Slashdot Mirror
Matrix-Style Brain Interface Closer To Reality
atkulp writes "According to this Wired article, a private company, Cyberkinetics is seeking permission from the FDA to test a product called BrainGate that implants in the brain and can control actions on a computer. So far it works for monkeys and they'd like to see it as viable for quadriplegics and others in need. How soon until anyone can become the ultimate expansion card? Sign me up!"
...for processing the data from the microelectrode arrays.
Yes, the above link goes to another web site called "bionictech.com", but the two companies merged in 2002.
The Army reading list
I could make a long comment about it but everyone will just go to the link anyways. here ya go!g ical/ 1-896,25078.asp
http://www.health24.co.za/news/Brain_Neurolo
There is or can be built a machine that can simulate any physical object. -Church-Turing principle
I wonder if this would work backwards? Is this the gateway to using the human brain as a computer? (After all, we only use a portion of it...)
m
No, we don't.
http://www.snopes.com/science/stats/10percnt.ht
-W
--
All unfair meta-mods are now being meta-meta-modded as retarded.
This was the cover story of the Popular Science that I just received in the mail. You can read the article here.
Do not read this sig.
1. Ogg Vorbis
2. Bluetooth
3. Beowulf Clusters
4. Soviet Russia
5. RIAA
6. Insensitive Clods
Since that obviously includes this post, it will self destruct in 5 seconds...
In spirit, it's similar to prosthetic devices that people have already been developing that operate using nerve impulses, such as prosthetic legs with knees that "bend" via sensors which pick up nerve impulses in the quadriceps. It's just that with people who are more severely disabled, you're going to have to move closer to the brain to pick up live nerve impulses. It'll probably be a long time (if ever) before this moves into being an elective procedure for entertainment purposes; the Matrix-speak from the Wired article seems to be just typical media sensationalization to give the story a little more juice.
Paintball is more realistic, you get the recoil action and the pain of getting marked.
For anyone that doesn't recognize this, it's an adaptation of a monologue done by Brak from the Space Ghost crew on Cartoon Network. Here's the original:
One time I hired a monkey to take notes for me in class. I would just sit there with my mind a complete blank while the monkey scribbled on little pieces of paper. At the end of the week the teacher said, "Class, I want you to write a paper using your notes." So I wrote a paper that said "Hello, my name is Bingo. I like to climb on things. Can I have a banana? Eek eek." I got an F. When I told my Mom about it she said "I told you never trust a monkey!" The end.
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
Current estimates by Robert Freitas suggest that it is going to require at least a trillion nanorobots in place within the brain and most probably the installation of an extensive fiber optic network to handle the required bandwidth to provide a matrix-like interface (either for real time full bandwidth human-computer interfaces or for brain/mind uploading into a computer). This may be documented to a limited extent in Ray Kurzweil's forthcoming book The Singularity is Near (est. publication early 2005) and perhaps to a greater extent in several years when Nanomedicine Volume III is published.
M.T. Anderson wrote a satire about this sort of thing. The book was called "The Feed". It's next on my list, haven't gotten to it yet.
Amazon describes it as:
"This brilliantly ironic satire is set in a future world where television and computers are connected directly into people's brains when they are babies. The result is a chillingly recognizable consumer society where empty-headed kids are driven by fashion and shopping and the avid pursuit of silly entertainment--even on trips to Mars and the moon--and by constant customized murmurs in their brains of encouragement to buy, buy, buy."
Sounds interesting, and inevitable....
Blind man can see thanks to a camera implanted in his brain
I thought I read somewhere they're unable to understand the processes in the brain,
but can reproduce the Outcome of the electronical / neurological process by chips in hopes to once understand how *that gray matter* actually works.
Neurochips detect brain's reaction to learning
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
I think were seeing a lot of enthused people, but the technology is not what you seem to think it is.
It's a sensor implated into the back of your head that will take directions from the you, and move around the cursor to match those directions- essentially it will at its best remove the mouse from the computer (it will probabally work as a stylus/mouse once you get used to it).
Now this might solve a lot of RSD and Carple tunnel problems, but it's not going to let you 'download' massive ammounts of code from your brain into your computer, and it definatly isin't going to send anything back.
And the technology isin't ever going to do that (well this particularly strain of technology, someone else will work on brain signal decoding some day- this process dosen't decode anything), this technology may however build better prostetic limbs or weelchairs, and it will allow the paralized slow, but functional, access to the itnernet (try typing on a virtual keyboard with your mouse, it's goign to be slow not matter what compared to a touch typer)
So slow down there, I like you, cannot wait to be able to interface directly with my computer; I'm even interested in this technology (I'm starting to feel the progression of RSD on my 'mousing fingers' (I switch which hand uses the mouse every 6 monthes) and wrists), but I don't expect THIS technology to ever evolve into direct some form of neural interface, that will have to wait for someone else to develop a way to decode/encode human transmission signals.
-Millions of Monkeys, Millions of typewriters, 6 hours of sorting through faeces encrusted pages to find: This post
I don't know about monkey's, but you can find some videos of remote-controlled rats on the net. Google for remote controlled rats video. Some news site have short clips of rats going through the "obstacle course". :)
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.