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Brain Chip Approved For Paralysis Research

Posted by Hemos on from the try-it-out dept.

dalillama writes "The BBC is reporting that tests are underway for the clinical trials of the "Brain Gate" computer chip, placed in the brains of paralysis patients. They hope the chips will map out nerve impulses which are sent to limbs, so that they can then be translated into computer code and sent to future artificial limbs. " Thanks to Robert Brooks for pointing out this closely related piece.

15 of 183 comments (clear)

  1. Im as dumb as they come by yuri82 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Why cant they just connect the brain to the legs and get the guy moving?

    Im thinking in the case where a person JUST lost movement on the legs due to an accident, etc...

    --
    Who is this Karma guy and why is he bad ??
    1. Re:Im as dumb as they come by Merkuri22 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Why cant they just connect the brain to the legs and get the guy moving?

      That's the desired end result, I believe. However, it's not that simple. You need to figure out which part of the brain actually does the moving, which signal does what. Then you have to figure out which part of the leg to stimulate to make it move. Amputees would probably be easier to help than parapalegics, because when you make them an artificial arm or leg you know exactly how that limb works (the trick is telling it to move as easily as your natural limb). And in the future if this technology actually works there will probably be no physical connection between your brain and the paralized/artificial limb because to run wires through your body is uneccesary surgery and to run wires outside the body is unsightly. The connection will probably be wireless, though this opens up security issues (what happens if two parapalegics who have similar frequencies walk too close to each other... will one be able to move the other's leg if the interference is just right?)

    2. Re:Im as dumb as they come by gr8_phk · · Score: 2, Interesting

      You may only require knowing which AREA of the brain to connect. It has this neat ability to adapt to things. If this "chip" is connected to an artificial limb, but it's "understanding" of the brain signals is incorrect, the person may learn to manipulate the limb as desired anyway due to some relearning in the brain. Using this line of thinking, who needs the special chip? A viable connection to the right part and some feedback (in the form of a real limb) is all you may need.

    3. Re:Im as dumb as they come by Spy+Hunter · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I think getting the brain to control limbs through this process will be much easier than anticipated. I don't think you actually need to figure out which part of the brain is used to move the legs. All you need to do is connect this chip to some random patch of neurons in the general vicinity of your motor control area. Then, instead of making the computer figure out what patterns of neuronal activity mean "move leg", the person with the implant could train their brain to produce specific patterns for the computer. The brain is not well understood but it is much more flexible than the computer, so making it adapt to the computer would probably be much easier than the opposite. I'll bet that over a period of years, a person could learn to use artificial limbs in this way and be just as adept with them as with their natural limbs (if the artificial limbs were as physically capable).

      --
      main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
  2. I'd buy that for a dollar... by beeglebug · · Score: 5, Interesting

    From the article: "The signals will be monitored through wires emerging from the skull, which presents some danger of infection. The company is working on a wireless version"

    If they can work out a way to hook it into an 802.11g home network, i'd get one fitted, paralysis or not!

    Imagine being able to control devices in the home as easily as controlling a limb. Of course controlling those same devices when drunk would be another matter entirely...

    1. Re:I'd buy that for a dollar... by Merkuri22 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      There is a difference. For one, it's a lot less complicated to "listen" to the brain's outputs and map what does what in a healthy person for use in a person with those connections severed. It's a lot harder to try and listen, so to speak, for the correct signal that the brain will interpret as "yellow". There has been some work in this area, yes, but it's far from perfect. Cochlear implants are being used today to help deaf people hear, but people who were able to hear at one point but later had an implant put in often say that it sounds "tinny" compared to natural hearing.

      Then there's the question of if people really experience things in the same way. I mean, anyone can point to the color yellow on a color chart (well, people will full color vision) but how do we know that I actually experience the same thing you do when I see yellow? Now, this is sort of getting into the realm of the metaphysical, but it's something we may need to think about when we start pumping alien signals into people's heads. Wierd and unexpected effects may happen in some people and not in others.

      A third thing to think about is how dangerous this is. If you try and move your new artificial limb up and it moves down, even if it moves down very fast and dangerously, you might risk injuring the arm and maybe give youself a few bruises, but no major harm will be done. Pumping signals INTO the brain, however, could have a lot more harmful outcomes. Certain frequencies of light on televisions has been proven to cause sesures, and artificial light signals may cause the same effects. Imagine if something goes wrong and all of a sudden you're experiencing a head-splitting high pitched tone and you didn't know how to stop it?

      And then it's dangerous in the more mundane sense of interrrupting your actual sensations. What if you were driving and you accidentally tripped your email program. Suddenly all you can see is your email. Ideally, we'd like to implement a system similar to how we daydream or think of things normally, where we can obviously tell the difference between reality and non-reality, even when we superimpose one image on another. But I don't think we have even the faintest idea how to do that. Just pumping signals to the existing connections to our eyes, for example, would probably hyjack our vision completely. And simply bombarding our brains with random electrical signals wouldn't really work, even if it weren't terribly dangerous. The brain doesn't always recognize new connections like that. Even some deaf children who have a cochlear implant never learn to hear. Their brain just doesn't know how to interpret that data. In order for something like that to work, you'd need to implant a child at a very young age and hope the brain learns to interpret those signals correctly.

      So, basically, there are tons more issues to deal with when sending info to the brain, rather than getting data from it. It's gonna be a while longer before you can read email with your eyes closed.

  3. Farscape.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Didn't Scorpius implant a brain chip into Kryton?

  4. Just in time to match Kurzweil's theory by zapp · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Ray Kurzweil wrote an interesting book about the progression of technology over the next 100 years. Based on his law of accelerating returns, he predicts various events for the next few decades until the Singularity.

    The book was published in 2000, and already he'd made quite a few accurate predictions, and many since then have been accurate as well.

    --
    no comment
  5. Walking? by jetkust · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'm no expert, and it doesn't mention walking in the article, but I wonder if one will be able to walk using a system like this since the impulses from the nerve endings in the legs will never be sent back into the brain. It's kinda like trying to walk without being able to feel your legs. I doubt I could do it.

  6. When is it too far? by consolidatedbord · · Score: 4, Interesting

    While this is interesting and innovative technology, when is it too much? How much further will this go? Not to sound like a tinfoil fashion junkie, but what if this kind of stuff gets put into the wrong hands? Honestly. With companies like Cisco, APC, and others putting hardcoded backdoors into their products, what if someone decided the same was neccessary on a wireless version of this device? Don't get me wrong, new technology is amazing. But IMHO it is something to be feared and respected. Maybe somethings are best never invented. Pacemakers are awesome, but a chip to control muscle functions in the brains of paralysis patients seems a bit frightening. Especially if a wireless version is to emerge. No, it wouldn't be un-wep'ed 802.11b, but nonetheless this, to me is an alert. I don't know anyone personally who is paralyzed, so maybe I don't take this as seriously as others, but I can't see myself having a foreign object implanted into my brain any time soon. Of course extensive testing will be done to ensure that the product is usable for deployed to patients but can you imagine a failure of this? What if it (the chip) becomes uncontrollable for any number of reasons?

    --
    while true ; do echo this is my sig; done
  7. Brain bandwidth... by phorm · · Score: 4, Interesting

    My question is: What is the bandwidth of the human brain. If we put it into terms of both latency (time before signal hits destination and a result is returned) and pipe size (how much data can we push through at a given time).

    Does our bring have a "ping." That is to say, if we had a leg where the nerve receptors has died, but the muscle nerves work (leprosy?), can you tell if it is moving when we want it to, or is the only return signal from the nerves that sense touch?

    It would be interesting to see if a wireless connection could handle brain bandwidth. I'd imagine that for the simple operatings such as moving an object etc low bandwidth is required. For a fully pluggable experience (how about integrating touch, hearing, and the optic nerve to pilot a mini-plane) I'd imagine that quite a lot of bandwidth is needed, as well as fairly low latency.

    But then again, I was recently at the doctor's doing exercises when I noticed that if I tried to do leg pumps too fast, my leg would be trying to "pull" when at times it should be doing a "push" and so I either get a short stroke or a shutter. Is this the same as a data collision or just lack of reaction speed due to the muscle not being well enough toned (the muscle is degenerated due to being immobilized from a break, but muscle tone is probably already average compared to most people).

    1. Re:Brain bandwidth... by Anonamused+Cow-herd · · Score: 2, Interesting
      Does our bring have a "ping." That is to say, if we had a leg where the nerve receptors has died, but the muscle nerves work (leprosy?), can you tell if it is moving when we want it to, or is the only return signal from the nerves that sense touch?

      We have sensory and motor neurons, and they are wholly distinct. You can theoretically lose all sense of feel, but still be able to move your muscle with the motor neuron. As a matter of fact, this is why, for example, chickens will keep moving after decapitation. The sensory neurons are obviously detached from the major processing center, but the motor neurons continue to fire. However, it turns out that motor and sensory neurons tend to travel along the same neural pathways, which means that if one gets screwed up, so does the other, especially in accidental paralysis. Thus, these chips would bridge the gap, allowing the activation of one motor neuron somewhere else in the system (i.e. where the neural pathway was originally severed during an accident) and the paralyzed part. It's like patching a cut cable, essentially, but about a thosand times more complicated, since there are millions of cables, and it's hard to figure out which one to patch =P.

      It would be interesting to see if a wireless connection could handle brain bandwidth. I'd imagine that for the simple operatings such as moving an object etc low bandwidth is required. For a fully pluggable experience (how about integrating touch, hearing, and the optic nerve to pilot a mini-plane) I'd imagine that quite a lot of bandwidth is needed, as well as fairly low latency.

      Well, you'd imagine fairly wrong, methinks. This research does not even begin to come close to any kind of pluggable experience. There are more possible neural pathways in one brain than there are atoms in the universe, as far as we know. What this research is doing is to allow the functioning of a normal part of the brain (motor neuron 1) to activate an abnormal, paralyzed part of the body (dysfunctional motor neuron 2). The reason they are using a chip is because it turns out that they are going to try to bridge more than one gap, of course. If you could only move one tiny little part of one muscle, it wouldn't be very effective, now would it? But the bandwidth is relatively small, and latency isn't that hard, since the electrical impulses in your body only travel about 200 mph, and since it's not exactly a long way from your head to your toes, differences in latency would be relatively unnoticeable.

      Is this the same as a data collision or just lack of reaction speed due to the muscle not being well enough toned

      The most probable explanation is that it is a reflex, generally a survival trait. When you kick your leg repeatedly and quickly, your body tries to take over and make the whole process faster, reflexively cutting out the brain from the loop and just kicking your leg for you. This is so that your body can do things faster than your brain can command it to, like in running or swimming, where it might be necessary. This is what happens when you bounce your leg up and down while sitting, and it kind of finds its own rhythm, and if you try to disturb it consciously, it just makes your leg twitch out of rhythm; it's a reflexive twitch.

      --
      -----[0_o]-----
      We are not amused.
  8. map this. by happyfrogcow · · Score: 4, Interesting

    mapping the brain could be interesting. especially on boundary conditions like in programming. what happens when the brain dies, what are the last signals it sends out?

  9. Sure, you can get data out... by Bagels · · Score: 2, Interesting

    This method can get data out of the brain. But, strictly speaking, we've been able to do that for ages (not quite so directly or in a way that you can carry around easily, but still)... It will get a lot more interesting - and potentially dangerous - when we have something that can send info back into the brain, in the form of, say, images added directly to what the eye can see within the brain.

    --
    --- Bwah?
  10. Telepathy is only a few years away by randomErr · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Imagine if you could communicate via a wireless connection. This could litterly let you do that.

    If these chips will let people walk again why not communicate with others with a similar chip via a low power network? Instant telepathy, just add water.

    This reminds of the premise of Ghost in the Shell. Whats next, Ghost hacking?
    fdisk /target:brain1
    format brain1:\
    copy c:\hackpattern.gz brain1:\

    --
    You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?