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

'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'

[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...

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.