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Working Nerve Chip
poetic writes: "Two scientists from Munich have succeeded in creating a nerve chip with silicon and snail nerves. The cells were hindered from growing away from the silicon with a plastic fence. They managed to get a signal to go from silicon through a neural circuit and back to the chip again. Cute, one step closer to a decent uplink! See the
abstract at Nature's site."
And we think were adicted to broadband!!!
Heck right now I can't find a place to eat without the internet, and now were getting this much closer to wireing ourselves into the network.
Can you imagine what having SlashDot on the brain will be like once this technology get's some where? (of course we'll need a better way to get rid of flame bait)
Of course then MS will come out with Windows '84 and it will only crash your mind once in a while... "Passport for your brain! It's just not for violating your financial privacy any more!!"
I would rather be ashes than dust!
Leach neurons and those of other critters are useful to experiment with because they are very large, especially in comparison to most mammals. This makes it much easier to connect them to electronics. It will probably be a while before we see anything with people, because the connections must be so tiny. It seems likely though that as nanotech and neuroscience advance, this field will become one of the hottest in science.
What I'd really like would be to have a CPU in my arm. Not for real thought -- too complicated just now -- but for the odd maths test it'd be extremely useful...
Of course, it'd have to be something slow -- could you imagine a human with cooling fans stuck all over them?
The chip's cells will need food. Therefore the chip will produce some waste, we'll need odour eliminators. "CountryBouquet air freshener" by AMD.
You will be assimilated...
resistance is futile!
You're using her as bait, Master!
It is certainly a nice start to what could be a promising field, but there are so many things to be dealt with before we could realistically use any technology like this for clinical purposes (ie: borg implants). Namely, if these were to be used in longer nerves (anything in the spine for example) they would have to come up with a way of dealing with myelinated nerve cells, not just bare cells. Myelin is a sheath that covers nerves to increase speed of signal transduction, and piercing it (with a chip interface) could lead to problems in propagating an action potential... However, this stuff looks like it has serious promise for starting research into "biological computing"
... not in here, pal, this is a mercedes...
I saw a documentary on TLC a while ago about AI and such, and they mentioned a group of scientists who had done something similar to this. They were pretty vague about the whole thing but these people had basically taken a small clump of nerve cells (I want to say they were human brain cells, but I'm not sure...) and put them on this chip that would monitor their outputs and provide inputs. They had connected the whole thing to this computer which simulated a very simple 2D (pseudo-3d, kinda like Wolfenstein) environment, and trained the cells to move around in the virtual "world", avoiding walls and obstacles.
It's sounded pretty far out...has anyone else heard of anything like this?
--Ariston
"I'm never wrong--sometimes reality just disagrees with me."
I remember reading about this experement, and what they had done is taken the "brain mass" from a lamprey (a jawless fish with an incredibly simple nervous system). Pretty interesting that just a little bitty hunk of cells could navigate around in the computer. Since a lamprey has but one very simple "eye" it was probably fairly simple to feed in the visual input.
Regards
James
But the only problem is the slowness of the propagation.
Next year, they are going to try the same experiment with rabbit nerves, to see if there is a speed improvement.
I'm actually surprised at the fact that the article focused on prosthetic implants (ie into the brain) as one of the primary benefits of this technology. Many of us on /. followed with similar thoughts. However, I see other applications to be much closer on the horizon. While we have a long way to go before we can start wet-wiring silicon to our brains, I think we could use this technology for artificial limbs much sooner. Theoretically, it should be possible to build entirely eltromechanical limbs that have the ability to transmit feeling -- hot and cold, pressure, pain, etc. Being able to connect electronic sensors in these limbs to actual nerve tissue is the missing link. In cases where a limb truly could not be attached, this would be the next best option. Any speculation on how long it will be?
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
... already patented the 10base-T Interface on the human body? Hmm I guess I'll immediatly rush to the patent office, and get also USB, Firewire and for the sake of it good old RS232 for direct humanoid interfacing.
Remember you don't have to bring a proof of work to patent something, just have to wait somebody else does.
Maybe the man-page will get a new meaning in the future?
--
Karma 50, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt.
If this has your interest, UK professor Kevin Warwick definatly will. He had a chip implanted in 1998, making him a cyborg (not the first though). He researches robotics and decided to get the implant for a week or so, which communicated with the university where he worked through a radio link (his story in Wired).
;) is that he is doing this on himself. There are actually health risks involved in the operation, which is why he chose to get it in his left arm, as he is right-handed. I guess someone would argue that it's unscientific experimenting on yourself, rather than a test subject, but for me it shows how much he burns for this subject, and if see an interview with him, I think you will agree.
THIS year, he is taking it to the next step. "Project Cyborg 2.0":
This phase will look at how a new implant could send signals back and forth between Warwick's nervous system and a computer. If this test succeeds with no complications, a similar chip will be implanted in his wife, Irena. This will allow the investigation of how movement, thought or emotion signals could be transmitted from one person to the other, possibly via the Internet.
I heard on BBC, where he was interviewed, that he wanted to find out, if they could transfer/share pain, he and his wife. Interesting stuff.
What I personally find cool about Kevin (yes, he is a first name kinda guy
-Kraft
Live and let live
Well it looks like that episode was based on Greg Bear's Blood Music, a sci-fi story dealing with MAB's - Medically Applicable Biochips. in that story, they MABs are "microscopic logic circuits which can be injected into the human body to troubleshoot".
He also developed this story into a novel, which I haven't read yet, so i can't say much about it.
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
Learning to fly, Pink Floyd.
The bad guy in that episode was Denis Leary >:)
Actually, this story reminded me more of the episode where there was a worldwide wireless "internet", but it talked directly to human brain via neural methods. Apart from the handful of people who were unreceptive to it, everybody could just download information to the brain whenever they wanted. Dont know how to speak French? zzzip.. learned.
As it happened, the system got a virus that started killing people with information overload , and the "retards" that were unreceptive to it managed to save the day by getting in and fixing the system (and discovering true love at the same time, or something).
What I'd really like would be to have a CPU in my arm.
Wouldn't it be better just to have an implanted interface, and have the actual processing unit be linked by wireless? The power requirements of a wireless interface are less demanding than a whole CPU, so you'd have to plug yourself in much less often. It would also be a lot easier to upgrade the CPU if it were external.
Tim
I find it sad that the first thing someone thought about when they saw this story was that it brought us one step closer to a (completely unnecessary, and downright dangerous in my eyes) machine-to-brain interface.
Hello?! Did it ever occur to such people that such a device has great possibilities for repairing or bypassing damaged nerves in, say, folks who have been paralyzed? Yeegads, people! Get a clue! If this can be made to work effectively in humans, it's just possible that the wheelchair-bound could regain their mobility!
We've got enough info overload right now without being linked to a bunch of frelling computers. Let's think of giving someone with, say, cerebral palsy a whole new and stable degree of motor control before we start browsing the web on the insides of our retinas, hmmm?
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
His next experiment was similar but involved attaching the transponder to the epineurium (sheath) of one of the nerves of the arm- the idea was that the transponder would pick up signals (eg the axonal activity caused by touch sensation, or pain) and then that these signals could be sent to a computer and encoded as "patterns" (eg one pattern for holding a pen, one pattern for being pricked by a pin). These patterns could then be analysed and even sent back to the transponder, where it could now act as an output device, and cause the sensation that was encoded! There was even talk of implanting Prof. Warwick's wife with an identical transplant and putting them in continual communcation, so that for example, when Warwick stroked a kitten, his wife would hae the sensation of kitten-stroking.
Not surprisingly for those of us that have neurological/neuroscientific training, the results from this study have never seen the light of day. The ideas are flawed from top to bottom. Warwick's main mistake is that his second experiment has no relation to the first. The first (having a transponder that identifies individuals) is marginally interesting, if overblown (the transponder doesn't have to be surgically implanted to work) - his idea is "The chip implant technology has the capability to impact our lives in ways that have been previously thought possible in only sci-fi movies. The implant could carry all sorts of information about a person, from Access and Visa details to your National Insurance number, blood type, medical records etc., with the data being updated where necessary."
Im sure fellow
Anyway, that "experiment" (more like a beta test) doesnt logically lead to the second nerve implant. His lack of elementary neuroscience is evident here- peripheral nerve trunks are not good places to encode data- and if he did manage to "record" patterns for himself - how could he "play" them back on his nerves? A simple magnetic transponder? It would be like trying to email a GIF to someone by holding an industrial elctromagnet next to a bundle of phone-wires! And the thought that recorded patterns could be played back on another person's CNS using such crude technology is simply unbelievable.
Professor Warwick is regarded as something of a quack in the UK high-tech/neuro community, as this site, Kevin Warwick Watch, testifies. His research, however, does raise one or two interesting questions. His techniques and methods, though, are nopthing more than circus sideshows, compared to the excellent work with the mollusc neurons.
Tonight the sky is empty. But that is nothing new
I really want a brain implant, too. (Yeah, and I suppose the wheelchair-bound can walk, too -- and have brain implants at the same time!).
But then I thought about the DMCA, and how I'll get in argument with my friends, as usual. We'll see an 80 year-old Anthony Edwards, of ER fame, on the screen and we'll try to figure out what crappy '80s movie he was in, and it'll rack our brains, and then up will pop a message from AOLTimeWarnerMicrosoftDisneySonyCBS Inc. that will say, "If you'd like to remember the movie Anthony Edwards starred in in the late '80s, we can provide the answer for 25 cents. It will automatically be deducted from your credit card."
I'll try to remember the answer, but finally, in desperation to beat my friends to the punch, I'll grudgingly pay the 25 cents to remember the answer, but just as the credit card is authorizing, my friend will yell out, "Revenge of the Nerds!"
But it'll be too late to cancel my thought order! And meanwhile, in my brain, I'll hear, "We have noted in our records that you couldn't recall the film 'Revenge of the Nerds', which is the intellectual property of AOLTimeWarnerMicrosoftDisneySonyCBS Inc. In the future, if you think about 'Revenge of the Nerds', be advised that you will be charged 25 cents. Thank you and have a lovely day."
gameDB
I suppose 'sensations' would be a more suitable word.
-Kraft
Live and let live