Slashdot Mirror
Mind Over Machine
broKenfoLd writes "Monkeys moving robotic arms by manipulating a cursor on a computer screen, simply by thinking about it? Mice who cause their water tube to dispense some refreshing H2O just by wishing it? Signal processing and decoding has long been a dream of Matrix fans and lazy system administrators for years, and science is amazingly keeping up! Popular Science's Carl Zimmer has written a fascinating piece documenting recent progress in decoding brain signals and interpreting commands issued from thoughts alone. If you heard a single violin playing Beethoven's 5th, you would be able to tell what piece of music was being played even though the rest of the orchestra was not heard. In the same way, by monitoring a relatively few neurons, computers can recognize patterns and allow programming based on these patterns to say, know if a mouse is thinking about pushing his water lever.
You can pass the time waiting for Matrix-style video games and motionless system adminstration/utilization by reading the full article."
the best of these kind of devices (devloped in nasa labs) can only do 95% accuracy. sure that might be fine for say playing a video game(unless its fast pace), but if you tried to walk with 95% accuracy, you'd be the but of more jokes then the "how do you get bob dole out of a tree, wave to him" jokes.
but over all its really cool that they are even able to do this at all.
And I ran him over with my SCV?
"I didn't run him over!"
"Did you THINK about running him over?"
*long pause*
I didn't run him over!
I mean, the rat can think about water, and get some water. But a rat's mind is way simpler.
Have you ever thought about suicide? Now imagine if when you thought about it a machine would come and kill you. Also I don't know about you, but I can't control my mind completely, sometimes I have thoughts that are completely unrelated with what I am doing... I really don't think I could trust a machine to make my thoughts come true, I'm sure in the future machines will be able to interpret the signals in your brain with a 99% precision, I just can't trust my own mind.
I remember a scene from "Macross Plus" Where two batteloids where flying and one of them was "neuro controlled". In a part, the neurocontrolled batteloid falls very fast and the other batteloid saves it from crushing into the ground, but as the "neuro" pilot regains control of his mecha, he wishes the other pilot was down(there is some grudge between pilots) and inmediately the mecha obeys the wish and wrecks the old batteloid!!. Be carful of what you wish, if you are hooked to a machine, you might get it!.
"The quality of life is inversely proportional to the number of keys on your keyring."
If you read 'The Light of Other Days' by Arthur C Clarke & Stephen Baxter you'll get a good insight into the possible consequences. While the book is centred around the idea that wormholes can be used to view anyone at any time, knowing what people think would have the same effect of first causing terrible unrest but eventually destroying barriers and allowing everyone to work together. It's a very interesting read and I feel that every day we get closer to that reality.
This does not answer how brain works at all :-) As a motor control neuroscientist by trade, I can tell that finding out what the brain actually doing has little to do with these neat things.
:-)
This is not to say that it's not important -- all kinds of prosthetic devices can be made to help people with disabled limbs or other parts of the motor control system -- so it's a great benefit to those people. The important thing is that these devices are still controlled by the human brain, and nobody has a good idea how.
The fact is, you can probably hook up whatever device to whatever portion of the brain (e.g. an artificial arm to you toenail brain area) and after some practice the subject will learn now to move it. So when they say "we don't see the brain as a mysterious organ anymore" they are telling you a bold-face lie.
The mystery would be demonstrated to be solved when we can build a computer with massively parallel and slow (up to 1kHz) elements that can match human performance in tasks like tracking, reaching, as well as learning those tasks.
So far, all the beatiful performance of the cool gadgets is accomplished by super-fast feedback and super-fast computing elements. Our neurons are ways slower, but they do much better. Therefore, the whole essense and mystery of the brain is how to connect 10^10 shitty elements into a great learnable machine. Algorythms and parallelism are still the mystery of the brain, even if the popular science magazines claim otherwise
Funny but if something did happen, the system would be a failure.
When you "think" about doing something, you are deciding via pros and cons, deciding outcome, looking at all options, recounting experience, true desire... on wether to do something or not. When you really decide to act, you act. That signal to act causes you to act. Thinking about acting is not acting. The final go ahead trigger to act is what matters. How else could you make a logical decision about anything? If you take out the thought process involved, we all would be living in a completely different world.
Consider the mouse and the bottle. If the mouse really wanted to get a drink, he would go over and get one. It's not like some force is holding him back and he keeps thinking about it but he just (slow superhero struggling voice) can't moooooooove.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.