Slashdot Mirror
Give That Monkey Brain A Robotic Arm!
jeffsenter writes: "The NYTimes (free reg. req.) has a short story about the craziest science since the story on decoding a cat's vision. A monkey at Duke has had its brain wired up to control a robot. However, the robot is at MIT and the signal goes over the Internet. The research offers some hope to paralyzed people."
Link to an interesting story about how humans are actually using thoughts to manipulate objects, and in the case of quadripalegics (sp?) regain the use of their hands and arms.
54% Slashdot Pure
Step 1: New, Improved E-Monkey(tm) patent pending
Step 2: Monkey Linux
Step 3: Fle et of unmanned aircraft
Step 4:Pick Target
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball.
Why does this look, sound and smell exactly like a recent item titled "Monkey Think, Robot Do" ?
6 &mode=nested
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/11/15/16123
-Billco, Fnarg.com
hell, why not the Moon or Mars?
I'll tell you exactly why. Latency. Noone ever seems to stop and think about the latency in these kinds of systems.
It takes radio waves travelling at the speed of light (the speed limit of the univese) several minutes (can't remember exactly) to get from Earth to Mars and back. Now every time you do any action, your poor brain has to wait several minutes for feedback on that. You try putting your foot down to take a step, but don't feel the pressure of the ground on the sole of your foot until a few minutes later. I'm sorry, but that's just not going to work, no matter how much you want it to.
You know those fun things they have at science expos, where you speak into the microphone and it plays it back to you with a 1 second or so delay? Those things are really hard to use, because your brain is used to near-instantaneous feedback. With practice, you can train it to ignore the feedback and just speak.
But this is just speech, you don't really need that feedback (eg. deaf people can speak, particularly if they weren't born deaf). For anything requiring a vague level of dexterity, such as walking, looking, playing sport, music, and doing just about anything with your hands and fingers, I suspect that even 500ms of latency is too much for your brain to handle. Thus it might just work for halfway-round-the-world comms (landline only, no satellites)... maybe.
Telepresence is a nice idea, but should be thought of more as an extension to videoconferencing than as the elaborate setup you're envisaging.
Since you are 'here', communicating with 'there' takes some unavoidable time... The only way to beat that is to go there.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
If only they'd rigged it up in your polling booths.
Monkeys would have decided Florida's vote instead of lawyers. Oh, sorry, what am I saying?
Also, the login/password "slashdot2000" / "slashdot200" works fine at the NY times.
--
The most valuable commodity I know of is information. - Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko, Wall Street
Whats so importaint about the distance? Do they hope to allow amputies the ablity to control their removed arms thosands of miles away? Sounds like a scary movie idea to me.
--
I think I'll light a chipmunk for Bobo.
--------
Okay this seems like a troll to me but I will respond anyway (not because of the position espoused but because of the anonymous assertive and unreasoned way it was presented).
I think you would have great difficulty establishing rights for people much less rights for animals. While some dedicated souls might truly believe a rights based approach to morality most people who espouse such an approach don'treally believe it.
The concept of a right is something which is inherintly inalienable not merely a desired state which can be overrideen in a pressing case or when it "conflicts" with other supposed rights (moreover the concept of rights carries with it that these are local moral necessities so one cannot say you have a right for the government to act in a way which maximizes total utility because this would be a non-local concept). Therefore one who truly believes in a rights based system must adhere to these rights in the most pressing of circumstances. For instance if I actually had a right to property and I owned the cure to a worldwide deadly disease a rights based approach would deem it inproper for that cure to be taken from me despite the billions of lives I might save. In this way very few people actually belive in rights (in an extreme enough example they would in actuality favor a more utilitarian approach. Their supposed rights are really just concepts which, because of human psychology, make the world a better place because of there enforcement.
Under this methodology the only reason we don't do this testing on humans is not because the actual testing would be immoral but that the backlashinduced by angry individuals and the inability of people to determine appropriate and inappropriate testing would reduce total utility
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Similar to the whole "brain surgeon touches part of a patient's brain, his leg moves" kind of thing.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Sure beats the hell out of Aibo, I guess.
54% Slashdot Pure
There was a professor at some university like MIT who embedded a chip into his arm. The chip relayed the nervous signals in his arm back to a computer which recorded them. He was later able to play thos signals back to his arm to reproduce the movements he had made earlier in the day.
Similar idea, slightly different application.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/11/15/161236 &mode=thread
'Well, diagnostics for disk drives are designed to shake up the equipment. But monkey brains are not designed to handle the electrical signals they received. You can imagine the convulsions that resulted. Two of the monkeys were stunned, and three died. The Digital engineer needed to be calmed down; he was going to call the Humane Society. This became known as the Great Dead Monkey Project, and it leads of course to the aphorism I use as my motto: You should not conduct tests while valuable monkeys are connected, so "Always mount a scratch monkey."'
On a nearly related note, (Now that I think about it), this year's presedential election could be described as a race between "Curious George and The Man With The Big Yellow Hat."
Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority. - Thomas Huxley (1825-1895)
10 PRINT "This is a"
20 PRINT "Haiku program."
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Now Furious George can go on that robot-arm assisted killing spree he's always wanted! The Man in the Yellow Hat is going to regret calling HIM a BAD MONKEY!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Then again, I have enough trouble keeping my joystick calibrated... ;)
We'll we really only have two choices for testing medical devices. Florida and monkeys. But Florida can be taken out by a big hurricane and then we'd be left with nothing. So, I chose the monkeys.
We test things on animals so we DONT HURT HUMANS.
If Bobo having wires in his brain puts us closer to helping disabled people then HOOK HIM UP.
Or you can tell the quadraplegics that the reason they still cant do anything, even with all our technology, is because giving them a semi-normal life would hurt an animal.
FunOne
FunOne
They should have sent you to the project homepage, where you can assist in the distributed training effort by sending stimulation to the pain centers of the monkey's brain when it screws up.
This is the more important part of the project. While only a few people are paralysed, most end up having disobedient children.
Unfortunately, they've been having little success in meeting their first objective: teaching the monkey not to curl up in a little ball and scream every time it's hooked up to the arm.
--------
Given an infinite number of monkey brains and an infinite number of robotic arms, could GM finally build a decent automobile?
Yeah, but can it play soccer?
(Whistle) Handball!
Oh well, I guess it would be awesome at throw-ins...
------
Let me give you the lowdown
Geek: Are you kidding me? Check this out, I just pinged my arm - what do you expect me to do with a latency like that?
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
I mean, wired monkeys have been controlling things over the net for ages. Ok, sure, we call them AOLers and First Posters (or "Management", if you want to be really brutal), but that's an issue of semantics which shouldn't be discussed. I wonder though, how that would compare w/ those new internet enabled sex suits (ugh, wheres the Yahoo! Magazine w/ the link when you need it) I'll avoid the obvious word puns though.
Information is the catalyst for revolution
Aw, this is nothing. Scientists back in the 80's hooked up a gorilla brain to a voice synthesizer and various sensory apparatus and created MOFO the Psychic Gorilla. People have been discussing the amazing psychic powers of MOFO the Psychic Gorilla for years on the IRC channel #Mofo (and before that on the Mofo BBS).
Stupid monkey-brain-controlled robotic arm. I've seen a gorilla-brain-controlled voice synthesizer with amazing psychic powers, and a dry, sarcastic wit.
--
Make mine methylphenidate.
I would like to see monkey brains controlling BattleBots. What could be moer entertaining than strapping a monkey brain with some electrodes to a 500lb death machine?
---
seumas.com
At Northwestern University Medical School they have removed lamprey eel brains, stuck them in oxygen rich saline solution, wired them to a little robot with complete with light sensors, and let it drive around the lab either seeking or avoiding light.
This has just got B movie science fiction coolness all over it. I wonder if they can make the saline solution bubble like it did in all the movies of the brains in jars?
(They are mostly studying how to make connections to the brain and how the brain adapts to those connections. The little robot is probably just for media pizzaz or the grad students got drunk and made a bet.)
Whole article is at sciencenews.org.
Search further down the page for "lamprey eel". Its a brain-in-jar project.
This story reminded me of the good old Rhesus monkey head transplant. Dr. White did it 30 years ago and now he wants to do it for a human head. The monkey lived for 8 days.
Most relevant and most interesting of the linked article is the section on Longer Life for the Paralyzed.
---
I'm just an ordinary man with nothing to lose.
I'd like the option to exclude stories that refer to articles on the NY Times in my slashdot config please.
I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
replace "www" with "channel" in any NYT link, and you don't have to spend the 20 secs...
People find it acceptable to cut the helpless animal open, attach wires to it, study it, and then likely euthanised it.
Actually, they probably will monitor it for a long time to monitor the long-term effects of the electrodes on the monkey's brain.
As for using monkeys instead of humans, there are laws against using humans for high-risk experiments such as this which imply manslaughter to Murder-1. Monkeys, no matter how unfortunate it seems, are not proteced by laws regarding manslaughter. Since primate physiology is the most similar to humans, it makes sence to use a monkey to test the system first. This way they can prove it's relative safety to the Feds before practicing on a human and avoid being attacked for murder by the AMA and FBI.
* * *
If this was being done to a dog, or a *gasp* human...
Are you volunteering? Step up to the plate. If you're going to condemn the scientific community for not being willing to use human subjects, then you had better be willing to be a subject!
This happened once, by the way. There was a doctor by the name of Erich Hippke in the early 1940's, working in a little Bavarian village by the name of Dachau-- perhaps you've heard of it? Jews and political prisoners became the unwilling human subjects of a curious surgeon who wanted to know just how much strain the human body could take before dying.
He exposed his "lab animals" (to use your term) to extreme cold, vacuums, severe impacts, etc., all in the name of science, and for the benefit of the Third Reich. Twins were of special usefulness, because if one died, he would have a second subject who was nearly identical for a control group.
And the most convenient part was, there was no need to euthanize the subjects, because his experiments killed every one sooner or later....
There's a lot to think about before you begin advocating human test subjects!
---------------------
---------------------
"Every man, without exception, is full of it." -- Athanasius
Hey, next, let's wire up a monkey's ass to a minefield... that could prove amusing for at least 5 minutes... or better yet, lets fuckin' wire up a whole bunch of monkeys to Brad Pitt for no good reason at all other than to say that we've done it.
OR... we could wire up some scientists to a high voltage / high amperage source and watch all the fun. And when we're done, we can blame it on PETA as we hit some lame-o corp. CEO in the face with a shit pie!
Hi! This is the Sig, blatantly attached to the end of this comment.
What does this research offer paralyzed people? The ability to have a monkey control their limbs from thousands of miles away??
:|
Finally, instead of having their filthy trained monkeys get their grubby hands all over the food the eat and throwing their feces all over the place, they can get nice, hygenic trained monkey brains-in-jars with clean robotic arms to do their chores.
... Mmm, I can't wait to eat that monkey!"
In the immortal words of Abe Simpson, "Oh son! This monkey's gonna to change my life!
--------
If you are too lazy and/or don't want to fill out the form, use:
login: slashdot2000
password:slashdot2000
http://my.webmd.com/living_better_content/him/arti cle/1728.64278
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I wonder if the monkey brain knows it is controling some limb. Can he see this limb move? Is there some sort of web cam for the monkey-bot arm?
I guess what I am asking is:
Can monkey see what monkey do?
-I just work here... how am I supposed to know?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The thing I don't understand about it is, why is it taking so long? I know that the brain and the nervous system are extraordinarily complex, and that they are analog rather than digital to further complicate things, but we are able to reverse-engineer things like Soviet submarines and other-companies'-microchips relatively quickly and fairly often. These are pretty complex and they don't come with design documents. Why isn't there a larger effort to actually document things like "the optic nerve protocol" or "the spinal cord protocol"? The benefits to having such specifications for the human nervous system would be unimaginable.
Of course, there are a lot of complications involved as well--as soon as you begin to manipulate the nervous system you can begin to manipulate reality. When we (or the state) can change what people see and hear directly, things begin to get real sticky, real fast.
The thing that scares me is that it is inevitable--the nervous system is bound to be cracked someday. What happens when it does? What is going to protect us from sinister uses of the technology? Will the benefits outweigh the risks?
Here is a link talking about the keyboard and the thought controlled cursor, but I don't know if it is exactly the case you're talking about. The stuff about the thought controlled cursor is about a third of the way down the page.
54% Slashdot Pure