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Nerve Cells Successfully Grown on Silicon
crabpeople writes "Researchers at the University of Calgary have found that nerve cells grown on a microchip can learn and memorize information which can be communicated to the brain. 'We discovered that when we used the chip to stimulate the neurons, their synaptic strength was enhanced,' said Naweed Syed, a neurobiologist at the University of Calgary's faculty of medicine."
Plant human cells in an elevator-controlling unit and you'll have the dumbest movie ever....
Spelling mistakes: My is english spoken not tongue of mother.
But what's the size of a neuron vs the size of a transistor in a 65nm process CPU?
-- *My* journal is more interesting than *yours*...
Haven't you learned anything on the matrix?
You'll be the reason of extinction!!!
"We discovered that when we used the chip to stimulate the neurons, their synaptic strength was enhanced, ... "
There was something like this in one of Asimov's books. The guys synapses are enhanced by a machine, then the guy starts to "feel" and "manipulate" things.
why do I feel like this is the beginning of the end?
But this is very exciting. The idea that we could grow neurons on silicon is one of those big steps that looks to lead us into the Johnny Mnemonic world that Gibson was talking about just a couple stories prior to this one.
There is a song that says, "It only takes a spark to get a fire going". So too is it true that it only takes a couple neurons to start synapsing. As these true neural webs become more complicated, it would be interesting to see if any kind of emergent behavior was evident.
Also, with the current political and scientific climate as it is, this could be the first step to replicating a nervous system without having to rely on fetuses for stem cells. It requires no human cloning and holds immense promise.
It would definitely be cool to have a couple of these chips implanted to enhance the base memory that we are kitted with at birth, that's for sure!
I have been pwned because my
I thought the Pine Lab at Caltech had done this several years ago. Neurochip Project
Might as well stop studiying now, soon we can download information directly to our brains anyway!
Will this make computers more human or otherwise ?.
... Forty Two ... naah... doesn't work) ... Of course, nature did a better job making us humans than we would have achieved ... :)
Maybe it's time to admit that nature does a better job bruteforcing (OK , what else do you call SEX and EVOLUTION) the secrets of this world than all our mathematical precision.. (E=MC2
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
If only they could find out how did the strength increase and wether we can do the same to the human body we can find a cure for most of the nervous system degradation diseases. Anybody have link to a more verbose article?
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
Not making faster Pentiums or Athlons. Sorry. Most of that magic has already been woven. Who out there is qualified to make systems level designs and decisions about bio computer systems? Think about the type of knowledge it must take about physics, electrical and computer engineering, as well as biological knowledge.
What type of magnetic and power restrictions will there be? Reliability? What type of optimizations will exist? Interfaces? Flexibility?
We're still quite far away from having things like this be applicable to modern day but think about when you too can say, "I know Kung Fu"!
The researches have read some Slashdot posts, and believe that there must be a huge market for this chip. There is clearly a need for it ;-)
"A transistor located on the chip then recorded that conversation between cells."
I'd like to see this transistor...
fud
I'm so creative sometimes I wear an eye patch.
.. memory upgrade implant, specially in the mornings.
:-)
It would also be cool with an encyclopedia or even a few o'reilly books implanted.
Too bad it seems to be a one-way communication only, otherwise a spellchecker implant would be cool too
cyberzombies. if you dont know what I am talking about, play shadowrun.
one world | many people
I, for one, welcome own new grown organic nerve and silicon masters.
Researchers at the University of Calgary have found that nerve cells grown on a microchip can learn and memorize information which can be communicated to the brain.
While the article mentions this in the introduction, it doesn't mention this happening at all in the research. It talks about neurons communicating with each other. This is a long way from connecting this chip into a living brain in an animal that can still function.
While I agree that this is a fascinating article, we should make sure not to sensationalize it too much. Making chips that interface with actual brains in actual animals, even if they are snails, is still a long way off.
"Flying is the art of throwing yourself at the ground and missing." - Douglas Adams
Seriously, this is what I have been waiting for,
If I were you I would welcome your new ME overlord.
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation. Social exper
"We are the Borg, all your base belong to us, i love you PHILIP-K-DICK".
Jonathanjk.com
Great, just what we need, computer chips smart enough to stick themselves to the side of the aquarium and do nothing. Intel must be shivering in their boots.
....chips
"synaptic strength was enhanced" What the...? I don't recall this term in my functional neurosceince calsses.
-- Exposing the hype of Gentoo zealots. Modded into the ground to suppress opinion.
This article contains more information than the original article.
would have a whole new meaning...
Researchers have used live pond snail nerve cells to implement a basic element of neural memory on a semiconductor chip. The team isolated two neurons from a pond snail and placed them on a silicon chip. They electrically stimulated one cell with a microcapacitor on the chip and recorded the signal transmitted to the other neuron. Repeatedly stimulating the first cell increased the strength of the connection between the cells, just as neurons in the brain strengthen their connections as part of learning and memory formation. The chip may find uses in brain research and drug development, and may eventually lead to neurocomputers with living nerve cells or microchips that could be implanted in the brain for medical prosthetics.
Someone could post a link to the reasearch paper itself ? It would be more interesting to read thenthe news articles. (couldnt find it myself....)
IQ instead of GHz?
...but I still think Natural Stupidity will outpace Artificial (or artificially enhanced) Intelligence.
One step closer to a direct neural interface to my computer, it's time to dump your stock in keyboard and monitor companies they'll be broke in a year.
I think this internet thing sounds like a good idea
Why do I feel like this is the beginning of the end?
Because you're paranoid. Heh.
"You should never doubt what nobody is sure about." -- Willy Wonka
never understimate the power of stupid people in large numbers
da da dum de dum.
da da dum de dum.
Termihuman III, coming to a cinema near you.
In the year 2250, a small pocket resistance of humans find the means to develop an organic gooker. Using the power of jelly to disable our circuit boards, they start a highly accurate military campaign to overrun the machines...
Tron and Tran, are a simple couple thrown together in this all-action, pistol pumping, explosion-full chase between man and machine. Will their love be enough to conquer the invading humans, or will the humans finally overcome the race they created.
Rated 18 with scenes of sex with hoover connectors and frequent uses of acronyms.
A film by Widget Jones.
When all is said and done, nothing changes...
'We discovered that when we used the chip to stimulate the neurons, their synaptic strength was enhanced'
Makes sense, doesn't it?
The (possibly) frightening spect of this is that it may pave the way for artificial lifeforms/cyborgs/skynet...
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
Ely Lilly release the new Prozac add-on for nervous cpu's
a.k.a Neal Stephenson and his uncle.
Chip embedded in politician's brain after a stroke - he goes on to be president.... v. spooky.
I would love to see alzheimer's patients helped with this. If it's a genetic disease, I'm up the creek and dropped me paddle a while back.
- Lnr
Researchers have used live pond snail nerve cells to implement a basic element of neural memory on a semiconductor chip. The team isolated two neurons from a pond snail and placed them on a silicon chip. They electrically stimulated one cell with a microcapacitor on the chip and recorded the signal transmitted to the other neuron. Repeatedly stimulating the first cell increased the strength of the connection between the cells, just as neurons in the brain strengthen their connections as part of learning and memory formation. The chip may find uses in brain research and drug development, and may eventually lead to neurocomputers with living nerve cells or microchips that could be implanted in the brain for medical prosthetics.
Evolution != bruteforcing. With bruteforcing (e.g. trying to guess a password with a dictionary) there is no "being on the right path" or whatever. It's just wrong or right. Evolution is survive of the fittest, do minor changes in different direction on an existing system and let see which one will lead closer to success.(Just like sex ;-)) Take many of the fittest and do the same again. The some time take some of the not so fit and try as well the same.
On the other hand you are right: This trial and error seems to lead to better results in the long run compared to deterministic creation. But this scheme is already adopted by science. IIRC there was a distributed computing project simulating a robot with a defined task and changing the parameters of the robot. The different clients exchanged the information about the results. I don't remember anymore the name or the homepage of the project, I think it was already 4 or 5 years ago...
Trolling is a art!
t-he.
Imagine a U.S. President that is simply a marionette made of organic plasma being controlled and manipulated by puppeteers and handlers behind the curtain - stringlessly AND wirelessly.
Maybe something can be done about spinal cord
injuries in the future with this technology?
towards a virtual girlfriend.
Quoth the article:
scientists stimulated one nerve cell to communicate with a second cell which transmitted that signal to multiple cells within the network.
Singal up (probably down too, though that is not said). That's a start. Now let me jump.
Imagine how this would feel in your own brain. Even strengthened to noticeable level by a lump of neurons, the signal would still read "beep". Now imagine being fed information through that channel. "Beep, bip beep bip bip beep". Better start training that morse.
Now let's enhance the input by adding more bits into it and running data through a digital-to-analog converter. This is where you would slowly be able to "see colors", one at a time. Low signal, cold feeling; high signal, hot feeling. That is brainable information. You can associate different patterns of these "colors" to different ideas.
But still it's not like you could see any shapes, is it?
Now add more bytes, feed them in side-by-side. That's a feed. At this point, feel nausea. Something is feeding noise into your thoughts, something you cannot possibly comprehend.
Would take a processing system not unlike vision inside the brain to translate that feed into experiences like colors, tastes, touches, then further associate these to make shapes out of the noise.
A long way.
Worth taking, of course, as research goes, but I wouldn't toss away those external displays as of yet. Have a hunch computers won't be the same, either, when we get there.
Future research will focus on interfacing silicon chips with the human brain to control artificial limbs and develop "thinking" computers.
Mostly fun!
I think, therefore thoughts exist. Ego is just an impression.
Right now theres a lab room somewhere filled with caged chimpanzees discussing who has to take the first one after witnessing buckets of vasoline being stacked in the corner of the lab the last few nights.
This is one of the coolest things I have ever heard of! Finally, the link between man and machine is being solidified. Just think, in 20 years, or less, an amputee could actually get a robot arm that obey's his thoughts. Granted, it's a far way off from "Cyberdyne," level tech, but it's a start!
"Jeremy, you need to get to an internet cafe and cut and paste some appropriate sentiments about me from the world wide
When pressed further, the spokesman stated that he couldn't be sure, but believed that growing neurons on AMD chips would however not contravene any laws.
RIAA executives were unavailable for comment, but an anonymous source indicated that at least one executive has been admitted to a private clinic, where he repeatedly tells everyone "The chips, they're everywhere! No music is safe! Why won't anyone believe me?"
Alan Cooper, author of "The Inmates are Running the Asylum" and other texts put it this way:
Q: What do you get when you cross a camera and a computer?
A: A computer.
His point is that from an interface and place-in-the-world point of view, most products that have been digitally enhanced tend to remain closer to their technology roots than their analog counterparts (with all of the usability, and I would say ethical, challenges inherient in a technologist-driven system).
That said, this is pretty frickin' cool, but the double-edged sword presented by this innovation seems both particularly sharp and far reaching. I really hope we get this one right.
"Why can't you use your powers for Good?"
So that's how the "real people personalities" work. Guess the crowd at University of Calgary will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes!
An eye for an eye... leaves the whole world blind.
So apparently, "synaptic strength was enhanced."
Does this mean I'll need to upgrade my apt-get?
How long 'till I can get my own cyberbrain implants?
A quote i read somewhere
"The danger from computers is not that they will eventually get as smart as men, but we will meanwhile agree to meet them halfway." -Bernard Avishai
Tinnitus is a serious problem to a lot of people today, and it can have many causes, from various diseases/illnesses, to noise damage. It apparently has to do with the nerves in one's ear, so would this kind of research, might we finally see a way to actually treat tinnitus?
Until you get T, you don't realize how lucky people who can actually be in a quiet room without going mad are...
Clever signature text goes here.
Perhaps it will be possible to make brain implants that enables you to connect to the internet and let others connect their brains with the net as well. Imagine sharing brainpower, or even share thoughts, ideas and memories over a filesharing network.
Pubmed link to the abstract for their research. Publisher's site sometimes holds a free copy of the full paper (depends on the journal).
wellcome our new cibronic sillicon neuron overlords.
DON'T PANIC
The last thing I would want is to make it nervous.
if/when M$ were to buy it and have it interface directly with their software.
WSOD is really wsod...
Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of those!
"This is your life, and it's ending one second at a time."
Neurons are much larger than transistors, but the two aren't really comparable. The main body of a neuron is usually around 25 microns (25000 nm) in diameter and runs at a clockspeed only in the kilohertz max.
A neuron is much more than a transistor-like switch. On the one side of the neuron's central body is a set of dendrites that connect to and gather input from other neurons. The average neuron might have a thousand of these dendrites.
The synapse at the end of each dendrite acts like part of a multiply-accumulate term -- taking the signal from an other neuron, multiplying it by a numerical coefficient and summing it into the total excitation level of the neuron's body. I suspect that the precision of this multiply -accumulate process is fairly low -- perhaps 8 to 16 bits.
Next, the body of the neuron has a long axon extending from it that sends the output of the neuron to other neurons (connecting to the dendrites of other neurons). This axon can be quite long, millimeters, even inches, in length. Thus, the axon is like an off-chip line driver with the potential to have a very high fanout (of a 1000 or more). (On a modern microchip, these off-chip connections are driven by much larger transistors than the small 65 nm ones used in computation).
Third, a neuron is not a static multiply-accumulate system. The coefficients on each synapse change in response to long-term adaptive processes. This process is computationally complex and includes cross-correlation of inputs between synapses and processing of other chemical signals in the brain. Cross-correlation alone could require the equivalent of several kilobytes to several megabyts of RAM. (We won't even get into the adaptive processes that include physical growth and removal of dendrites as this has no easy analog in hardware)
In summary, a neuron is more than a transistor-like switch. Its a free-running 1000 register multiply-accumulator with an off-chip line driver and a statistical processing engine that updates the coefficients on each of the multiply-accumulate terms. Thus, emulating a single neuron would require hundreds of thouands to millions of transistors.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Now it's only going to be a matter of time before I can download porn to my brain. ^_^ Ha, just playing.
"Instant gratification takes too long." - Carrie Fisher
if these nerve cells (organic) are grown on silicon (not really organic), could these possibly have a computing application as well, instead of bio-tech?
What I wonder, is what the lifespan (or MTF) these silicon "nerve chips" have. After all, if the nerve cells are "grown", they obviously are fed and nurtured in some way. What kind of upkeep and lifespan are we talking here?
Thanks for the reply, very enlightening.
But it clearly would be folly to try to emulate a neuron using purely digital computing techniques. You're dealing with an analog mechanism that is pretty much a wire-or of many inputs feeding into a capacitor. This is very much an analog computing circuit; now the question is how efficiently you can do A/D-D/A conversion on this scale.
(And as I recall, the sciatic nerve running down your leg is a single cell with an axon over 1 foot long. Definitely some impressive stuff Mother Nature has concocted...)
-- *My* journal is more interesting than *yours*...
Would it be possible for such a thing to get so stimulated that it starts causing unpedictable results... like a seizure or insanity? Not that we'll need to worry about that for decades, but it would be interesting to figure out before it gets applied to technology that could affect a large number of humans directly.
8==8 Bones 8==8
if that was the case, such a puppet would have the combined intelligence of a team of hired PhDs, would be unbeatable in discussions. there would be some lag, naturally.
Fight Frist Psoting!
Browse Slashdot with 'Newest First'!
Or, for a more software interpretation, it's a function that takes a bunch of boolean parameters and returns a boolean. Anyone who's ever done any programmation or computer architecture should see why you can easily process anything with this.
This axon can be quite long, millimeters, even inches, in length.
Acutally, it can be over a meter in length (spinal cord to calf is one axone). Try that with a transistor
Ask 8 slackers a question, get 10 awnsers (a citation, but I can't remember from who)
Since you are using a ridiculously little part of all the storage space you have available at anytime in your life. The cool thing, would be to have an electronic device that could strenghten a give synaptic path, allowing you to "refresh" your memory at will, and not forget important things. (like read the whole C++ W/ libraries reference once and then refresh this everynight)
Evolution is to bruteforcing what dichotomy is to random guessing.
Who'll be the first to upload a linux distro into the brain of an actual pinguin.
I, for one, welcome our nervous silicon Overlords! (because they clearly srouck!)
The team cultured nerve cells from a snail...
I'm thinking it might be a bit slow :)
RegardselFarto
Or, for a more software interpretation, it's a function that takes a bunch of boolean parameters and returns a boolean. Anyone who's ever done any programmation or computer architecture should see why you can easily process anything with this.
Excellent point. You are right about the computational flexibility of neurons. They can represent a wide range of logical functions, although I believe that the single neuron is incapable of doing an XOR.
But a neuron is more that a Boolean circuit. Although a neuron seems like a two-state device (its either quiesent or its firing), it is more of an N-state analog device in which the pulse-rate encodes a numerical quantity (probably the equivalent of an 8 to 16 bit floating point number). That is why the dendrite field is like a giant numerical multiply-accumulate.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
At the end of WWII research director Vannevar Bush predicted the IT revolution. He was eerily right in many ways, but some things are still to come. For some time I had the following quote hanging on my wall:
In the outside world, all forms of intelligence whether of sound or sight, have been reduced to the form of varying currents in an electric circuit in order that they may be transmitted. Inside the human frame exactly the same sort of process occurs. Must we always transform to mechanical movements in order to proceed from one electrical phenomenon to another?
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
but I welcome my new silicon based masters.
Get ready for new enhanced killer attack snails.
Serious note: The future will be full of key decision makers suddenly dying, when attack insects like common flies carry real poison payloads with nano-tracking equipment installed.
Here on /. years ago there was an article about Japanese researchers controlling cockroach movement with implants stimulating its brain. Perhaps now they could control bigger life forms ....
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
The Lift is a Dutch movie about a thinking lift. It's quite old and seems to be badly duped in the states. See the Reviews here, here and here. It has been quite some while i've seen it (the native version) and i thougt it was scary than. probably was 1988 then ...
OR
they could use faulty pentium processors and a Windows OS...
Now I can have a bluetooth adapter in the back of my skull.. oh wait, thats a dying protocol, but at least i can trigger my neurons into making me grumble like a ferrari when i first wake up!
Ok, now thats a good explanation of why humans can so (mentally) easily manipulate objects in 3d space without doing any math.
I've always figured that the best design for a computer would be one that's able to "imagine". Since it would take too many transistors to emulate a neuron, maybe there's some other way to do it? Is binary the only way to compute?
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
I disagree. Nature had a lot of time to "bruteforce" things. Give us the same amount of time and we will see what we'll be able to do in terms of "reengineering the world".
Modern science is a 400 - 500 years old thing. Nature had billion of year to reach the levels we see.
I think that the progresses we are achieving in the last 50 years are *really* impressive, and probably what we'll see in the next 50 years will be even more impressing. Sometimes humans deserves more credits IMHO.
IAAN, and this is not a big breakthrough in any sense. Basically, this is something that was first done using manually-positioned electrodes probably twenty years ago, and now they can grow neurons on a dish that has electrodes built into it and do it that way. WoO-hAH!
The computational power of neurons comes from the way they work in groups, not the way they work alone. Therefore, it's strongly dependent upon the detailed organization of their connectivity. Grinding up a piece of brain and regrowing it on a dish will obviously not retain native connectivity. Additionally, the time it would take to manually rewire an interesting circuit by giving little localized electrical pulses (or do anything else interesting) is longer than neurons are viable in culture, and that's not a problem that's been solved yet.
I'm not saying this technology won't have important uses as a research tool, just that it won't be useful for what people here seem to think it will be useful for (high-density pornography storage). BTW, one of the more interesting characters in this field is Steve Potter, a somewhat strange guy who does some technically impressive work
FYI, LTP is one of the most promising mechanisms proposed for explaining how long term memory works.
Your post just about gave me an orgasm. May I ask if you are in university or in the workforce? What have you done professionally or personally to get that kind of insight? I've been in electronics for most of my life, but I've always felt/known that electronics is childishly and hopelessly simple compared to a single cell. The biological machinery around us is much MUCH more complex and interesting to me than the boring repetitive electronics world I'm (still) in.
So, what's the scoop? I have to go back to school for sure, but in what?
I don't see any practical value in being able to add memory; but it would be cool to have an interface that would let me learn things faster.
Kind of like how people in "that movie" can learn how to fly a UH-1 in 3 seconds.
Now THAT ability would be cool.
Hot Damn! It's the Soggy Bottom Boys!
Now your PC can actually FEEL Windows being installed!
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
a high school student was suspended today after he began screaming explitives as his teachers and fellow classmates, following the resuld of catching the famed magistr virus. when asked about wether or not the suspention was fair, the school board replied," it isn't our fauld he diddn't update his definitions"
Should I get the 32 bit brain implant now, or spend the big bucks and get the 64 bit implant? How big a cooling fan will I need to attach to the side of my head?
Yeah, he is looking more and more like McGyver all the time. Oddly enough, I happened to really enjoy Johnny Mnemonic. Admittedly though, I am a fan of any movie in which Dolph Lundgren's character dies.
Announces WinCE Neuron....
Imagine if that happened. Can you say seizure?
Give math another 200 billion years and then maybe you have a comparison.
Actually, I think it can be done (or at least a partially working XOR.) Imagine a neuron with two inputs and an output. But these inputs are not both excitatory: one is excitatory and the other is inhibitory. So, input only from the excitatory branch produces an action potential, and input from both branches yields no output. Unfortunately, input from just the inhibitory branch would produce no output either.
2^5
I can store 80 gigs of data in my head!
"This message brought to you by LOUD YELLING, the future of nationwide wireless communication."
-1? Way to go, mods! What happened? You saw the word 'orgasm', looked in the dictionary, found out you never had one and got pissed? Or are you in EE and got miffed that I think electronics is for children?
It's not available on line at journal's web site or the university's, at least I didn't find it : ( Anyone know where it is ?
You're right on-- the change in firing rate relative to the baseline firing rate is very important. Also, there is some reason to think (logically and biologically) that some ensembles of neurons fire synchronously with each other and asynchronously from other ensembles of neurons. By using synchrony of firing, they gain computational power and allow for variable binding, thus allowing more formally logical computations to happen than just autocorrelation our boolean operations.
If I have four neurons, and one represents "red," one represents "green," one represents "square" and one represents "circle," then it is very difficult to tell (based on the sustained activity of the neurons alone) whether they are responding to a red circle and a green square or a red square and a green circle. This is called "the binding problem" and, at least in neural networks, can be solved by distributing the firing patterns of the neurons over time. So, "red" and "circle" fire in synch, then rest while "green" and "square" fire in synch and then rest while "red" and "circle"... etc. Notice that you could even have "red" bound with both "circle" and "square" by being active over two epochs, thus allowing for dynamic binding of variables, etc.
Anyway, the point of all of this is that if we can figure out how some of this temporal synchrony dimension is exploited in the brain, then we should be able to harness that computational power through silicon transistors like the one described in this article and build modules that could replace damaged regions of the brain.
The term "outside the box" is squarely within the box at this point.
I'm gonna grab one of these new Ono-Sendai and hack my way into the subspace interbank !
With that aggravating beauty, Lulu Walls.
Maybe, the Puppet-On-A-String
can improve his "speeches" and "press conferences".
Regards,
Kilgore Trout
What's a "partially working" XOR anyway?
"Future research will focus on interfacing silicon chips with the human brain to control artificial limbs and develop "thinking" computers." Thats one heck of a leap forward from connecting x number of snail nerves together.
Sounds analogous to a wire, but that's so obvious that I must be missing something.
Synaptic strength in this context means something different from nervous system degradation. When neurons are fired, they tend to reinforce that connection. Hence, practicing a free throw, which is simply just a certain pattern of firing a group of neurons, can make you better at shooting because the neural pathways involved are stronger. They are saying that they observed a similar phenomenon with a neuron on the chip.
Nerve wasting illnesses attack the nerve itself. MS in particular causes the myelin sheathing on the nerve cell to disintegrate. This cannot be reversed or prevented by the strengthening mentioned in this article.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
...as to the actual motivation behind the negative moderation of the parent post.
Is it illiteracy? Must be, because not only is the story Fondly Fahrenheit extremely ontopic for the article, it also applies quite well to the parent post.
Would the moderator care to post AC, and 'splain his/her ignorance?
Two Women in a Bathroom Laverne: I kinda liked that Rudy fella, he seems to be a nice guy... Charlotte: I think he should flash his neurons less often. Laverne: Why so? Charlotte: I can't believe you didn't notice it! Laverne: Notice what? Charlotte: It's like he's nervous all the time. He keeps fidgeting and I can't stand his nail-biting. Laverne: You think he's a junkie? Charlotte: You'll never know with these firmware addicts, you think they're nice and normal and then they just flip out all of a sudden. I'm not trying to be funny. This conversation could actually happen.
It sounds like a brain is just a beowulf cluster of alot of tiny neurons. The neurons compared to silicon aren't much at processing individually, but they are orders of magitude better connected. How many beowulf clusters have each machine connected to 10,000+ other machines? That there is I/O bandwidth. The sum is more than the individual parts. Besides how many beowulf clusters have standard self repair? That don't just route around bad machines but repair it and the connections to other machines? Organic will be awesome, but really scary. I'd be easir to make organic machines that are sentient than fully silicon ones.
Does that mean that in the future my pc will shed a tear when I rip it from limb to limb during an upgrade.....?
I would like to know just how the FUCK that is off-topic. It doesnt have much to say. It may be "overrated", but it is _NOT_ fucking "off-topic". Those were my thoughts on the matter, and it is not your job as a moderator to mod-down something because you have a different opinion.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
I am not so much interested in the Hollywood vision of this, although Ice-T deserved an Oscar for his performance. What I think is interesting is to think about the limits of our brains and how this could be used to expand consciousness.
I think it would be interesting to understand how a neural interface would 'feel'. What would a process based in ones and zeros feel like? How would the brain adapt to take advantage of the new processing capability? Would we be able to project our consciousness outside of our body in some kind of digital plenum (that may not be a visual experience at all, it could be an entirely abstract experience like blind person contemplating numbers or language). Would we be enabled to 'see' new phenomena if we integrate a chip into the visual cortex (we could hook our brain up to a radio telescope and see the entire electormagnetic spectrum)? What color would ultra-violet be if it became a part of the visual spectrum or is the brain incapable of seeing a color that is as yet unimagined? What would it be like to 'smell' or 'touch' light or gravity or computer processes. Would it be possible to add entirely new senses or reasoning structures to the mind. Could we augment our perception to allow us to be cognisent of additional dimensional properties in addition to the 3 dimenstion we can see now. Would our bodies ultimately be relevant to our consciousness or could this technology allow us to be unhinged from our physical being, what would that mean for religion and philosophy? Could a person be in more than one place at once? Would it be possible to integrate two people into one or transfer one person into another, what would that do to 'individuality' and 'memory'.
Just a few questions.
I think parent (along with some other posts) are confusing the biological neuron and the perceptron, which is a simplified mathematical model. While the perceptron can't cope with linearly inseperable problems (like XOR), there is no consensus on the computational limits of the neuron. In fact, very little is known for certain about the learning algorithm used by the nervous system. The neuron may learn not only through the weights of its inputs, but also through chemical interactions with glial cells. Really, the neuron is still too much of a mystery for us to know its limitations.
There was a neat article (sciencedaily.com?)on a replacement medulla oblongota for rat brains. Researchers took a slice out from a rats medulla, mapped it electrically and made a circuit to give the same outputs as it gave to the same inputs. With the slice missing the rats were crippled. When the circuit was put in place to replace the removed slice - the rats were fine. What is interesting about this research is that the medulla is a primitive structure and is very similiar in human brains, it's purpose is usually muscle control. Combining the two discoveries could well lead to bionic limbs.
It is a long way off, but the research is now showing it is possible.
This is what I sound like.
"We discovered that when we used the chip to stimulate the neurons, their synaptic strength was enhanced..."
Neurons firing in response to the same stimulus do that; that's what they do. All this really managed to show was that the stimulus could come from a chip holding the cell rather than cells around it or a wire shoved into it. Growing cells on a chip is neat, but increasing synaptic connectivity ain't that tough.
In any case, I for one welcome our new wires-in-the-head ma..... oh wait, I am one.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
and yes, I realize that Bill said "640k etc...." just a few years ago, so I shouldn't underestimate technological progress. But I'm quite sure about this because the problem isn't grafting neurons and chips together, it's understanding how our brain works. The human brain is the most complicated object known to humanity in the known universe. What makes it especially difficult to investigate is that its almost impossible to verify any theory because you can't really conduct experiments on it, because no 2 brains are ever the same (look up the formal definition of an "experiment" if you're not sure what I mean). All you can do is observe and theorize. Tinkering around with it would most likely damage it.
Despite all the technological achievements, nobody knows how we remember, why we are conscious, how knowledge and judgement works, etc. All this information is "soft" knowledge (dunno if that's the technical term), so its not like we can make some calculations and decide where to graft cards and make the brain accept and use it. All we know is that if you are scared, then this part of the brain gets more blood, and if you're remembering, then this part of the brain gets more voltage. But to insert a chip somewhere in the brain? You'd probably just do brain damage. We don't even know where you'd graft the chip onto, much less how, much less without doing damage, much less how to make the brain use it. As if all that weren't enough, here's the final obstacle for scientists: it seems that every person's brain is different!
From a design stand point it occures to me that the first elements of our electro neural system to be replaced likely won't be processing or memory based. Though an interfact with a long term storage solution might be in our near future it will probably be controlled consciously. Despite an earlier comment to the contrary, I think that advances will be made in replacing longer neurons such as the spine. The money is there for research because of spinal chord injuries and other disabilities and all these links do is move electrical current from one location to another. This means they can be done in conjunction with our current systems.
:)
Plus running a hyper transport bus from my occular nerve centre to my trigger finger would be pretty badass
XOR has the truth table:
a b aXORb
1 1 0
1 0 1
0 1 1
0 0 0
What you have described is:
e i e?i
1 1 0
1 0 1
0 1 0
0 0 0
Where ? is either &~, i.e. "e and not i", or "not if e then i". A "partially working" logical function is really just a fully working different logical function.
(C) Kaki Sain, 2011. By reading this, you have illegally copied my property to your brain.
The universe is perhaps 10 to 20 billion years old. Earth is about 4 billion years old.
This is very much an analog computing circuit; now the question is how efficiently you can do A/D-D/A conversion on this scale.
Also, if your silicon starts to chug, will you need a heatsink on your skull to cool it? Body temperature isn't ideal for microcircuitry. Could I take the heatsink off if I'm not thinking about a diffucult problem? Would my AMD coprocessor catch fire if my heatsink were jostled? Would my Intel coprocessor throttle it's clock and make me dumber in the summer?
And would my 60 year old barber still cut my hair if I have a huge hunk of metal clamped to my head?
Clever signature text goes here.
Very informative? Isn't this guy talking about Legos? lol jk...couldn't resist. Mod-away.
--Thei Antispamist A useless endevor that will cer
Sorry for the OT post, but others will probably find this interesting too.
> the sciatic nerve running down your leg is a single cell with an axon over 1 foot long
I thought this was usual Slashdot bull$h!#, as it sounded unlikely. I was right that the statement was incorrect, but "in the wrong direction." A foot-long nerve? Evidently it's more like a 2.5-3 ft. nerve cell. Crazy. Check out Paragraph 3 of this link.
>And would my 60 year old barber still cut my hair if I have a huge hunk of metal
Naw, by the time that chunk of metal gets there we will be outsourcing hairstyling/barbering (anything like barbarism?) to China.
While admittedly that one was off-topic, any moderator should have at least been considerate enought to mod the other one up a bit while modding this one down. I must conclude that whoever moderated the parent must not have actually read the post before moderating. I hope the meta-moderators will view it in context and do their job!
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
So where the fuck are the memories, man?!?!?!
Argh... I'm so tempted to just open it up, and stick a logic probe in there.... grrrrrr
If you know of any good links with more information like this, I would appreciate it.
True genius is grasping a situation like a peice of fruit, and peircing it just right so that it drains dry.
If only they could grow a few more nuerons on the brain of the avarege person we may be better off.
Army of rogue super-snails occupies Paris. Restauranteurs publicly executed. France surrenders. Allied liberation forces mired in slime trail.
It's called neuroscience or neurobiology at many schools. Other options are biomedical engineering and biophysics.
BioSoft; the next big monopoly? Hated more than the other .....soft corp. If you think a M$oft tax on your hardware is bad; wait until you have to pay the "thought tax".
...oh wait
Just a thought. Or is it? Maybe it's someone elses memory?
better stop before I go crazy.
I don't want a pickle; I just want a Motor-Cycle! A four foot cop arrived with a five foot gun!
Waise bhi Dimag kharab kar diya-ab Barbaad karo aur Maza looton.
Ask the University and Max-planck people to collaborate with www.cyberkineticsinc.com and do something positive for humans too.
Someones been doing AI....