Monkeys Play Videogames With Their Mind

Thanks to IOL/Reuters for their story discussing research on monkeys who control videogames with their thoughts. According to the piece, "Dr Miguel Nicolelis knew he had nailed it when the monkey stopped using her arm to play the computer game. An implanted device had allowed the monkey to control the game using only her thought." The research, to be printed in Public Library Of Science Biology Journal on Monday, is intended to help humans who "have partial or nearly total permanent paralysis."

Comments

Re:Humans can do this too

[Ieshan]

I know you're not a big fan of animal research, but I figured I'd try to enlighten you a bit.

Many of the research conditions required by advanced neuropsychology require very direct control over the type of injury that a patient has. Because we're only "starting" to know a great deal about areas of the brain (both human, simian, and avian), we must control very carefully the types of injuries that our test subjects have.

Studies such as these cost tens of thousands of dollars to perform - not because the technology is costly (which it is) - but because test subjects are required with such precision. Think about how hard it would be to get test subjects with one particular condition flown in from all around the globe, and that's only after you've gone out to interview them or have spent the money to find out about them. Then, you've got to make sure they've got exactly the type of injury that will help progress your research - a blunder could ruin the experiment.

There are lots of different things that control "now try moving the robotic arm without moving your real one". Thousands of pathways that could be injured in the intermediary. When scientists conduct animal tests, they are doing it for the benefit of the humans they help to aid - and often, it involves very specific lesions that must be carefully examined post-mortem: such a sacrifice we cannot expect humans to provide.

Trust me when I say this: no one likes harming aminals, even for test purposes. There's no joy when we realize that some of the pigeons I work with might have to die some day, to be able to validate the research we conduct. It's not pretty to note these things, but it's neccessary to continue furthering our understanding of the brain and of vision.

Any questions specifically about avian visual psychology (that's what I research), will be gladly accepted. :)

PS: Very, very few of our test subjects are ever harmed, and yes, they've all got names instead of numbers. ;)