Warwick Gets a Few More Wires

teamhasnoi writes "CNN reports that a British university professor has been fitted with cyborg technology. (100 wires embedded in his wrist) This apparently enables his nervous system to be linked to a computer, encoding movements like wiggling fingers and feelings like shock and pain, and recorded for the first time. Is this the end of VCR+? Or the beginning of an (unholy) marriage of man and machine?" Warwick has been doing this for five years now.

Comments

neuromancer

[I Want GNU!]

Has anyone here read Neuromancer? It was the first book of the Cyberpunk genere, and it preceded Snow Crash and The Diamond Age.

Anyway, in this book, one of the main focuses is how they are fitting the characters with wires and chips and such, and they set it up so that one of the characters is acting like a video camera and another one is set up in such as way that he can see and feel and hear everything she experiences.

Re:neuromancer

[McBeth]

Neuromancer is definitely _not_ the first book in the Cyberpunk Genre. While Gibson did coin the phrase, several books had been written before Neuromancer. A book that everyone would agree as being cyberpunk, and pre Neuromancer, is "True Names" by Vernor Vinge. It was published in 1981, three years before Neuromancer.

If you want to define cyberpunk by the themes in the books more than the physical act of flying around in computers with your mind, people like Alfred Bester, Roger Zelazny, and Philip K. Dick are definitely precursor-cyberpunk. Hell you could make a good case for Plato and Descartes.

If Vernor Vinge weren't such an _okay_ writer, and a pompous buffoon, I'd be more willing to give him the title.

'Batlike 6th sense'

[PopeAlien]

Warwick also hopes to wire himself up to a ultrasonic sensor, used by robots to navigate around objects, to give himself a bat-like sixth sense.

Hmm.. I've heard that when somebody loses one sense (sight, hearing, etc) the other senses grow stronger to compensate. So the obvious question is: Would this work the other way around? If you add a 'sixth sense' would the strength of your five basic senses be diminished? Would they become 'lazy'?

Re:'Batlike 6th sense'

[isoteareth]

It would never really work like a true sense. Your brain specializes large chunks of itself to deal with the various senses, and just adding in some new input without having that chunk of brain matter to process it isn't going to do much.

As an example of something similar, consider cases where sight has been restored to individuals who have been blind since birth, or at least for a considerable amount of time. They never gain sight in the way "normal" people regard it. An example of this can be found in "An Anthropologist on Mars", in the study of Virgil.

Re:'Batlike 6th sense'

[Puk]

Your brain specializes large chunks of itself to deal with the various senses, and just adding in some new input without having that chunk of brain matter to process it isn't going to do much.

But that leads to an interesting thought. While what you say is largely true once you are an adult, your brains starts largely unprogrammed with how to process optical and auditory input. It learns what is effective and how to decode the outside world's input into useful internal information. I assume most of this learning is done when young, but I bet some of it continues later on. So if you inserted this information into the brain, eventually it should train itself to use it as just another sense/input -- probably faster if you are younger.

This, of course, leads to a debate on who it would be moral to test it on, and I'm not sure there are any good answers to that. I certainly don't have any.

On a related note, I remember watching a presentation at school on a comparison between the basic structures of a image using some sort of network (sadly, I forget the details) trained on raw images and the basic structures used by vision-related groups of neurons. They were amazingly similar. No, this didn't fool me into thinking we have any clue how the brain works. :)

-Puk

Re:'Batlike 6th sense'

[Uberminky]

a human who uses his 5 senses together in a new way

I don't know anything about bats. But what you say sounds a lot like something I've been thinking about lately. It's incredibly common, but we probably don't think about it much: subconsciously combining our senses to create new "senses". Here's a great example: wetness. You don't have any wetness sensors. But if you stick your hand in a box and brush it up against something that's wet, you know it's wet. How? Your "cold" sensors (or temperature, or whatever) fire, your tactile sensors register certain patterns, your hairs are matted down (more tactile feedback).. and you infer subconsciously that your hand is wet. You could be wrong (just like you can be mistaken in your judgements of the sources of sounds, etc), but odds are you correct. If you rub your fingers together and they catch, slip, and vibrate in a certain way, and your muscle feedback says there's a certain resistance signature, you're probably wet. You can't help but feel it: it's a new sense.

Sorry for going a bit off-topic. Seems kinda interesting to me anyway...

electric circuts?

[Hadlock]

as i understand it, pain/heat/cold sensory input is sent through the nerve endings as chemical/electrical pulses. wouldn't this sort of electrode "paralyze" his hand, removing him of all feeling, or at the very least; give him that "oh shit my arm went all tingly when i fell asleep on it again" feeling? i know the latter has to do with lack of blood-flow, but it seems like his sense of touch will be at a serious disadvantage.

on a second thought; do you have "upstream" nerve channels (hand to brain), and "downstream" (brain to foot) nerve channels? or do they just use the same neural pathways?

this is good for "terapalegics" (3 limbs missing?), but might this have any applications for scroleosis, or MS? (my friend was recently diagnosed, and a co-worker just had back surgery, i know not much more about the disease)

Re:electric circuts?

[NullStr]

on a second thought; do you have "upstream" nerve channels (hand to brain), and "downstream" (brain to foot) nerve channels? or do they just use the same neural pathways?

'Downstream' nerve signals (*from* the brain) follow what's called the Efferent pathway, and 'upstream' signals follow the seperate Afferent pathway.

Yes. Neurons, in general only carry signals in one direction

Interestingly, it seems that transmission of neuronal potentials in the opposite direction to the main signal is important for learning. This backpropagation effect has nothing to do with neural network learning schemes you learnt in CompSci courses, however.

Although this is a step forward

[Merik]

for human computer interfaceing, there is a more direct method for gathering movement information: These guys at Brown University have gotten this information from a monkey by monitoring very few neurons directly in the brain(I as few as 20). Looks like the monkey are always going to be one step ahead of us:)

Man in the middle nerve hacking?

[lysurgon]

Hmm... this sounds like nervous system hacking to me. It's kind of a "man in the middle" type infiltration for recon purposes. Makes one wonder exactly how the communication that lets me type this message is getting passed around my body.

If we can decode the human nervous system, that would be a huge step. I'm not sure if it's a good one or bad one, but a step.

However, I don't know how successful we will be at integrating computers and the body. As far as I understand it, the nervous system while based on electrochemical energy circuits, is not a binary system. Each nuron has many possible states, not just on/off. These various neuron states cause different neurotransmitters to be released at synnapses (where they connect) and somehow a super-complex net of this leads to consciousness. Hopefully this research will eventually shed some light on that "somehow".

In the mean time, the most succeess will probably come from just letting the human body adapt to computerized input, like that optical sonar implant they did a while back.

Offtopic: I did some research on neurotransmitters recently. It's fascinating stuff... makes one realize that taking drugs is really just a crude (though often entertaining) way of hacking your own body/mind. But then agan, so is any activity you take designed to have some effect of yourself.

Re:Beware of Kevin Warwick

[TinheadNed]

As a student of Kevin Warwick, now having had him as a lecturer for two years, I would like to say that, yes, he is a bit of a prat. But he's a nice guy. The Department of Cybernetics is one of maybe two in the country, and it is a bit publicity orientated. My AI lecturer just asked me if I was going to try to market my neural network project, and I don't think he was joking.

And the rest of the Department is not against going on the radio to tell Warwick he's completely insane. The fact that the electrodes he's having fired into his arm have never been removed from live animals (let alone humans) before adds a little zest to the whole operation. Aside from gangrene and other infections that could get in from the hole in his arm he now has that could destroy his use of his hand.

And there are a lot of uses for this implant if it works. Admittedly most were thought up afterwards, but there are uses. It's just a little overmarketed. He's a bit weird but he's not as serious as some people think he is. I think he's just trying to shock people to get their attention

New Scientist calls it a "Gimmick"

[Curious__George]

New Scientist has this article under the headline: Nerve Implant Experiment "a Gimmick", but you can't help but wonder if it is jealousy at the media attention that the guy garners more than bad science that has other scientist against this guy.

Curious George