection set, its development has been extremely difficult.

The number of connections in the human brain is 1000 billion times that of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, and for a long time researchers could only study it by analyzing post-mortem brain images combined with in vivo imaging.

The Human Connectome Project aims to utilize various brain imaging techniques, including resting-state functional MRI and diffusion-weighted MRI.

Scalp electroencephalography, magnetic field imaging, and other methods were used to comprehensively map the functions and structures of different living human brains.

Although the plan is still underway, no data has been released yet.

However, Chen Yiran possessed a man-eating flower. This was originally a public research project, which would eventually be made public, so its confidentiality was practically zero. Chen Yiran was able to obtain the experimental data that was to be released in advance.

This includes brain scan data from 68 healthy adults, along with their behavioral information and 2TB of brain imaging data.

These can only be used as a reference. Chen Yiran decided that he couldn't wait for slow development; he had to test it first.

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A month later, another branch of Aurora Group, Weaving Technology, was established.

The other shareholders of Aurora Group had some doubts about this project, which seemed somewhat unrealistic and obviously meant to burn through cash.

However, Chen Yiran's current status is too high, and no one dares to be the first to disagree. Anyway, it's only two hundred million US dollars a year, so they just let Chen Yiran burn it as he pleases.

After all, although Aurora Group has been aggressively acquiring various companies since its inception, the company's cash flow has become increasingly abundant.

Apple has been enjoying a string of successes lately.

Uber leveraged Apple's traffic to conquer markets across the United States. Because it was directly embedded in Apple Maps, some copycat companies couldn't even launch a price war. Without a traffic entry point, no matter how cheap the price was, it was useless.

Netflix subscriptions have also hit a new high, and with so much money they don't know what to do with it, they're starting to prepare to invest in original series worldwide.

Samsung was equally impressive, with its new system proving a great success.

The system store has consistently provided a large amount of cash flow.

Aurora Group receives various technology-related revenue shares from these businesses, and with the existing income from each branch, they already feel that Chen Yiran is not ruthless enough and is not spending money quickly enough.

An initial investment of $3 million and a commitment of $2 million per year represent a massive amount of capital in this relatively uncongested market.

Therefore, Chen Yiran directly brought all the big fish to Zhiwang Technology.

The most important person in charge was Professor Krishna Shenoy, who was poached from the Stanford Neural Prosthetics Systems Laboratory.

He is a perfect collaborator in the field of brain-computer interfaces, having made significant contributions to algorithms, electrode interfaces, and clinical trial design.

And there's also bad news that could be good news: Professor Krishna Shenoy was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2011.

For him, holidays were completely meaningless; he was determined to dedicate the last part of his life to research and accelerate the production of results.

Clinically, Chen Yiran directly chose Jamie Henderson, a neurosurgeon at Stanford University recommended by Professor Xie Nuoyi. He had previously co-directed the Stanford Neuroprosthetic Translational Laboratory with Professor Xie Nuoyi and was the one who actually performed the implantation surgery.

He can be responsible for the FDA clinical trial pathway for brain-computer interfaces, electrode implantation accuracy, and postoperative management.

Finally, there's Timothy Dennison, recruited from Medtronic. Medtronic is a leading global medical technology company primarily focused on chronic disease treatment, manufacturing pacemakers, insulin pumps, and various surgical consumables.

Timothy Dennison spent twelve years at Medtronic designing application-specific integrated circuits for implantable neural devices. He holds more than a hundred patents and his specialty is finding ways to place chips into various parts of the body.

The rest of the team were recruited by these three bigwigs, meaning they recruited most of the talent in the industry.

Chen Yiran gave them the main goal, which was to achieve breakthroughs in hardware research.

The current electrode substrate is rigid silicon. After implantation, the brain will continuously produce glial scars, the signal will become weaker and weaker, and it will also cause some pain. Therefore, they need to find newer materials to adapt to the electrodes.

Regarding electrode coatings, it is also necessary to find ways to reduce interfacial impedance while increasing charge injection capacity.

In terms of chip design and packaging, Chen Yiran directly instructed Timothy Dennison to use FLowEDA's technology for better design.

Chen Yiran didn't expect them to achieve any immediate success; he already had a general expectation.

All of this depends on the official chip from the coffee project team being released before the research and development speed can be truly accelerated.

However, it's still possible to use money to splurge a little and satisfy his curiosity.

Just then, the Venus ship finally arrived at Lanai Island, and he went there to check on the progress of the project.

After all, if he were to conduct experiments, only Lanai Island could give him peace of mind.