Slashdot Mirror
Blind Get Wired - for Sight
Graz writes "MSNBC has an article about a blind guy that can navigate around obstacles using camera input into his brain." It's not much, but it's way better than nothing. Looks a little bit painful, though.
Update: See this ABC story with a slightly different take on the same subject.
My training is nowhere near complete, but my initial guess would be no. The brain does have dynamic connection capacity, but that capacity has always been set to deal with the five senses, all the way down the evolutionary tree.
It may be possable by mapping the new capability into a nuance of an existing sense, particularly the somatic sense. The higher areas of the brain are quite capable of such mapping already. We may not gain new senses, but quirks of old senses can be used. For example, it is known that if tactile stimulators are set up right on extended arms, the subject will eventually percieve the stimulation to be occuring in empty space between the arms. Perhaps if the world is mapped to a persons body (GPS), they will come to 'feel' where they are based on the existing somatic sense. That wouldn't even be all that odd to the person. We allready overlay a great deal onto the somatic senses ('gut feelings' and such).
A ballistics visual overlay that ties into the cerebellum could be interesting. I suspect that a lot of things will start as visual and audio overlays for prostetic vision and hearing, and move up from there. Prostetic somatic senses will also be needed for artificial limbs, and will add another input to overlay.
really sensitive to disruption. A little bit of extra electrical stimulation at the wrong time can seriously fuck things up.
Agreed, we're nowhere near that sort of thing now, and won't be for a while. Even when the tech improves, there will be SERIOUS ethical issues involved. The first steps will have to be on adult volenteers as allways.
You have to start somewhere. This guy probably didn't pay for the implants at all, seeing as he was a volunteer.
And hey, remember, this implant is from 1978. That means the hardware is, for the most part, ancient in our current technological terms. If he were to get another implant using something more modern, it's quite possible he'd be able to see significantly more.
But, this is a start. There's a saying out there, "the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." Well, consider this to be that single step.
Well, I wouldnt say that its ludicrous. There are lots of ludicrous ideas and thats not one of them. It may be speculative and farfetched, but not ludicrous.
Anyways either I am misinterpreting the article or this is far advanced over what I knew we could do previously.
Wired Magazine, in an attept to boost their dwindling number of reader subscriptions has decided to release a new version of Wired ... entirely in Brail.
Unfortunately, sales of the new Brail edition have plummeted to exactly one sale, as only one blind man has been determined as capable of actually surfing the web... More on this later.
Sorry guys, guess i just read the article title wrong the first time around...
--Cycon
Your Brain + EEG + LEGO Robots = Brainstorms
Looks a little bit painful, though. There are no pain receptor in the brain itself. For the record, most brain surgery is done with only local anastetic. Thus, the surgeon can control exactly what he/she is doing ;-)
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Wow, think of the options...
:)
:)
This particular AC is gone, so let me suggets a Beowulf cluster of them...
Actually, a cluster could use senses like smell in a much more advanced way, building a map of the smells in an area, not just as one specific sampling point.
Ditto with noise, you'd have a lot more samples.
A high bandwidth link and a sound-chip dedicated to finding better 3d cues with the info, and modifying your perceptions so that you 'hear' the sound as coming from where all units agree it is...
And, then there's simply RC5 or CSC cracking.
If they could do a 10x10 pixel image back then, what are they capable of now? Forget Sony's goggles; I want my next monitor to work like this ;)
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Well, there's something called the Auditory Brain Implant. It converts auditory signals into electrical signals, and sends them directly into the brainstem, bypassing the auditory nerve. This is useful for people who've had their auditory nerves damaged, possibly from an acoustic neuroma (tumor on the auditory nerve). Last I read about it a few years ago, it takes a bit of training to familiarize oneself with the new "sounds," but otherwise helps to get some form of hearing back to folks who've lost it. A simple Yahoo search doesn't show anything informative about it, though.
Using it to move a mouse or select symbols is a bit more realistic than having the computer snag entire images and sounds out of your head, though. (And remember, when the sound is in your head, it doesn't have the tones of your voice attached to it yet; those come when it's actually articulated.)
:) Seriously, I doubt that we really understand the advantage of connecting to the brain at the level of thoughs. Examples: It would be nice to have a machine which would automatically answer the easy parts of a problem I am working on, but this will still require formulating a problems statment, so I think needing to speek the statment to the computer is a minor thing. Example: I supposet there might be way to stimulate a section of knowledge to make you recolection of it better, but we could do something like this by having a series of "note cards" which recap the importent theorems or something. It just sems that we don't know that much about our though processes execpt for the parts that work via langauge.
I think you could could do the same thing to grab speech without speeking that you could do to grab arm movments without moving your arm.. just watch little abortive movements of the vocal cords. Example: It feals like I can "speek" without blowing over the vocal cords, i.e. the vocal cords move but no sound comes out. This would probable make is easyer to the information from your voice then from your arms because you would not need to train the person in these "almost movements" which do not really move anything.. You could just train then to not exhale when they spoke to the machine.
You might not care about spech that much though once you got the arm/finger movements working since a 2D symbole buffer is a much better means of communication (and your langauge can adapt to it the same way it adapts to writing instead of speeking).
Actually, your face and mouth might be the best way to get info to the computer. There are LOTS of seperatly controlled mussles which you could be trained to move individually.
Also, realize the potential problems of doing this. If there's an implant recording your thoughts and sending the data stream to an Internet-connected computer... you think you've got Big Brother looking over you now? Just wait.
Connecting close to the mussle level solves all these problems since you can always choose notto talk.. unless yuou talk to yourself a lot..
Jeff
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Niven and Barnes' book "Achilles' Choice" brings up some interesting possibilities and dangers with the technology of wiring our brains with computers. In their scenario, the "linked" enjoy a level of power, both technological and political. In an earlier book, "Oath of Fealty", he touches on some interesting advantages of having instant data and communications available from a cerebral implant communicating with a central computer.
So... This story looks like another small victory towards the future where we can get our information faster and easier. Right now, it is a tool for helping the handicapped, but perhaps it will be a status symbol once it reaches technological maturity. Be honest! Who would not be tempted to become one of the "linked"?
A dingo ate my sig...
"The brain has all the input ports connected to senses already, and as far as we know there's no place God left for us to install new peripherals."
/really/ see some computing power.
Hmm. Just like God to have a lock on the hardware and software. If God would open things up, maybe the human brain could be ported to other architectures, and then we'd
I just hope God doesn't become the next Apple - Innovation is great, but let us in on it as well!
Makes you wonder if, as a baby, you had some strange thing (IR port, GPS, radio) wired into your brain just after birth, would you learn how to use it, just as you learn how to stand up, talk, and focus your eyes?
My training is nowhere near complete, but my initial guess would be no. The brain does have dynamic connection capacity, but that capacity has always been set to deal with the five senses, all the way down the evolutionary tree. The brain has all the input ports connected to senses already, and as far as we know there's no place God left for us to install new peripherals. Thus, any kind of neural-interface tech is likely to work using the existing sense inputs.
Now, that doesn't mean there can't be some kind of extra output added, as was the case with that guy down in Georgia. It is likely that people will eventually be able to control computers through thought. However, chances are that the output from the computer will still come back through the same sense lines. (It's possible, I suppose, that someone might figure out exactly where the "phonological loop" of short-term memory is (that's the part you're using when you hear your own voice in your head), decode the representations of all known phonemes, and start injecting thoughts in via electrodes. However, that sort of capability is in the very far future.)
As for putting something into a kid so they'd be naturally adapted to it... might not work as well as you'd think. Yes, kids' brains are more adaptive. However, kids' brains are also still developing, and thus really sensitive to disruption. A little bit of extra electrical stimulation at the wrong time can seriously fuck things up. I personally would not volunteer a child of mine for such experiments, even if I'd designed the device myself.
Alik
They absolutely cannot interpret and send brain signals as images. That is ludicrous to think about with our current understanding of visual signals in the brain.
What they can do, is map 100 inputs onto 100 surface electrodes of the brain. Naw, scratch that. Given most implants viability, they probably have a 100 electrode implant with about 20 good signals. The person then learns to interpret whatever perceptual form those 20 inputs take in his brain.
This is also already working in the other direction. They have human motor cortex implants that allow patients to light up patterns of activity in LED grids, and researcher John Chapin of Hahneman has similar implants in rats. His trained rats operate motorized lever arms with their brain signals.
The potential for fine levels of control is still not so hot though, and miniaturizing biocompatible implant grids takes a certain degree of skill. It is not as simple as throwing it on a wafer board and off we go.
The retina implants have a lot more promise than Dobelle's at this point. I should point out that cochlear implants with a dozen electrodes are becoming commonplace. The US version was developed at UCSF by close friends.
The device you describe has been created, and is little improvement over classical Braille. It is called the Optican. There are various technical reasons for the limitations of the skin. The largest is the resolution. Braille uses 0.5 mm high dots in a 2x3 grid with 2 mm spacing. And, BTW, you would recognize Braille characters as well as a blind person with about 2 days of training.
Even reasonable but not so hot visual information requires about 100 pixels. The fingertips also do not like to work together. Some blind people use 3 fingers locked together to read Braille; these fingers have an extraordinary tendency to stay locked together the rest of the time too.
Basically, you have a nice idea, and one that was explored and largely dropped in the late 1960s.
Well, I think there's even more to it than that. Suppose everyone has "sense transmittors" plunked into their brains and is on a big wireless network. Want to know what it smells like in San Francisco one morning? No problem. Want to know what the weather is like outside, don't turn on the weather report, just feel what someone outside is feeling. Always wanted to know what it would be like to screw your neighbors wife...err....nevermind.
Disclaimer: this post is a joke, in real life I understand that this research is a large step ahead for the disabled and intend no disrespect to those who work on it or who volunteer themselves as test subjects.
Now sir, we thank you for volunteering for this research. After the operation you will have vision just like the rest of us...
later
What? All I see is a bunch of letters and stuff, what happened.
That's just the licence agreement, say I agree and you can continue using the implants, otherwise we will have to shut them down and you can go back to how you were.
But, but this license agreement says I cannot use the apperatus to look at any system running software not made by microsoft!
Well isn't that a resonable price to pay for sight?
I suppose so. I accept.
Oh and by the way, that license agreement, if you read enough of it, also said you agree to hand over all your assets to Bill Gates, you read that part didn't you?
I don't even want to know what new meanings this brings to "blue screen of death"...
Little Brother, watching the watchers
According to slashdot, this has already happened.
m l
From http://slashdot.org/features/99/10/01/1215235.sht
"Clark's #7, sensory input. I just talked to a professor of neurophysiology here and he told me a few interesting things. He said that we would definitely be able to do this within 100 years. There's lots of research into this area, especially the eyes. Today we have a pad you can wear on your back that has thousands of pins in it. These pins put light pressure on the skin of your back to form a "braille" image of the b/w image from a camera. With practice, people are able to see with their skin. Fully jacking the brain should be do-able by 2100 he says definitely. I think he was being conservative."
Unless I've misunderstood this bit entirely, it is separate from Clarke's predictions.
Also of interest are braille monitors and reading machines- essentially they're monitors and OCR devices with vibrating pins instead of pixels. Nifty, eh?
zorba
Allow me to spend a moment considering what this kind of technology and experimentation represents.
/.'ers want to know is, does it run linux, and can you make a beowulf cluster out of it?
150, perhaps even one hundred years ago, the completely blind, and even visually impaired (hi!) were considered next to useless by "normal" society. Disabled in general were embarassments to be hidden, rather than fellows to be assisted and given a chance to grow. A century or two ago, I probably would have been sent to a "special" school, if my family were rich and looking to dump me. If my parents were poor, forget it. No way to make up for crap eyes, or deformed legs, or a fried brain.
Fast-forward to 2000. Legs don't work? Get prosthetics! Muscles don't respond properly? Treatment, baby! Eyes not up to snuff? Get a brain implant! This is a glorious time, at least if you live in a region with access to medical help. Whereas someone like me or worse would be stuck in some "good with his hands" job long ago, now I can participate in a radio/TV arts program. So can the completely blind guy one year ahead of me. Advances like these may allow him, me, and other blind/visually screwed people to one day experience sight approaching that of a person blessed with a working pair of optic receptors. Perhaps bulky visors, headsets, even glasses will be unnecessary.
If there was a project in progress to fix my < 20/200, color-blind, light-sensitive eyes, or at least get around the problem, I'd sign up in a second. I wouldn't wish this state on my worst enemy. However, I've become used to it. I still express disbelief at the ranges most people can discern text, when I'm still trying to figure out just what in hell they're looking at.
We can always expect the worst, hope for the best, and work toward a better future in any way we can. Otherwise, why the fsck are we here?
(actually...leave that question for another thread.)
what
plat
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
I suppose, that someone might figure out exactly where the "phonological loop" of short-term memory is (that's the part you're using when you hear your own voice in your head), decode the representations of all known phonemes, and start injecting thoughts in via electrodes.
:)
How much do they really know about the phonological loop? How diffrent is the voice in the back of my head from the voice that is about to come out?
I don't really think that adding other sences would be that importent as compaired to just have a really ergonomic computer interface at the other ends of the ones we have now. I am a first year graduate student in mathematics and the most useful thing I can think of is having the ability to quickly write symboles to my field of vision and move them about without having to say stuff or move my arms. If the process of thinking about moving an arm or saing something really dose triger activity like the actual movement then maybe we could interact with a computer via these abortive movements. This would be the killer app. for brain implants since people could use images and audio in everyday communication.
There are also problems in math which would be easyer to solve if you could develope an intuition about higher dimentional spaces. Idea: the phase space of the ``possitions of the human body'' is MCUH larger then 3 dimentional. It might be possible to take a mussle group and program a computer to respond to the movements of those mussles as if they were moving an object in a higher dimentional space, then the user might gain some intuition about things which they could apply to solving some open problem. It's kinda funny to think we may have applications of biology to mathematics someday..
Jeff
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Anyone want to donate their kid to research? If he survives, he'll be able to do 23-digit factoring in his head... specifically in the math coprocessor under his skin.
Wah!
Blind people are able to read Braille which, I understand, is comparable to a punchcard character code. Little bumps on a surface stand for the characters of the alphabet. To a non-visually impaired person like me, it is a miracle of skill and training to read characters where all I feel is a surface with bumps. This shows what the brain can do given enough training (and will.)
So I think: Why should the brain implant be necessary? Why couldn't you deliver the "visual" information using a device close to a Braille converter? I imagine a little device that you can strap onto the back of your hand or wherever the skin has enough nervous endings to discriminate separate tactile impulses. The device would have little bumps ordered in a 10x10 array, raising and lowering them by electromagnetic switches, much like a Braille converter. So the blind person could have the visual input from the computer, translated into a tactile image that is delivered to the back of his hand, and he could feel the raw image like he is able to feel Braille writing.
No brain implant would be needed, and it would make the device much cheaper and more usable for general purposes.
Yes, you are right there. -- Another glass of champagne?