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Brain Prosthesis Ready For Testing

Posted by timothy on from the can-we-nominate-recipients dept.

jhouserizer writes "New Scientist is reporting that an artificial hippocampus is ready to undergo testing. The leader of the team of scientists is Theodore Berger of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. They hope these artificial hippocampuses can replace damaged (stroke, Alzheimer's, etc.) portions of your brain. I wonder what portions of 'you' would be noticeably different to your family & friends? I wonder how long it will be before we can have HUDs, such as in this story by Cory Doctorow?"

38 of 515 comments (clear)

  1. I need a hud. by Unknown+Poltroon · · Score: 0, Interesting

    So i can tell if my armor suit is wearing down, or if im getting sick.

    Seriously, i think it would be great to have some stuff built in provided:
    A: It has a fucking meaningfull offswitch. I dont need a virus flashing popups at me that i cant turn off.
    b: Open source, and the hardware eqivalent. I wont sign a eula for something thats going into my body.

    --
    All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
  2. Neural Nets by aSiTiC · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Fun stuff...on the path to Kurzweil's future.

    We can all upload our brains into Neural Net Hardware.

    Scarrrry......

    --

    Where the Music Matters

  3. Cool by The+Terrorists · · Score: 2, Interesting
    They'd better make sure that the people recieving these brains intend to use them... for standardized research you had better implement a self-improvement program including Go, reading, crosswords for these folks.

    Most people would waste a brain extension. Any expansion in intellectual power must be preceded by an expansion in social capacity for learning.

  4. Record your life? by sparkhead · · Score: 3, Interesting
    The job of the hippocampus appears to be to "encode" experiences so they can be stored as long-term memories elsewhere in the brain. "If you lose your hippocampus you only lose the ability to store new memories,"

    So lets say they get this working. Would it then be possible to record every moment of your life and store it away?

    1. Re:Record your life? by bandit450 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Funny story. A book called "The man who mistook his wife for a hat" contains a reccord about a man who couldn't make new memories. His name: John G.

      Connections to Memento? Methinks so.

      --
      -- Bandit450...If-Else-Do-*TWITCH*!
    2. Re:Record your life? by iabervon · · Score: 2, Interesting

      It's not clear that the hippocampus actually gets all of the data; it may well be that the hippocampus only produces "tags" for memories, which get sent to the parts of the brain having the experiences, and those parts encode their current state and store it with the tag. In this case, the output of the hippocampus would serve to produce the associations you would have with every moment of your life, but not the moments themselves (or the content of the associations).

      In computer terms, the hippocampus would be the CPU issuing DMA requests; the data actually goes from RAM (short-term memory) to disk (long-term memory), without appearing in the output of the CPU. Recording the output of the CPU gives you all of the disk and RAM addresses, but not the actual data or the meanings of the addresses.

      This project doesn't attempt to understand how the hippocampus works, or even what its exact role in memory is (beyond the fact that, whatever is does, it is necessary to memory work); it attempts to duplicate the signals the normal hippocampus produces. For all we know, the hippocampus might be an incredibly complex clock, needed for memory but having no useful relationship to the experiences you're having.

    3. Re:Record your life? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      why couldn't you just write the output to a file, and then load it into input later?

  5. Igor? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Anyone else think of Igor limping off and drooling while mumbling Brains...my master needs brains....

  6. How about a brain linkup then? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I wonder how far away we are from actually linking the brain to a computer via a neurocannulae? If we can recreate parts of the brain, why not enhance them or make them interfaceable with computers? Think of the possibilities! Lifelike graphics (rendered by your brain, not by a puny graphics card), MMORPGs with true movement, getting shot in FPS games and actually feeling it (would eliminate those dumbasses who run at you all guns blazing just to get your health down to 50% before they get themselves killed in the process) and then there's the good old porn industry that's just waiting for something like this :D

  7. Adaptation by dr_dank · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "Forgetting is the most beneficial process we possess," Williams says. It enables us to deal with painful situations without actually reliving them.

    I am very interested in seeing how the brain would adapt to this. Would the brain always remember things or, in the case of trauma, learn to halt impulses before they reach the implanted area so that they are "forgotten"?

    --
    Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
    1. Re:Adaptation by sql*kitten · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I am very interested in seeing how the brain would adapt to this. Would the brain always remember things or, in the case of trauma, learn to halt impulses before they reach the implanted area so that they are "forgotten"?

      Consider a relational database, like Sybase. It maintains two types of data: the database itself, which analogous to what you know, and the transaction log, which is the experiences that taught you what you know. Example: you know not to touch a hot iron, because you had the experience of burning your finger.

      What you are suggesting is dumping the transaction log periodically. So you would know not to touch the iron, but the memory of getting burnt would not be there. The question is, would you trust your own memory in that case? Or would you get burnt again to work out where the memory came from?

  8. Brain Implants by totallygeek · · Score: 2, Interesting
    I have wondered about stem cell injection working for learning as well. I mean, that nail-gun kid had his heart fixed by some stem cells being put into the heart, how about some stem cells into "dead" areas of the brain?

    --
    Click here or here.
    1. Re:Brain Implants by NewbieProgrammerMan · · Score: 2, Interesting
      But once you're inside the brain, the nerve impulses have no objective meaning. "Thought transmission", if it is ever acheived by technology, won't be as simple as replaying neural impulses from one brain into another; there's no one-to-one correspondence between neurons, and certainly no corresponence to neural weights. (Odds are, we'd have to learn to use it, and it would 'just another' line of communication, not 'mind reading' as it was portrayed in past literature.

      This brings up something I've wondered about: how well would the brain be able to use a new set of input impulses? If we took a simple instrument, like a compass or barometric pressure sensor, and provided that information as some set of impulses to the brain, would it be able to learn how to use it?

      It's one thing to provide a type of input that the brain is familiar with - it's got to be able to learn to interpret all our normal senses when we're children. But can it learn how to use something that has never been 'standard equipment' in our ancestors?

      --
      [b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
    2. Re:Brain Implants by Rorschach1 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      This is what makes language interesting to me... it's sort of taking those abstract ideas and packaging it into 'cross-platform' compatible building blocks (i.e., words). It takes a good speaker/writer to effectively take a multifaceted, complex idea and break it up into those blocks in such a way that it can be re-constructed in the listener's own brain and fit together with what's already there.

      I think if we're going to have some sort of 'thought transmission', it'll be sort of a machine-assisted super language. You'd still need some kind of common frame of reference to start with, though. It makes my head hurt just trying to imagine where you'd start when trying to decode and quantify ideas directly from the brain.

      What I'd like to see is a 'mind's eye' feedback device - something that can build a picture from what you see in your head, and display it for you, like on a computer screen. You could picture a face, or a scene, or whatever. If you're like me and not a gifted artist, it'd probably be pretty rough at first, but by looking at it you'd be able to say 'no, that's not right', and fix details one at a time. Like working with a police sketch artist, but in real time.

  9. artificial intelligence? by sammy+baby · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Back in the day when I was studying to be a cognitive scientist (whatever that means), we did a lot of talking about what the nature of intelligence / mind actually is. There was a "strong anti-AI" camp which believed that Artificial Intelligence couldn't happen - even if you created a perfect simulation of a brain, you'd just be "simulating" intelligence, whatever that means.

    So, we proposed an experiment. Let's say you took a guy who had completely lost function in a very small, localized area of the brain, and built a machine capable of reproducing its function entirely. You stuck it inside the guy's head, and he was magically fixed.

    Now, make the area affected progressively larger - lets say, by replacing the whole hippocampus. Or the entire left hemisphere of the brain. Or, what the hell, the whole thing. At what point do you say that it's no longer a mind, and is "just" a machine?

    So, that's the first thing I thought of when I saw this story. Once we can perfectly replicate the functionality of every last bit of the brain, do we just have a really nifty toy, or a genuine mind?

    1. Re:artificial intelligence? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Google is already smarter than me, sort of.

    2. Re:artificial intelligence? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Only simulated people living through the storm! If their simulations were sufficiently complex that they didn't like getting wet, and most stayed in their simulated houses or took simulated umbrellas with them, or danced in the rain... if such a simulation was accurate to a sufficient degree, then yes, for all intensive purposes, as far as those simulcrae care, they got wet.

  10. Why emphasis on disabled ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Why are these stories all based upon making the disabled normal? What about making the normal more powerful?

    But in the end there is no debate. Those who stand in the way of progress will be killed by the products of progress (implanted guass rifles). Those who make the disabled normal will be killed by those who make the normal something more.

  11. Different portions of 'you" by silvaran · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I wonder what portions of 'you' would be noticeably different to your family & friends?

    I don't think the word should be "different", but "better". Things like Alzheimer's can be disastrous to your family. You disappear, and a completely different, and usually unwanted, person is the replacement. It's a horrible disease.

  12. Re:Neural Nets - Getting into the machine by RedCard · · Score: 3, Interesting

    In Kurzweil's future, I believe that he proposed uploading of the brain, but knew of no meaningful way to get 'you' into a computer.

    What he meant by this, of course, was that if you were to copy an image of your brain into a computer, then the real 'you' would still be outside the machine, watching the image of you play with all the bells and whistles and fun things that their new digital life afforded them.

    So, I would suggest the following:
    1) nano-machines are placed into your brain, where they spread out and cradle every neuron.
    2) as neurons die (old age, etc) the nano-machine become active, and emulate the neurons that they're cradling. These would be the Type I nano-machines.
    3) eventually, you have a completely robotic brain, devoid of biological tissue, but the structure of the brain still encodes it's function, so... how do we 'upload' without having the problem of two copies of you?
    4) the nano-machines are slowly replaced by a different kind of nano-machine... one that can only act as a transmitter/receiver of information, and cannot do any computation itself. These type II machines offload the processing that they would have to do to a computer outside your body, and as more and more type II's are introduced, more and more of the computing takes place outside of 'you'... now it's easy to see how 'you' could get into the machine...

    And that's that. Of course, some would suggest the following:
    1) make copy of person's brain in a computer
    2) kill the person

    But would that really transfer 'you' - your consciousness, and the perception of self? Or would it just be an emulation that thinks it's you?

    I don't know. Neither does Kurzweil, as far as I can remember.
    (Apologies to Mr. Kurzweil if I've misquoted or otherwise screwed up your ideas - it's been a while since I've read your work)

  13. Forgive me if I seem skeptical... by RichardtheSmith · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The difference between the brain and the heart is that we understand
    how the heart works in detail. Treating the hippocampus like a "black
    box" will probably not work. This just begs the question of how the
    brain works, which we still don't know. I would never let someone
    open up my skull and implant something if they couldn't explain how
    and why it works. Sorry but this is not news, just some promising
    research combined with wishful thinking.

  14. Re:Hippocampus... by einhverfr · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Hippo in Greek means Horse. Hence Hippopotomus means "River-Horse" and Mesopotamia means "Middle of rivers" actually according to This site Hippocampus originally meant "Sea horse" (ship?) I wonder how this came to be known as the horse of the sea....

    --

    LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
  15. High hopes by cgenman · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Don't get your hopes too high for this invention. The process overall is very, very cool, but the fact that they don't understand how the hippocampus works, they just worked out a neural net model of imputs and outputs in rats, leads one to believe there will be a lot of bumps down this road. In that way the model they worked out isn't nearly as interesting as how they interface the chip with living tissue, and how they mapped the pathways of the hippocampus in the first place (or, for that matter, if there is variability within hippocampuses or if it is predetermined by genes).

    Of course, I want one, and I want to mod it. Record an encoding of a lecture, and play it back on the train ride home. Or do a 2 second loop of someone while they say their name, in order to remember those bloody things (why can't people just e-mail their names to my phone?). Or, as in the case of Daredevil, put an encoding on hold until the end of a film in order to know if it is worth wasting space on.

    I can't wait until I get Alzheimers just to try this out! Fortuitously, that will be about the same time this chip comes out of beta.

    --
    The ______ Agenda
  16. Re:Neural Nets - Getting into the machine by PD · · Score: 2, Interesting

    But would that really transfer 'you' - your consciousness, and the perception of self? Or would it just be an emulation that thinks it's you?

    I think it would be you. Think of it this way: if the emulation is good enough so that no observer can distinguish between the original and the emulation, then that person has been transferred.

    There's no reason to believe that the person being emulated is any more qualified an observer than anyone else. If it's good enough to fool outside observers, it's good enough to fool the person being emulated.

    --
    If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
  17. Re:Ethics? by machine+of+god · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Perhaps, but that doesn't solve the problem. What attourney is going to decide that a (experimental) partial brain replacement is in the best interests of their charge. Especially if the person is living well otherwise.

  18. Drugs and Memory by halepark · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Another interesting thing to note is that drugs like alcohol and marijuana affect short-term memory by interferring with the hippocampus. One of the reasons that happens is because the hippocampus has a high number of cannabinoid receptors. But if this organic part of the brain were to be replaced with electronics, would the drug's effect on memory be diminished or disappear? Think about that the next time you decide to wear beer (or bud) goggles.

  19. Re:This is cool. by SouthwindCG · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I've been saying the same sort of things (humanity becoming a Borg-like hive mind, etc.) for a few years now, but I always get "are you insane?" type reactions. My only major point of contention would be your 5-10 year timeline. I feel that's a bit optimistic and I'm thinking it's closer to 50 years.

    The end result is that same though: humanity will evolve into something godlike, using nanotech to control our environment at the molecular scale. I'm hoping I live long enough to see it happen.

  20. Greg Egan... by alwayslurking · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Yet again, the real world imitates one of his stories. He has a couple of stories based in a world where everyone's brain is swapped out for a crystal computer. Mindfuck stuff about the true seat of consciousness, mortality and the meaning of "human". Just remembered "Reasons to be cheerful", specifically about brain prosthesics and personality.

    Home page with free stories

    This is my third Greg Egan post in the last few months and they've all been ontopic. He thinks big thoughts about our near future and is a much better writer than Cory Doctorow, imho.

    1. Re:Greg Egan... by ZzzzSleep · · Score: 2, Interesting

      The Egan story that goes into the most detail about replacing the brain with a crystal computer was called "Learning to be me". I also highly recommend "Diaspora" for potential ideas on what we can do to ourselves, once our minds are all just run on computers.

      --
      Emerald Astrology
  21. Re:Neural Nets - Getting into the machine by Bonker · · Score: 2, Interesting

    In both methods you mention, it's the pattern of thought and memory that's perceived as important, since Kurzweil discards brain tissue so easily in favor of nano-machines and machine processing. Personally, I agree with this assessment on both logical and religous grounds, as well as ethical grounds.

    If that's true, that means that both the 'you' inside your brain and the 'you' inside the computer in the 'copy and kill' method would both really be you. Both have memories, emotions, and preferences of the original. It would be unethical and immoral at that point to destroy either one.

    --
    The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
  22. Electronic impulses not the only part of the brain by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    What about all those wonderful chemicals that also affect our mind and how we think/feel? I think that having a purely electronic hippocampus could have some devious side affects.

  23. Re:Neural Nets - Getting into the machine by Tackhead · · Score: 5, Interesting
    > A copy is a copy. The consciousness (spirit, soul, whatever it's called) must be moved along with everything else.

    That's metaphysics; you are presupposing the existence of consciousness independent of a physical medium.

    At present, there is no evidence to support (or refute) your hypothesis.

    It's just as possible that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of chemical activity in a special configuration of neurons known as a "brain" - in much the same way that "Pac-Man" is an epiphenomenon of certain electrical impulses in special configuration of silicon known as a "Z80 CPU and EPROMs", or "P4 2.4GHz, hard drive, and MAME".

    If the materialist viewpoint is the case, and the copy is destructive, then yes, one of me experiences death. And one of me experiences a lifetime before transfer to machine, followed by an odd transitional moment (which may not be "experienced" per se -- can a machine actually be said to be "running" code in the nanoseconds between clock cycles?), followed by life as a machine.

    More interestingly, if the copying process is nondestructive, one of me experiences being the aforementioned weird transition from "running on meat" to "running on silicon", and the original experiences nothing worse than having some kind of funky scanner waved over me.

    I'd like to run on silicon. fork() me a few times, plug my copies into space probes, and lob them off on random paths to star systems, and HLT me until there are enough photons bouncing off my solar panels to run my clock. It may take 500,000 years to go from star system to star system, but who cares? I cease to exist for half a million years at a time, but those are the boring parts of the trip anyways. Finally, I could see the galaxy on five Altarian dollars a day!

  24. Re:New Neurons? by gid-goo · · Score: 3, Interesting

    That's not true. It was thought to be the case until recently. Here's one of the first links I found: check it out.

  25. forgetting by pmineiro · · Score: 1, Interesting

    "Forgetting is the most beneficial process we possess," Williams says. It enables us to deal with painful situations without actually reliving them.

    LOL when I read this. I thought for sure the second sentence would read something like "it enables us to abstract over past experience, and is an integral part of categorizing and modeling our universe into a managable and queriable form." Probably that would be closer to what this Williams guy actually said.

    Leave it to the press to find the emotional hook. Not that somebody who remember everything would be hopelessly impaired cognitively like the famous Russian "S" case, but rather, they would have to endure their last breakup without relief.

    -- p

  26. Familiar method by CaptainCarrot · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Am I the only one who noticed they reverse engineered the hippocampus using almost the exact same method Compaq used to reverse engineer the IBM PC BIOS? From the article:

    No one understands how the hippocampus encodes information. So the team simply copied its behaviour. Slices of rat hippocampus were stimulated with electrical signals, millions of times over, until they could be sure which electrical input produces a corresponding output. Putting the information from various slices together gave the team a mathematical model of the entire hippocampus.

    I suppose it's nice they were careful to avoid infringing on the brain's IP. (Or should that be The Brain's IP; I imagine he has a number of patents under his evil little belt.)

    --
    And the brethren went away edified.
  27. Eidactic memory.... by horse_pheathers · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I wonder what you would get if you modelled the hippocampus of someone with "photographic" memory in silicon and transplanted it into someone else? The first "killer app" for wetware?

    --Horse_pheathers

  28. Re:your .sig by Beetjebrak · · Score: 2, Interesting

    5 rem first we clear the screen
    10 PRINTCHR$(147)
    11 rem store old values
    12 A=PEEK 53281:B=PEEK 53280:C=PEEK 646
    15 rem set screen to black
    20 POKE 53281,0:POKE 53280,0:POKE 646,0
    25 rem check for keypress
    30 GET A$:IF A$="" GOTO 30
    35 rem restore old values
    40 POKE 53281,A:POKE 53280,B: POKE 646,C
    45 rem retun key pressed just for the heck of it.
    50 PRINT"You pressed";A$;" to get your screen back!"

    I'm not sure about the syntax of the PEEK command nor about the PRINT statement on line 50. As you can probably see, this 'screensaver' has been through some editing during previous discussions about it. Funny how so many people respond to my sig! Originally it just started out as 53281,0 and 53280,0 to create some quick black. Sadly the BASIC program is too long for my sig. Oh, and I as yet refuse to create a full-blown subroutine using GOSUB/RETURN just for to check for a pressed key but you're welcome to submit a patch and add features.. the thing is GPL'ed but adding the GPL in REM statements seemed a bit over the top ;-))

    --
    Learn from the mistakes of others. There isn't enough time to make them all yourself.
  29. Re:Neural Nets - Getting into the machine by Aexia · · Score: 2, Interesting

    So by your reasoning an advanced AI could never have a spirit, sould, whatever it's called with out killing/stealing someone else's?

    I think his point is that the AI would have *a* spirit/soul/whatever; it just wouldn't be *your* spirit/soul/whatever. It's effectively a brand new and entirely seperate entity from you.

    You make a perfect virtual copy of yourself. The copy is happy and immortal and everything, but *you* are still stuck in your body. *You* haven't gone anywhere. You've just been photocopied. Something nearly indentical to you would be immmortal, but *you* wouldn't and you'd eventually die. Which defeats the purpose of the whole exercise.

    The best way to keep *you* going would be the gradual replacement that others suggested.