Robotic Arm Controlled By Monkey Thoughts

mallumax writes "The BBC reports that Pittsburgh University scientists have succeeded in creating a robotic arm, controlled by probes inserted into the brain of monkeys. The probes interpret signals from individual nerve cells in the motor cortex. Monkeys were able to grasp and hold food with the robotic arm. Since the number of nerve signals for even small movements is huge the scientists used an averaging algorithm to obtain the movement signals."

Comments

That's not my hand on your ass

[Anonymous Coward]

That's my monkey controlled robot arm's hand on your ass.

Re:That's not my hand on your ass

[junglee_iitk]

Beware! Dont let the monkey lay hands on magic wand!

Tool use?

[wind river]

Wouldn't this also be a sign that monkeys are capable of fairly sophisticated tool use?

Re:Tool use?

[Richie1984]

That's not the impression I got. It seems more like the monkey was moving the tool as if it were it's own limb, i.e. the moneky tried to move its hand and the tool moved instead. If this is the case, all it shows is that monkeys can control their own limbs.

Re:Tool use?

[acidrain69]

Sure, if the monkey built the arm himself. Otherwise it isn't much more than using a stick to whack another monkey around.

That is some high-tech-poo-flinging right there.

Re:Tool use?

[glowimperial]

I would think that there is plenty of non-robotic evidence that monkeys use and make simple tools, are skilled and knowledgable in their use and pass tool knowledge from individual to individual already in the wild. Monkeys have been trained to operate tools and devices before this, both in and out of laboratory settings. I wouldn't consider this a breakthrough or in any way revealing about monkeys, I would consider it more of a robotic/hapic/man-machine interface breakthrough.

Re:Tool use?

[dabigpaybackski]

Wouldn't this also be a sign that monkeys are capable of fairly sophisticated tool use?

Indeed it would, and the implications are frightening. Imagine steroid-enhanced cyborg chimpanzee super-soldiers high on crystal meth.

Try dangling a bunch of bananas in front of that cage.

Re:Tool use?

[ucblockhead]

Yeah! It's a sign that monkeys can pick up food with their arms and transfer it to their mouths! A stunning discovery!!!!

Re:Tool use?

[rm999]

But using tools for us humans is almost as natural as using our hands. Maybe thats true for monkeys too. Perhaps the only thing that is stopping a monkey from using a tool is the lack of opposable thumbs.

Re:Tool use?

[Emperor Igor]

American Mecha-Monkey Marines, the most potent weapon in the fight against terrorism!

"Run! They've mastered tool use!"

Re:Tool use?

[Richie1984]

But using tools for us humans is almost as natural as using our hands.

Is it? We are only just beginning to scrape the surface of what makes us human. Language aquisition, for example, is a much debated surface, as no one can be 100% how we start to learn to communicate. Likewise, just because we have the ability to use tools, does that mean that it's a natural process? Or does our upbringing and factors from society teach us to do this?

Re:Tool use?

[Rei]

Well, we'll find out how humans compare when using robotic arms as soon as they begin "Human trails".

Methinks the monkey also helped copyedit the article.

Re:Tool use?

[elan]

Monkeys (and prosimians, their ancestors -- like a ring-tailed lemur) are not generally considered big tool users. Apes, however, are. Chimps use sticks to fish for termites, and in some cases have been taught to interact with a computer (matching symbols with pictures, for example).

Re:Tool use?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right that tool use is probably a natural extension of limb use. But if I had to guess, my guess would be that the limitations aren't mechanical, they are in terms of processing capacity. Using and adapting rapidly to tools you pick up as naturally as your own limbs requires a lot of extra "CPU power", and monkey brains may simply not be built to devote that much processing capacity to limbs. Maintaining extra processing capacity takes a lot of energy, so brains generally are just as large as they need to be to handle the tasks they need to handle. Any extra capacity is an evolutionary disadvantage. Adding a lot more capacity to the motor areas at first probably wasn't useful, until it turned out that tool use gave a real advantage to the one species that had it.

Re:Tool use?

[glib909]

*cue Thus Spake Zarathustra*

Re:Tool use?

[flargleblarg]

That's not the impression I got. It seems more like the monkey was moving the tool as if it were it's own limb, i.e. the moneky tried to move its hand and the tool moved instead.

That must suck. You try to move your hand and your tool moves instead. Of course, that could be fun.

Re:Tool use?

[forkazoo]

Only when he installs his own implants to use the robot arm.

Re:Tool use?

[Cylix]

Sounds like the premise for a good cartoon or video game.

Though we'll need to modify the title a bit and put them into space.

In the end, I have to say it...

I for one, welcome our new Mecha-Monkey Marine Overlords.

Ye Gads! That's the title...

Re:Tool use?

[Amaranthyne]

dammit! your interface didn't make it obvious enough that I had to log in AGAIN to post from a public terminal.

Amaranthyne (312785) == Jenni bot

Re:Tool use?

[iamlucky13]

This is actually more like using an existing arm rather than learning to use a tool. We all had to go through a process of learning to use our own arms when we were babies. Our neurons carry the signals from our brains to our muscles and the muscles react according to the signal. We unconsciously figured out during our infancy what signals made our muscles do particular movements. In this case, the neurons interface with tiny electrodes that pick up the signals and a computer translates them into instructions for the robotic arm. Over time, the monkeys observe the effect of their "thoughts" on the movement of the arm and unconsciously learn to control the arm as if it were one of their own. There's also some very interesting related research going on with the goal of accomplishing the same thing with eyes.

Re:Tool use?

[homer_ca]

You'd be amazed what apes can do. I saw an orangutan at the zoo. Some people had thrown popcorn onto the ground (a sloped hillside) outside the cage just out of reach. This ape had a big canvas rag that he pulled through the chain link fence, then swung the rag to knock the popcorn down the hill where he could grab it. Maybe he was a genius ape.

Re:Tool use?

[johnlittledotorg]

If the headline read "Monkey uses brain controlled robotic arm to bitchslap researcher" then I'd have to agree.

Re:Tool use?

[Alien Being]

Ahh, gorilla warfare.

Re:Tool use?

[daddymac]

lack of opposable thumbs.

Uhhh, except that some monkey do have opposable thumbs, so it can't be the "only" thing. Read the faq (number 23):
http://www.primates.com/faq/index.html

Re:Tool use?

[millennial]

Most linguists would be hesitant to say that monkeys use language, per se. The three major aspects of what we consider language are productivity, conventionality, and displacement. Productivity is the ability to combine symbols into previously unseen arrangements that still convey a meaningful, coherent message. You'd be hard pressed to find a monkey doing this. Conventionality is less important, as it just indicates that the meanings of symbols are arbitrarily agreed upon. Displacement would be even more difficult to demonstrate in monkeys, as it is the ability to describe things and events that are not currently present. Since we can't fully understand what monkeys intend by their calls and gestures, we can't tell if they truly use displacement or not.

Aside from all this, and more on-topic, I'd really like to see this sort of thing perfected and used in humans. Especially in accidental amputation cases, such as those resulting from car accidents, land mine injuries, and the like. If a monkey can do it, I'm sure people can, too.

Re:Tool use?

[ingo23]

Monkeys have been trained to operate tools and devices before this, both in and out of laboratory settings.

Yeah, I've seen them operating things from coffee makers to W2K Servers in the office settings.

Re:Tool use?

[Ohreally_factor]

Well, we'll find out how humans compare when using robotic arms as soon as they begin "Human trails".

That's how the robot army be able to track the surviving humans. By their trails.

Oh, wait. Robot arm, not army. Sorry, I'm apparently as careless a reader as zonk is an editor.

Re:Tool use?

[Ohreally_factor]

Monkeys have been trained to operate tools and devices before this, both in and out of laboratory settings.

Do you consider slashdot to be a laboratory setting?

But seriously. I have no knowledge of monkey tool use in the lab, but I do know (from many years of National Geographic) that tool using primates make and use very simple tools, usually materials close at hand and with minimal modification. The two examples that come to mind are using twigs to collect termites or large ants for food and crumpling a leaf to sponge up water that might be hard to reach with the mouth.

Obviously, this requires an ability to observe phenomena and to remember. In other words, the ability to learn, which many animals have. The advantage that the monkey has is that it can grasp objects and more easily manipulate them.

In a very broad sense of the word, other animals can learn to use tools. If you consider a door knob mechanism as a tool, there are many stories about animals that learn to open doors (usually the lever type knob). However, no one would reasonably suggest that an animal (other than a human) can make a doorknob.

I guess you're right to consider this "more of a robotic/hapic/man-machine interface breakthrough," but I think the real breakthrough was whatever advance led us to more complex tool making. My guess is that it was the development of language that made this possible, but I doubt that this will ever be proved.

Re:Tool use?

[jyak]

This topic was on PBS Innovation, Episode Human Body Shop. It original aired in 2004 and was then repeated last month. From the website, here is the description:

Thought Into Action
To many researchers, the most exciting application of a mind-machine interface would involve tapping the brain for signals that trigger responses outside the body. The field of brain-machine interface (BMI) systems, as they are sometimes called, proposes to make it possible for thought to equal action.

In humans, rudimentary BMI systems have relied on monitoring a person's brain activity via electroencephalograph (EEG). Electrodes placed on the scalp read and amplify the activity before transmitting it to a computer. By thinking different types of thoughts, patients learn to exert control over a cursor on a video screen. In most cases, this simply moves the cursor in one of two directions. However, this binary code can communicate important thoughts. After the most obvious answers of "yes" or "no," a system can be set up to allow a person to slowly choose letters and thus spell words and make sentences. This research is still in its infancy, but its successful application could allow even those people who are completely paralyzed (a condition known as "locked in") to communicate with the outside world.

Aspirations for BMI, however, go far beyond communicating thoughts and wishes. The Holy Grail is finding ways for the brain to command the movement of other objects such as artificial limbs. In the mid-1990s, researchers at Duke University clarified how the brain sends out signals directing muscles to move. Miguel Nicolelis, one of the Duke researchers who made the discovery, has already proven that harnessing these signals can link thought and action.

Nicolelis and his colleagues monitored the brain activity of a monkey as it manipulated a joystick. The brain signals were picked up by hundreds of electrodes buried in the animal's scalp and connected to a cap on its head. Many repetitions of movement generated enough data for the researchers to recreate a "language" and thus enable the monkey to communicate with and control a robotic arm through its brain's neural signals. The animal was even able to control an artificial arm over the Internet 600 miles away. Further research at Duke and other institutions is exploring ways to allow the brain to achieve more delicate control of artificial limbs and also receive sensory feedback simultaneously about what the limbs are touching. Ultimately, when these motor and sensory systems are combined, someone commanding an artificial arm to pick up a glass of water would be able to "feel" where the glass was and control how hard to squeeze it.

In 2003, the BMI field received a tremendous boost from the U.S. military -- more specifically the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which manages research for the Department of Defense and specializes in funding explorations of high-risk, high-payoff technologies. In 2003, DARPA invested $24 million in BMI programs, split among six different laboratories, including the one at Duke.

A major challenge for BMI research is improving upon the weak, blurry signals provided by EEGs. One nascent technology that might solve this problem is a new kind of brain imaging known as magnetoencephalography (MEG), which measures the magnetic fields created by nerve cells as they produce the small electrical currents used for neurotransmission. MEG provides much better scanning speed and resolution and does not require physical contact to record signals. Current MEG scanners are massive and so sensitive they must be surrounded by shielded walls to prevent readings from being compromised by laboratory machinery or even nearby traffic. But DARPA is funding research into shrinking the scanners' size, with the ultimate goal being a device small enough to fit inside a helmet.

Re:Tool use?

[Holi]

Are you talking about chimps or or monkeys. Chimps are in the ape family and are NOT monkeys. In the article they talk about monkeys but the animal in the picture looks more like a chimp. I went to several news sites but That image is the only one I could find.

Re:Tool use?

[l-ascorbic]

And, more importantly, if you were wondering if gorillas are the same as bears, read this FAQ (number 1).

Re:Tool use?

[gstoddart]

Uhhh, except that some monkey do have opposable thumbs, so it can't be the "only" thing. Read the faq (number 23):

My god, there's a primate FAQ????

Re:Tool use?

[DrSkwid]

some birds and some primates use tools

Re:Tool use?

[zero_offset]

We really should treat them as respected but at worst slightly verbally handicapped peers.

Slightly?
Peers?

You've been reading WAAAAY too much /.

We are disabled already.

[Eunuch]

"The inventors believe it could help people who have lost limb function through disease or trauma." Why are all these types of enhancements framed in terms of the disabled? We are disabled. Why must we hunger, breath air, thirst, sleep? I wonder if these researchers are just giving the public this. Can they see the obvious leap to transhumanism?

Great News!

[s7uar7]

For one armed monkeys.

Re:Great News!

[fnord_uk]

Even better news for no-armed monkeys. How else would they rewind to the best bits of the monkey-porn, and, er...spank?

Nipple Fettish

[BlurredWeasel]

As long as the monkey doesn't have a nipple fetish I think we'll be fine.

Re:Nipple Fettish

[gstoddart]

As long as the monkey doesn't have a nipple fetish [boingboing.net] I think we'll be fine.

That's hilarious. And I seem to recall an episode of Monster Garage in which said same gorilla seemed insistent on seeing Jessie's Nipples.

Wierd.

Re:Nipple Fettish

[TimeTraveler1884]

From the article:

During at least three visits, the suit says, "Patterson communicated to Alperin that exposing one's breasts to Koko is a normal component to developing a personal bond with the gorilla."

I've tried telling women that a normal component to developing a personal bond with me it for them to show me thier breasts. Using this logic on women has had no success as of yet.

I await Koko's finger-painted book titled: "Human Women Gone Wild or How I get Chicks to Show me thier Breasts."

Sealab quote

[Chairboy]

Is there such thing as an obligatory Sealab 2021 quote yet?

News Anchor: Scientists have successfully transplanted little Jango's brain into a robot monkey body. on a sad note, however, Jambo died late last night after drinking his own urine.

Sparks: Hey, Skip. What do you think about all this robot stuff?

Murphy: Why? Are we under attack?!

Sparks: No..but that robot monkey on the news..

Murphy: You're kidding! That guy's a robot monkey?

Re:Sealab quote

[Tjoppen]

.. or how about:

Murphy: Not if he's surrounded by bananas! I mean, look at him, he's in heaven.
Stormy: No, look! He's doing it. He's going for help.
Murphy: No he's not. He-
* Jango enters carrying monkey porn
Stormy: Jango, put that down!
Murphy: I told you he'd find it.

Re:Sealab quote

[Squirmy McPhee]

News Anchor: Scientists have successfully transplanted little Jango's brain into a robot monkey body. on a sad note, however, Jambo died late last night after drinking his own urine. Sparks: Hey, Skip. What do you think about all this robot stuff? Murphy: Why? Are we under attack?! Sparks: No..but that robot monkey on the news.. Murphy: You're kidding! That guy's a robot monkey?

News Anchor: In an unrelated story, Koko the gorilla has a nipple fetish.

Debbie (unzipping top): We're under attack by robot monkey nipple fetishists?!

Sparks: No!

Debbie: Damn! I haven't been touched in hours! (zips top)

Murphy: Sparks! I'll be in my quarters. No way those monkeys are stealing my nipples....

Re:Sealab quote

[AdmiralWeirdbeard]

whatever, I just want my Adrian Barbo-Bot

and that monkey better keep his hands off my 'stache

Deep Thoughts...This is the first step

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the monkeys at the zoo should have to wear sunglasses so they can't hypnotize you.

-Jack Handy

University of Pittsburgh NOT Pittsburgh University

[rueba]

See here:
http://www.cnbc.cmu.edu/faculty/schwartz.sh tml

It seems he does joint work with CMU but his official position is at UPitt(as we sometimes call it).

That's great...

[Lisandro]

Don't give monkey knives or guns. Just give them robotic arms a-la-Robocop!

Acceptable question now...

[andy314159pi]

The following is an acceptable question to ask:
"Should we really be attaching electronics to monkey neurons?"

Re:Acceptable question now...

[Richie1984]

That raises the question "is animal reseach acceptable if it benefits a larger number of humans?", which is a debate beyond the scope of this article, in my opinion. There's no indication that any animals were harmed in the process, and there's no mention whether there is any lasting damage, or if the proceedure is reversable. But, if I were going to use the technology, I personally would like the answers to those questions beforehand.

Re:Acceptable question now...

[Eq 7-2521]

No no no! It begs the question. Get with the modern vernacular.

Re:Acceptable question now...

[gphinch]

monkeys are a natural resource put on this planet for humans to expend, just like oil and iron. now where can we go to war to get more monkeys...

Re:Acceptable question now...

[rokzy]

>There's no indication that any animals were harmed in the process

'cept for "inserting probes into brains" ?

I'd prefer this kind of thing was done on humans and with non-invasive probes, but this is probably better (it had better be to jusify the use of animals like this).

Re:Acceptable question now...

[soft_guy]

where can we go to war to get more monkeys

Ringling Brothers?

Re:Acceptable question now...

[Richie1984]

"Inserting probes into the brain" doesnt mean that the animals were harmed. It's a surgical proceedure. Ok, it's a long shot, but we still aren't sure either way whether there was lasting damage. Hopefully, there wasn't.

Re:Acceptable question now...

[timeOday]

There's no indication that any animals were harmed in the process, and there's no mention whether there is any lasting damage, or if the proceedure is reversable.

But we can intuit something from the fact that they used monkeys rather than people in the first place.

Re:Acceptable question now...

[dsanfte]

Who cares? If there was damage, breed another monkey and try again.

You guys are downright bizzare with your ethical conundrums. Are you all vegans, too?

Re:Acceptable question now...

[Richie1984]

Personally, I grew up in a househould where we had a lot of animals, especially dogs. While these animals were certainly nowhere near as intelligent as we were, they certainly had their own individual personalities and traits. As a result, I just don't really like the idea of animal testing if harm comes to the animal.

Re:Acceptable question now...

[srleffler]

Not really. You don't do any kind of experiment on humans unless you really have to. Even simple non-invasive experiments on humans require extensive preapproval through ethics committees, at many research institutions. Animal experiments are much easier to get approval for.

Re:Acceptable question now...

[plastik55]

I've toured several labs and met several animals used in neuroscience research--owls, rats, cats, monkeys, bats, etc. I've never got the impression that they experienced a substantial amount of pain. They all seemed perfectly normal except for the odd bit of metal sticking out of their heads.

This kind of research takes a lot of time investment in individual animals--training takes a lot of one-on-one involvement, and scientists are no less likely than anyone else to form bonds with creatures they care for.

Re:Acceptable question now...

[DunbarTheInept]

The tricky thing with that question is that the research cannot be known to benefit humans until the decision to harm the monkeys is alredy made. If a technique was KNOWN to work, it wouldn't be necessary to test it on monkeys. The way research works, it tends to fail more often than it succeeds (that's normal), and so there are many cases where the monkey harm had no human benefit. Short-sighted people can look at those individual cases and try to make the argument that in those cases it was wrong. But they ignore the bigger picture, which is the total monkeys harmed compared to the total humans benefitted, globally across all reasearch on the planet. That's the only fair way to do it. If you have to decide in advance whether it will benefit humans before being allowed to do it, then no tests could ever be carried out, because you never really know for sure until the experiment is finished.

Re:Acceptable question now...

[mbaciarello]

Mmmh... My post seems to have gone to /dev/whoknows, so here goes again (sorry for my n00bness if it turns out a dupe, but I have corrected it :):

I've seen similar experiments at Med School, and they involved "population vectors" too, back in 1998-99.

That's right, it's a pretty much painless procedure (according to our perception of the animal's reaction), and it's performed in a safe and sterile fashion.

The probes are really fine needles, much less than a millimeter in diameter. They don't cause particular brain trauma, and a variation of those probes is even used in surgical procedures and critical care monitoring in humans. The portions of skull removed to access the brain are put back in place and allowed to heal. Or, the probes can be left in place (as is the case here) using surgical material in a relatively safe manner.

Relatively safe here means that it's not like sticking a fork through the poor monkeys head: an increased risk of brain infection, trauma etc. is of course present.

However, by looking at the picture in TFA, it seems as though the monkey is only moving the robotic arm. If that's the case, to the best of my knowledge, there's no way they could have prevented the real arm from moving or sending feedback signals other than by damaging the descending and/or ascending pathways (outgoing connections) of the motor cortex being studied. Such damage would be pretty much permanent.

TFA says the monkey's arms were restrained, but that brings up one more question: how did they bypass automatic feedback signals coming from the restrained arm, telling the brain it wasn't actually moving, and thus to increase the strength and/or to try other movements/recruit different vector populations? I can't see how the movement might have resembled "natural" ("like your own arm," as TFA say) in the presence of contrasting feedback coming from the real arm.

Re:Acceptable question now...

[grolschie]

There's no indication that any animals were harmed in the process

oooohh.... why didn't they try it on humans first then?

Re:Acceptable question now...

[Anonymous Coward]

Lab monkeys 'scream with fear' in tests

Sandra Laville
Tuesday February 8, 2005
The Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,140 7818,00.html/

Re:Acceptable question now...

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

Oh yeah, and the sleep deprivation leading to death really didn't harm the rats at all.

Or that rats that had their dopamine systems destroyed, and as a result, died because they couldn't be bothered to eat.

In some fields of science, the animals being tested on are probably living quite a nice life. But for others, it really is tourture.

Re:Acceptable question now...

[SQL Error]

Sure. Just remember to mount a scratch monkey when running diagnostics.

Re:Acceptable question now...

[enigmatichmachine]

It could be so much worse, i've friends who work smashing animals in the head to observe blunt trauma injuries to the brain. sometimes the first wack kills them, if so, they chop up the brains and record the data, if not, they let them heal and do it again.

Re:Acceptable question now...

[jqpublic]

The even larger question goes beyond whether monkeys were harmed in this process or even if the harm done to them ultimately benefits humans. The question to be asked is do high functioning primates, which in many tests of cognitive and emotional ability are equivalent to 3-5 year old humans, have the right to be left alone? You wouldn't think this experiment were so cool if it were done on a 3 year old, would you? A fascinating book on legal rights for certain primates is Rattling the Cage by Steven Wise.

Re:Acceptable question now...

[FleaPlus]

Do you have any links from real news sources?

Re:Acceptable question now...

[dsanfte]

My brother feeds two rats a week to his pet snake. Forget which kind, it's about three feet long and a few inches thick. Brownish, non-poisonous.

Regardless, the rat is very probably harmed, as is the nature of this snake. It eats animals.

You may be very sad to know that things have been suffering and dying on this planet for longer than our species has existed to lament it. You may also be sad to know that your ancestors killed plenty of animals to survive, and their progeny led to you.

You may also, finally, be sad to know that you are a hypocrite.

Re:Acceptable question now...

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

No. I'm not a hypocrite. I don't even see how you can accuse me of such, since I never said that people should stop testing because it harms animals. I was just correcting the obvious false impression that this person was giving; that no animals are harmed in testing.

As for the pet snake, It's natural for a snake to eat rats. And the rat will die fairly quickly. People don't have to perform these experiments, and they also do it fully knowing that they may be harming the animal. So there's quite a bit of difference between feeding a snake and animal testing.

With regards to that suffering has been around for a long time. I fail to see what this has to do with anything. As why, simply because that's the way things used to be, should things continue to be the same way?
That kind of argument makes about as much sense as the argument that we must eat meat because we still have molars. Not that I want to turn this into an anti-meat eating argument, since I do eat meat. But the reason many use to justify this are quite stupid.

Perhaps you shouldn't make generalizations about people's ideologies and way of life by a single post. Perhaps you should also wake up and realise that many issues are not clear cut, and the many people are smart enough to realise this, and don't create black and white views on such subjects.

In terms of where I stand on the whole animal testing issue. I'm pretty much on the fence. Mainly because a lot of this research ends up preventing a lot of suffering.

Re:Acceptable question now...

[dsanfte]

With regards to that suffering has been around for a long time. I fail to see what this has to do with anything. As why, simply because that's the way things used to be, should things continue to be the same way?

You are a complete idiot. Please show me a viable way to change the entire ecosystem of the planet to a "happy non-killing" kind. Please. I dare you.

Re:Acceptable question now...

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

The only idiot here is the person who is suggesting it's necessary to change the entire world to make a difference, right after a comment pointing out the stupidity of thinking in black and white.

Since when the hell did I suggest we change the entire ecosystem to prevent all suffering? Since when did I say we should do anything at all?

Your are one of the most idiotic people I have meet on Slashdot. Not only do you jump to conclusions and make generalisations, but you completely miss the point. You take your dislike of me and try an fit it into an argument rather than arguing rationally.

Further evidence that you are an idiot is your use of the "foe" feature. Only a bitter idiot uses that, since it give them a way to know wether to agree or disagree with a post without having to think and use rational, logical decision-making processes.

Monkey operated.

[lateralus_1024]

It's not a robotic arm, it's Congress, the Supreme Court and the Senate.

Re:Monkey operated.

[XFilesFMDS1013]

Forgot about monkey controlled arms, how about the monkey that controls the U.S.?

Implications

[Aggrazel]

This is all well and good until some scientist accidentally fuzes 4 arms to himself and goes mad, rampaging through the city and hatching evil plots...

oh the horror.

Re:Implications

[lordsilence]

So that's where all the missing urane went to, the building of the reactor to control those arms..

Re:Implications

[CrackedButter]

Excuse me but you need glasses, Bush still only has 2 arms.

Let the robotic poo-flinging begin

[The UberDork]

Robot Monkey Arms flings robot poo!!

No, the tool is the arm.

[Eunuch]

Remember they are using the tool like they would use their own arm. Monkeys already can grasp--having opposable thumbs.

Re:No, the tool is the arm.

[peculiarmethod]

sugar gliders have them as well.. one per hand. and they even have unique fingerprints.

Re:No, the tool is the arm.

[daddymac]

If you think only humans have opposable thumbs, please read #23 of the faq:
http://www.primates.com/faq/index.html

Thanks to this robotic arm...

[DaFallus]

"In this world gone mad, we won't spank the monkey, the monkey will spank us."

Remember the last time

[Prince Vegeta SSJ4]

people experimented with monkey thoughts

Pittsburgh University?

[chia_monkey]

I'm still trying to figure out if they're talking about the University of Pittsburgh, which has a rather well-known medical program, or Carnegie Mellon University (which would be a Pittsburgh University) which is world famous for its robotics program. Anyone? Bueller?

Re:Pittsburgh University?

[chia_monkey]

Ah...thank you. Was a bit too busy at work to do my usual detective work. I too wouldn't be surprised if there was some invovlement with CMU Robotics. Thanks again.

We're doomed

[cyberwiz01]

Besides the obvious addition of extra limbs a la Doc Oc from Spiderman, imagine what it would be like if everyday people had loads of mechanical limbs. As if drivers on cell phones werent bad enough. Now people can drive, talk on the phone, type something on their laptop, eat, and read the newspaper at the same time.

Re:We're doomed

[3770]

I'm guessing that the brain only can handle two arms. You could have an extra limb, but it would perfectly mimic either the left or the right arm.

Or your left or right leg, or maybe the arm could mimic one of your fingers. But I don't think that you can have a robotic limb which which is completely independend from all your existing limbs.

Maybe if you got the robotic limb when you were a baby.

Re:We're doomed

[Stanistani]

>Now people can drive, talk on the phone, type something on their laptop, eat, and read the newspaper at the same time.

Or, considering the "averaging" in the algorithm, imagine them typing on the newspaper, turning their laptop to the right, talking to the steering wheel, shoving the cellphone in their mouth, and careening off the road.

Re:We're doomed

[mbaciarello]

That's right...

Neurons undergo something like a Darwinist evolution. At birth, you have more than you'll have at 20. Those which "survive" are those who have been used the most (or 'produce the fittest output'), presumably because they have established the most efficient connections with other neurons.

So if you get your new arm at 20, a substantial portion of this "evolution" will already have occurred, and since neurons may not multiply, the ones remaining will have to share the additional tasks. It's possible, but it's an excruciating, not always successful process which you can see in traumatic brain injury or stroke patients: neurological rehabilitation.

In those cases, existing connections need to be re-adapted, and this isn't possible for all of them. Additionally, you basically have an insufficient amount of individual neurons in the motor area of the brain cortex, so the actual spatial/dynamic resolution of movement control will be further reduced.

This is also valid at least for sensorial areas of the brain. Memory and associative areas are much less understood.

Re:We're doomed

[captain_craptacular]

Why would you think that? You obviously have no children. A newborne babies brain can handly approximately 0 arms/lets/appendages. They can't even really focus their eyes. All of that is learned behavior which comes to them slowly through months and years of practice.

For example, the brain of an average human hasn't learned to control the legs enough to walk until somewhere around 1 year old.

Re:We're doomed

[3waygeek]

I'm guessing that the brain only can handle two arms. You could have an extra limb, but it would perfectly mimic either the left or the right arm.

Douglas Adams figured that out years ago -- that's why Zaphod has the second head.

Re:We're doomed

[DunbarTheInept]

I think you're viewing the brain's muscle control like dedicated hardware ports in a PC - this parellel port is only for printers, that ps/2 port is only for keyboards, this ps/2 port is only for mice, etc. But that's not how the brain's controls function. It's more like USB - here's some ports. Learn what they're connected to, and then in software decide how to manipulate them.

The brain's control of muscles is mostly learned. There is some pre-configured default settings at "the factory", but they are maleable. If you look at two different individual creatures (of the same type), and the way they control the same appendage, it's really cool how it works. Out toward the extremities the wiring is the same. (For example, every human being has the pinkie and the outer half of the ring finger wired up so they share the same nerve path and "tingle" together when they "fall asleep".) But closer to the brain, you see individual variation. Once inside the brain, it's no longer hardwired. Two individuals may have learned to do the same task with slightly different paths.

In humans this is especially so, since most muscle control is learned after birth through practice. The human brain has less instinctive motor control and more generic user-definable motor control.

So I think you probably COULD train your brain to control a third arm. But it would definately take longer if you did it later in life.

Re:We're doomed

[FuryG3]

I think you might be wrong:

http://www.gizmag.com/go/3503/

They've succesfully implated chips which, after intensive training, allow humans (and monkeys) to control various things by thought.

Initially it's difficult to operate. you think of something like "the color red", and it moves left. but after a while, your mind learns to just do it. Sort of like people recovering from a stroke...

Re:We're doomed

[ikkonoishi]

Yes because its impossible to play a video game without looking at the controller.

When you first start playing you have this instinct to jerk the controller from side to side as you play because you are trying to move the sprite on screen.

After a while you move it completely by hitting the correct buttons. If you play it enough you don't even have to think of the keystrokes, you can just imagine the move in your head and your hands will hit the right keys.

This wouldn't be much different except that you wouldn't have to actually move your fingers.

First you map the movement of the mechanical hand to your own hand movements. After awhile you focus on not moving your own hand when the mechanical one moves. Pretty soon you can move each of them seperately.

I went through this very process learning to cross and uncross my eyes when I went to therapy for my lazy eye when I was a kid.

Re:We're doomed

[Ironica]

For example, the brain of an average human hasn't learned to control the legs enough to walk until somewhere around 1 year old.

Well, they can control their legs just fine, and in fact until the age of two months have a reflex that causes them to step up if presented with an uneven surface under their feet. And they usually have the strength to support their body with their legs by around two months. But what they don't master until closer to a year (9-16 months is the normal range for first walking) is balance.

Sorry, just nitpicking (as I spend much of my day watching my son try to stand up, and fail).

Re:We're doomed

[SpaceTaxi]

As a parent of three kids, I'm willing to give the third arm a try. Sure beats psycokenisis! ;)

In other news...

[pacmanfan]

It has been determined that with a motor-cortex-controlled electric typewriter, it will only take approximately 10,000 years for a million monkeys to compose the works of Shakespeare.

Wired has a better story

[garbletext]

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,65468, 00.html?tw=wn_story_related

Didn't this happen before...

[Ruarris]

This just happened in humans at MIT http://www.cnn.com/TECH/science/9807/23/t_t/digita l.gadgets/

Re:Didn't this happen before...

[Ruarris]

Sorry, wrong article :) But i can't find the one I was looking for. I believe it was MIT who designed an arm that a man who was paralyzed could control with his mind, and so far could turn on a TV

Interference from tissue growth

[Mark of THE CITY]

Could tissue growth be suppressed locally, maybe by having a supply of some anti-growth factor dispensed from the (possibly porous) probes? It would still have to be replenished; but undesirable side effects (suppressing tissue growth elsewhere) could be eliminated or mitigated and the probes could last much longer.

Re:And for the next version...

[Stanistani]

From the article:
"Our biggest problem is durability of the probes. Typically they last for about six months."

I'd say a bigger problem is that to make this work, you have to stick friggin' needles into the brain!

How about some sort of non-invasive sensor cap as the "next step."

I imagine it can hurl

[saddino]

shit at blindingly fast speeds. Ex-cellent.

Mojo

[PretzelWagon]

Pray for Mojo.

Jesus Christ

[kaustik]

In early tests, monkeys had tiny probes inserted into their brains and had their limbs restrained

I'm no blood-throwing, goat loving PETA member, but this sounds horrible. You'd think there would be better ways of testing things like this... like on willing humans who were properly sedated. Hell, I'd do it if they let me keep the arm...

Evil monkey-robots?!!

[caluml]

Holy shit! We're giving those evil little fuckers cyborg capabilities to go with their brains, opposable thumbs, and tails?!!
NASA wants us all dead! NASA sent up monkeys - are they all accounted for? NASA sent up robots - where are they now? We can defeat the monkeys. We can defeat the robots. But NOT AT THE SAME TIME!

Re:Evil monkey-robots?!!

[djward]

I, for one, welcome our new evil cyborg-monkey overlords. And the obligatory responses on /. that follow.

"This robot arm smells like burning Rhesus Monkey!"

"Really? Well, when you're around it all day I guess you stop noticing."

Re:And for the next version...

[Richie1984]

I'd be more concerned about the algorithm they use. Due to the large amount of messages, most are scrapped and only the seemingly 'important' ones are saved. I'd want to make sure that the algorithm is actually effective before trying out this technology, or I'd like an explaination as to how they sort unimportant signals from important ones. Otherwise, the movements of the tool may not relate to what the user actually intended.

Graft

[looneyboy784]

So when this tech matures will they be able to attatch a 3rd arm to my back so i can scratch my ass without distracting me from other activities. cool, but where would i buy shirts?

Re:Graft

[bcmm]

Oh no you won't.
When you have three arms you will keep one (the artificial, carpal tunnel proof one) on the mouse and the others on the keyboard. You'll need a fourth. And when four hands becomes normal, they'll invent three-handed keyboards.

Now we can make new arms for monkeys...

[bcmm]

we can teach them to type!
This will do wonders for the quality of discussion on Slashdot. CmdrTaco, if your reading this, please give extra mod points to non-human /.ers.

But i was hoping for RC

[Colin E. McDonald]

Isn't that kind of like thinking you were getting a real RC car for Christmas and then when you
tore away the wrapping it ended up being one with a cord attached between the control and the car?

I've been ripped off!!!

Unless of course...those probes were using BlueTooth.

Well..

[Nifrith]

I, for one, welcome our new cyborg monkey masters.

Re:Well..

[bcmm]

I, for one, welcome our new cyborg monkey masters.

Overlords.
Not master, overlords.

"I, for one, welcome our new cyborg monkey overlords!"

Re:Well..

[Nifrith]

"I, for one, welcome our new cyborg monkey overlords!" They might be _your_ overlords, but they're _my_ masters.

Re:Well..

[bcmm]

What about this Google fight then?

P.S. Arghh! It's all been redone in flash!

at Pittsburgh University...

[ultramk]

At Pittsburgh University, the monkey spanks you!

-m

DUPE

[DrLZRDMN]

This item is very old, I remember it from last summer or spring. It is however, a very awesome achievement.

Old adage proven true

[mdxi]

The article says the team's biggest problem is that after about 6 months tissue grown begins to interfere with transmission of signals to the probe.

This will no doubt limit the adoption of monkey cyborgs in RTOS and embedded spaces, and proves the old adage, "Always mount a scratch monkey".

Enough to turn me Republican.

[Eunuch]

The end result of all this will be a transhuman capable of withstanding all those bombs being exploded in Iraq. There is no sacrific too high. PETA and stem cell opponents are both roadblocks, although they are political opponents.

And...

[ZeroConcept]

When given pen and paper, it wrote down:

"Developers, developers, developers!!!!"

Re:And...

[Pedrito]

When given pen and paper, it wrote down:

"Developers, developers, developers!!!!"

When given a typewriter it wrote the entire works of Shakespeare.

Re:University of Pittsburgh NOT Pittsburgh Univers

[Anonymous Coward]

This work is *OLD*. Take a look at the Boston Arm for examples of why it doesn't work well. The electrodes cannot yet be permanently linked to small enough numbers of neurons to prevent huge amounts of signal noise, and you get a minimum of half a second of phase delay in the control systems to average out the noise. And the smaller you make the electrodes, the higher the impedance of the electrode, which also reduces your available signal level and potentially lowers your signal/noise.

Mechanical arms reading motion of other moscles still works a lot faster than any of the neural implants. Look at David Edell's work at MIT for examples of potentially useful electrode technologies, involving electroplated slots in semiconductor grade silicon.

Reverse would be better

[Kohath]

I don't know about you, but I'd rather have a monkey arm controlled by robot thoughts.

Human Testing

[ghobbsus]

According to a Popular Science article on the subject, several humans have already undergone similar treatments, allowing them to control a computer mouse by thought. In addition, scientists were able to use a weak FM transmitter to circumvent uncomfortable wiring.

Re:And for the next version...

[Stanistani]

Maybe with a "lossy" algorithm like this that wouldn't be as big a factor... then again, maybe the answer is making the elctrode/brain/skull part more durable.

Re:And for the next version...

[TheKidWho]

yeah it just happens to be completely coincendental that the monkey managed to pick up the food with teh arm and eat it. The odds of that happening by coincedent are astronomical!

Plus, the brain adapts itself so that it can use the arm, there is no reason to completely adapt the interface to the brain.

That's not my ass!

[soft_guy]

That's my fembot's gorilla controlled ass!

Re:Typewriters

[bcmm]

They should be put to use writing software.
Get some of them to type random code, and others to alpha test. When you get some code which compiles fairly cleanly and which can open and edit a few common formats (MS word, PDF, Oo.o sxw, etc.), sell it and start them on something else, like a photoshop clone. Yes, there will be issues with bloat, what with all the random peices of code which don't do anything, but it probably won't be as bad as the bloat in MS Word...

Modding

[northcat]

OMG look at the moderation on this article. As of now, only three posts are visible under default settings. WTF?!!

Re:And for the next version...

[Richie1984]

That's a fair point, but my main concern is that the algorithm may not be perfect, which is expected as the technology is only in development. I just don't like the idea of 'unimportant' messages being filtered. What is their definition of unimportant?

Practicality....

[cdegough]

Now I can just think about changing the channel when my remote is out of batteries...

Re:One step closer

[Anonymous Coward]

wtf?

Hey, professor!

[sushibot]

What they don't tell you is the first thing the monkey did was raise it's robotic middle finger.
-sb

Oh, Shit

[waldoj]

I, for one, welcome our new monkey overlords.

-Waldo Jaquith

lol,

[sabedoria]

I'm sure he's working on that ammendment too...

The wonders of one-handed typing

[alphakappa]

will soon give away to no-handed typing :-)

Ok everyone who's having Monkey Thoughts

[Anonymous Coward]

raise your hand.

Just as I thought. 65,567,289 people.

So, will it take infinite monkeys a little longer

[noidentity]

to write Shakespeare if they are typing with this thought-controlled robotic arm?

Monkey Controls Robots...

[SunFan]

Who is the CEO of Microsoft, now?

Birds Make and Use Tools

[Anonymous Coward]

I think I saw an article here sometime ago about raven's fashioning tools out of paperclips in order to snag food.

A quick search on google turns up an entire site devoted to tool use in birds.

I for one

[Anonymous Coward]

I for one welcome our new robotic armed monkey overlords!

i'm confused

[sabedoria]

what's a typewriter? Is that like a gramophone?

It's being used

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

to produce articles and comments on Slashdot!

Yeah, subject.

[MasonMcD]

I know where I'm casting my vote for the most dada-esque Slashdot headline *evar*.

Re:Just to have it be said

[pointguy]

It was said at least three times already. The four of you should start a club.

More Information Can Be Found...

[mrighi]

...at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Also, the University of Pittsburgh has a movie of the monkey moving it's arm.

For more information, visit the University of Pittsburgh Department of Neurobiology Motorlab

You hairry little monkey...

[TiggertheMad]

You beat me to posting that link.

I just want to say that the case mentioned by the parent posting will probably be the first time in legal history that anyone pleads innoncen on the grounds that, 'The monkey made me do it'.

Arm controlled by monkey?

[Qrlx]

I'm guessing the first use of that arm was to fling a whole lot of feces.

Links and more info

[FleaPlus]

First off, it's the University of Pittsburgh, not Pittsburgh University.

The actual web site for Schwartz's lab:
http://motorlab.neurobio.pitt.edu/

The above link has neat videos of the monkey moving the arm around.

Researchers like Schwartz who record from motor areas of the brain do cool stuff, but I'm personally more interested in folks like the Andersen Lab who do recording from more goal-oriented areas. Basically, it's a difference between a command to "move my elbow this much" versus "I want to grab this object."

Here's a PDF link to a paper published by Schwartz and others in 2002. Here's the abstract:

Direct Cortical Control of 3D Neuroprosthetic Devices

Dawn M. Taylor, Stephen I. Helms Tillery, Andrew B. Schwartz

Three-dimensional (3D) movement of neuroprosthetic devices can be controlled by the activity of cortical neurons when appropriate algorithms are used to decode intended movement in real time. Previous studies assumed that neurons maintain fixed tuning properties, and the studies used subjects who were unaware of the movements predicted by their recorded units. In this study, subjects had real-time visual feedback of their brain-controlled trajectories. Cell tuning properties changed when used for brain-controlled movements. By using control algorithms that track these changes, subjects made long sequences of 3D movements using far fewer cortical units than expected. Daily practice improved movement accuracy and the directional tuning of these units.

Re:And for the next version...

[TheKidWho]

It doesn't matter because the brain adapts to losing information like that and tries to send the data differently so that it can manipulate the arm the way it wants.

Alas,

[LesPaul75]

He is more machine than monkey now, twisted and evil.

Re:And for the next version...

[Alyred]

Why does it matter? All they care about it moving the arm in that case. It's not that the "filtered" signals are being blocked from the body, and just getting lost. The article states that the monkey tried using his regular arms for a while until he realized that the new arm worked when he tried as well.

But, while I'm sure that if any harm came to the monkey in the end that animal rights groups would be all over them, I'd like to hear about follow up once the monkey was disconnected from the machine. Do his arms work normally? I doubt the probes have any lasting damage, since they are pretty small and don't penetrate the brain enough to destroy parts of the brain. Think of them as more... fitting "between" the cells, though I'm sure this analogy doesn't do it justice, and is not technically accurate.

On that note...

[CrackedButter]

I for one welcome our robotic simian poo flinging overlords.

Re:And for the next version...

[srleffler]

That doesn't seem like such a big problem. I mean, if you are missing an arm and they could give you a brain-controlled robotic one to replace it, wouldn't you be willing to go for it? (Assuming of course, that this had been thoroughly researched and proven to be safe, first.)

Re:And for the next version...

[porcupine8]

But, while I'm sure that if any harm came to the monkey in the end that animal rights groups would be all over them,

No, the animal rights groups don't care if or how much the animals suffer, they just don't want them being used in research, period. They're in no more danger of being firebombed if the monkey gets hurt or even killed than if the monkey is just fine.

Why is there a block on transhumanism?

[Eunuch]

Why aren't you mentioning transhumanism? I'm curious about the block people familiar with neuroscience have. Like an elephant in the living room.

Yes you lose a lot of neurons, but at least for the senses you should be fine as long as you have your thalamus. There was a recent case of partial hearing restored by inputting directly into the brain stem.

Re:Why is there a block on transhumanism?

[mbaciarello]

Why am I not? Er... I'm ashamed to admit I'd never read that term before, although I seem to grasp the concept.

Well, that wasn't really my point, I was just stressing the point that an extra arm attached in this fashion at the age of 20 wouldn't be easy to "manage."

As for the other point, you're partially correct. Sensory information is conducted, and elaborated, in the thalamus, but it reaches consciousness only at the last neuron in the pathway, which is located in an area of the cortex just behind the one controlling motion. Such area also has extensive connections with memory, associative and "biohumoral" areas. Damage to the thalamus may lead to absent or impaired sensation, whereas destruction of the sensory cortex leads to total absence of conscious sensation. Both structures are part of the sensory pathways, though, so they're both essential.

As for that recent case, I haven't read about it, but that would depend on the level of the lesion. For example, if only axons (the 'cables') conducting information from the inner ear to the brainstem were damaged, the injection of stem cells might have stimulated the repairs of those connections. A broken axon can nowadays be repaired, although it depends on the lesion. A dead neuron cannot.

Of course, this doesn't mean we couldn't be able one day to "start over" by injecting new, indifferentiated neuronal stem cells which could then differentiate into full-fledged neurons and get back to work. This is actually being researched in Parkinson's disease, where a particular kind of neurons in the basal ganglia die. There's hope that by injecting stem cells in the area might lead to re-population and renewed functionality. Such procedures might turn out to also work in brain injured patients, or in those who just had their third arm installed...

H2 G2

[kaalamaadan]

Reminds me of Doug Adams' prediction in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the galaxy, about thought and motion controlled radio controls, so that eventually you have to sit irritatingly still and listen intently to the radio, otherwise the channels will switch ...

Let's hope it's not the

[jpetts]

monkey in "hooked on Monkey Phonics" that masturbates instead of helping Cartman spell "chair"

No, We are very much enabled.

[droopycom]

"Why must we hunger, breath air, thirst, sleep?"

You dont have to, you can just die if physical life doesnt suits you.

Please note that this is not an encouragement. But just realize that hunger, breath, thirst and sleep, are not disabling, they are enabling you to live in this physical world.

We are very much enabled:

If you cant sleep, your life will be a nightmare.
If you're never hungry, you'll forgot to eat and eventually die.
If you're never thirsty, you'll not drink, and die in a few days or weeks.
If you never breath, you'll die pretty quick.

again?

[kram3r]

I read about this in scientific american over a year ago??

Think deeper

[Eunuch]

Hunger--we already have intravenous food (such as Resource).

Breath air--our breathing system is quite inefficient. Heart-lung machines are already available. We'd be "breathing", but we wouldn't be conscious of it.

Thirst--See hunger.

Sleep--This is more interesting. Certain drugs keep you up for days. A designed sentience may or may not need sleep.

Re:Think deeper

[ricka0]

I guess there are a few problems with the current IV food and delivery. High blood sugar levels,lose of appetite, disruption of the liver, and a major risk of infection (since it's inserted to a central line germs could be carried strait to the heart). Also, it's hard to get the mix right (and there are some trace elements that we are still learning how important they are).

Besides many people would miss the taste of food.

Thirst seems like the most logical one that we could deal with more quickly. The biggest issue would be having some way of testing how much liquid you needed in your system. Many of the implanted testing for say diabetics have had issues with the body growing around the testing device making it less useful and quickly useless, if it were done in say the blood streem.

hmmm

[ralphus]

No doubt they will soon be flinging robotic poo. What bold advances science makes.

The 6 Million Dollar Monkey

[srobert]

...we can rebuild him. We can make him better than he was, better, faster, stronger...

Starring Lance Link as Steve Austin
If you don't remember Lance Link, you're too young.

Re:This is just wrong!

[Acts of Attrition]

Robots don't kill people.
Monkey-controlled robots kill people.

A little history

[Guerilla Antix]

I was watching the Discovery channel awhile ago (probably close to a year, if not more) and saw something that may have related to this research. The scientists began by giving the monkeys a joystick (or mouse, memory is hazy) and when the monkeys moved the cursor to a box on the screen they would receive a treat. Then they took away the control and wired the monkey's brain so that (s)he could simply use thought to control the cursor on the screen. Apparently this was done by thinking of the same movements that the monkey would do to maneuver the cursor but not actually physically performing the action. I'm kind of curious if this current robotic arm is an extention (no pun intended) of that research or completely unrelated.

A infinite number of monkeys...

[ddent]

Finally! We can get an infinite number of monkeys in an infinitely large room with an infinite number of typewriters and have all the works of Shakespeare produced. [*]

[*] Unfortunately research has shown they tend to fixate on one or two keys.

I for one....

[jwhitener]

Welcome our bionic monkey overlords

Re:And for the next version...

[Tyreth]

What I'm wondering is about the drain that such a system would place on your mind. In order to receive the signals, these probes are taking...electricity (excuse my ignorance)...from the brain without, I assume, replacing it. Will this have a negligible effect on the day to day running of the brain or will it be significant enough to show a drop in intelligence through tests?

Coordination test

[Spy der Mann]

1) Plug the probe onto your brain

2) try to pat your head with your right hand, rub your belly with your left hand, and scratch your neck with the robotic arm.

If I woke up like that...

[myowntrueself]

As Master Shake said "If I woke up like that, I'd move toward the nearest living thing... and kill it".

is that cowboyneal

[hachete]

or you just pleased to see me.

Re:And for the next version...

[Surur]

I doubt the probes have any lasting damage, since they are pretty small and don't penetrate the brain enough to destroy parts of the brain. Think of them as more... fitting "between" the cells, though I'm sure this analogy doesn't do it justice, and is not technically accurate.

I'm sure the disection will confirm this ;-)

Surur

Not the first time...

[terranlune]

This is very old news...

http://archives.cnn.com/2000/HEALTH/11/15/monkey.b rain/index.html

We have a running joke

[the_mushroom_king]

We have a running joke at work that the makers of our ERP system QA their code my putting a bunch of monkeys in a room. The monkeys throw fesces at a target at then they manage to hit the target, the code is released.

I imagine that advances like this will allow them to QA the new code much faster.

-- TMK

old news

[schmobag]

http://www.time.com/time/archive/preview/0,10987,1 005971,00.html

Heh!

[roman_mir]

I also want a robot hand to spank my monkey...

(blashing)

Inefficient != disabling

[droopycom]

Efficiency is debatable... Everybody is going to define Benefits vs Costs.

I mean, 4x4 SUV are not efficient (MPG-wise) yet they can enable you not being stuck in a snow storm.

Humans. migh not be the most efficient thing out there, but as we say if its not broken why fix it ?

feh.

[jpellino]

the post office apparently has had their lobby stamp machines connected to the brains of insane monkeys for years now...

AND Carnegie Mellon U.

[J_Omega]

Thanks for clearing that up, rueba. When I saw the PittsburgH (has the ending "H",) I figured that something was amiss.

yah, it is Univ. of Pittsburgh... Pitt. Note, however, that the link you gave to the researcher's bio is hosted on a CMU page.

With the CNBC center located at CMU, I would've thought the BBC would've mentioned CMU instead. Nice to see the Pitt prof working in conjunction with them, though!

Re:University of Pittsburgh NOT Pittsburgh Univers

[Rei]

You're kidding, right? The Boston Arm was *EMG controlled*, not electrode controlled. EMGs have poor resolution.

Of course, old data-out electrode-based BMIs (Brain-Machine Interfaces) weren't great. They got coated with organic material. They tended to tear up the neurons that they were probing. Etc. Modern BMIs, however, are rather different - often over a hundred blunt teflon-coated probes in a single array. With these, you get a 70% prediction rate on things like arm movement with 100 neurons, and 95% or so with 500-700 neurons.

As for latency, just a quick search reveals one number: Duke's arm from 2003 had 60-90ms delay. Not "instantaneous", but not bad either. And the numbers are really getting better.

As for how "old" this tech is, it wasn't until the 90s before it was shown for certain that specific motor control activities are greatly distributed, making BMIs feasible; there was a popsci article a while back that discussed the discovery.

Spanking your Monkey

[bzeichick]

Now, The monkey just needs to think about spanking itself.... Neato.

Re:Tool use? (you're right!)

[Laebshade]

I would think that there is plenty of non-robotic evidence that monkeys use and make simple tools, are skilled and knowledgable in their use and pass tool knowledge from individual to individual already in the wild.
After all, they do deliver all these wonderful articles on Slashdot!

Weakness

[Eunuch]

You miss the taste of food. Don't worry--everything can be simulated later. Some regulation is done in the digestive tract, which is bypassed in this case. You can actually just drink the very liquid they use--it's called Resource and you can order it online. I usually have something like Ensure, which is similar but meant for injestion.

Re:Weakness

[ricka0]

Are you really getting everything you need from it though? Or maybe too much even?

Quick example, TPN typically included Manganese as it is an essential trace element necessary for good nutrition and contained in unrefined cereals and green leafy vegetables. "...the tiniest amount of manganese typically added to TPN is responsible for the same kind of toxic effects on patients with liver failure as have been seen in miners with prolonged exposure to ore, in whom manganese poisoning was first described."

Also, "In addition to thiamine deficiency in both short- and long-term TPN patients, deficiencies of vitamins A, D, and E have been reported."

Although those total nutrition foods are great for people, it's not a good long-term plan at the moment. We still don't know near enough about how the body matabalizes food even (for example glucose levels vary for individual diabetics on different foods because of how their body digests it. So an apple might throw one person off the charts while only mildly effecting another. It's not a science yet, it's still an art.)

awh!

[Blitzenn]

It would be a lot more fun to control a monkey with my robot arm.

It's broken.

[Eunuch]

Stand a few meters away from a bomber in Iraq and you'll be quite broken. Design yourself to be much sturdier and you won't even notice it. This won't even be a compromise. You'll be able to jump to Mars from Earth.

telempathy

[celeritas_2]

I'd like to see them implant probes in the prefrontal cortex (monkeys don't have those right?) and hook em up to antennas, that would truely be the one true killer ap! Think the Matrix without those silly plugs, or Trekkian class mind readers YAY

Re:telempathy

[man_ls]

Ignoring the possibility that such a thing would kill a person, I had to wonder.

I was taking an EEG the other day as a guinea pig for a psychology grad student. Obviously, since he had lots and lots of moving lines and fancy bar graphs on his screen, *something* was leaking out of my skull when I thought, and being detected.

Thus, I hit upon the interesting idea: Hook the EEG electrodes up to an RF amplifier and suitably shaped antenna -- would the "stronger" waves, many orders of magnitude stronger, be picked up through the skulls of the other person, and suggest or induce behavior?

As scifi as it sounds, I think my uneducated perspective puts it within the realm of "well, your design is good, but unfortunately it just doesn't work like that in real life" rather than "you moron, that breaks every law of physics, including 3 that haven't even been discovered yet!"

Re:telempathy

[celeritas_2]

I would think some sort of receiver antenna and skull plug would be necessary, seems like neurons wouldn't pick up radio waves too well. Then again there are some things that screw with your head involving very strong magnets and alike hocus-pocus.
Nothing is as fun as hacking brains, preferably others'. I'd rather not have a kernel panic in my head.

Re:And for the next version...

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

No, the animal rights groups don't care if or how much the animals suffer, they just don't want them being used in research, period.

But the whole point is that no-one can know if the animal was harmed untill AFTER the research has been done. Otherwise it wouldn't really be research, would it?

SWEET

[hanshotfirst]

When can I order My Veritech VF-1?

Didn't Duke University already do this?

[bitfoo]

http://www.dukemednews.org/news/article.php?id=710 0

I was under the impression that this experiment occured in October of 2003 at Duke University.

What the monkey thinks about all this...

[Simonetta]

"Geez, guys!"
"All that work and trouble, and what you give me is an arm?"
"You could have made me a new thought-controlled five-axix huge super-fine dick!"
"But no, you gotta make some silly monkey-ass arm!"
"What do supposed to do with this extra new arm?
"I already have two good ones".
"Hey, what are you doing with that saw?"
"Holy shit! Someone call PETA fast! These white-coats are fuckin' nuts!"

compleat[sic] works of shakespeare?

[circusboy]

does this mean we can now wire the monkeys directly to a wordprocessor?

/. Cliche

[Ryan Monster]

In Korea only old people welcome their new overlord beowulf cluster of robotic monkey arms. **Sorry, I just had to do it

Re:/. Cliche

[Dunbal]

In Soviet Russia, robotic arms controlled by monkeys place electrodes in YOU...

Saw this on PBS last month

[JeffHunt]

This is stale news... I saw a show about this on PBS in January

Ob. Futurama Quote

[bakawally]

Professor Hubert Farnsworth: But what about your superintelligence?

Gunther the Monkey: When I had that there was too much pressure to use it. All I want out of life is to be a monkey of moderate intelligence who wears a suit. That's why I've decided to transfer to Business School.

Professor Hubert Farnsworth: NOOOOOOOOOOOO.

"Monkey thoughts..."

[d474]

God, I hope this isn't how they wired Bush(aka, 'Chimp') to The Button.

FOOLS!

[rlsthree]

"We can defeat the monkeys. We can defeat the robots. But not at the same time!" ~Lewis Black~

Personally...

[DanielNS84]

I welcome our new robotically enhanced cyborg monkey masters...

Ghoulish. Makes one think.

[groomed]

This is pretty ghoulish and a bit disturbing, even though there is every indication that this kind of stuff probably happens every day.

It got me thinking, why are we doing this? Why is it alright to saw the skull off an ape but not a human? As far as I can tell this question can be answered in three ways.

The first answer is that there is some huge insurmountable difference in kind between apes and humans, which makes it alright to subject apes to torture for the purpose of research, but not humans. This is basically the religious argument, because so far nobody has succeeded in providing a measure of this difference, much less in quantifying it. Meanwhile all the differences which can be measured, such as genetic difference, seem to point overwhelmingly in the other direction, namely that the difference is small and quite surmountable. Note that all the answers of the form "apes don't really suffer" or "it would violate the integrity of the human" and "it is against the law" all belong in this class.

The second answer tries to qualify the conditions under which it is alright to saw a monkey's skull off. We know the apes suffer, we may try to minimize their suffering, but ultimately we judge that the benefits from research warrant whatever suffering we subject the monkeys to. But there are two huge problems with this answer. First, if the research is really so important, then why don't we sacrifice a few humans instead? We can answer this question qualitatively by saying that there is a fundamental qualitative difference between humans and monkeys (which brings us very close to the first answer), or we can answer this question quantitively by saying that although monkeys and humans are both part of the same continuum, monkeys are simply worth less than humans, since they lack the mental acuity or dexterity of humans, or some such. But if mental acuity or dexterity are the criteria, then why not use retarded or disabled humans? Second, who determines the value of the research and on what grounds? And does this mean that some research might turn out to be so vital that it requires human guinea pigs?

Finally the third answer just posits that it's alright because we can. This is the position that might makes right. This is the most logically consistent position, even though it is ethically bankrupt (since all ethics are the ethics of the weak -- the strong need no ethics).

While none of these answers is entirely satisfying, generally the second answer seems to be the most palatable as well as the most common, since at least it tries to address what many people feel are legitimate issues. The catch is that it enshrines often questionable research on the backs and skulls of living, breathing monkeys. Although research for the sake of research has frequently enhanced our lives in unexpected ways, it has also frequently been a dead end. And while modern medical science can pull some amazing rabbits out of its high tech hat, the significance of these accomplishments can sometimes seem shallow when compared to that of mundane technology such as penicillin, antibacterial soap, and tap water.

I just hope this isn't another oversold "breakthrough" which turns out to have little practical use other than to funnel more funds into the departmental cash register.

Re:Ghoulish. Makes one think.

[dmarcoot]

why hasnt this been modded up to 5?
this is amongst the most insight posst i have ever seen on /dot

Re:Ghoulish. Makes one think.

[Dunbal]

which makes it alright to subject apes to torture for the purpose of research, but not humans.

Believe it or not if I stick electrodes in a monkey's brain it will not feel pain. If I stick an electrode in your brain, you also will not feel pain. The brain does not contain any pain sensitive nerve endings. The painful structures in the head (skin, periosteum, meninges) can be adequately anaesthetised. It's not torture, as you say - otherwise said experiment would never be approved, and said monkey would not cooperate at all - no animal in pain would be useful in such an experiment. It would just sit there, or it would be bouncing all over the cage.

From an ethics point of view monkeys are not persons (they are not able to express their thoughts and they don't have the power to take decisions) therefore they lack the basic ethical right people have: autonomy - the right to refuse treatment, or in this case to refuse to participate in research. The other rights - justice and non maleficence, are respected ANYWAY because WE are human, and also humane. You can't intentionally harm the monkey (unless such harm is essential for the experiment, like say giving it a disease). Your results must also justify any potential harm.

We know the apes suffer
Only in your uninformed mind. This used to be true say 30 years ago when animals were not given pain medication, but not anymore. Not even MICE suffer, much less apes. Unless you consider suffering being in a cage rather than "free" running through the jungle, or your attic (in the case of mice).

First, if the research is really so important, then why don't we sacrifice a few humans instead?
Because humans cannot be sacrificed - you are not allowed to give up your human rights the first being the right to life, even if you wanted to be sacrificed. But such experiments can certainly be performed on willing humans, provided it can be shown that under reasonable conditions the human will not be adversely affected. Humans have had electrodes in their brains before.

We can answer this question qualitatively by saying that there is a fundamental qualitative difference between humans and monkeys

Yes there is. Monkeys are not persons, and do not have "human rights". They now have "animal rights" in some countries, and no experiment will be permitted that does not take into account steps to prevent or minimize suffering of animals.

although monkeys and humans are both part of the same continuum, monkeys are simply worth less than humans

Of course a monkey is worth less to humans. If there is a situation where you have an equal choice between saving the human, and saving the monkey, if you save the monkey you are nuts. Monkeys may hold themselves in higher esteem than they hold us, but they haven't expressed this. To us, however, a monkey is certainly a less valuable member of our society. The US hasn't elected one as president (yet)...

Second, who determines the value of the research and on what grounds?

Experimental design is done by the scientists who try to prove a hypothesis, or at least to fail to rule it out. Then this design must be submitted to a scientific ethics comittee. These comittees consist of scientists from all fields, lawyers, TYPICAL MEMBERS OF THE COMMUNITY and (usually) a religious authority. They get together and look at the ethical aspect of the experiment, for example: is there a point, how much will the animals suffer and is the potential gain in knowledge worth the price the animals might have to pay. They either approve the experiment unconditionally, approve the experiment provided some suggestions are followed, or they refuse to approve it.

In order to publish the results in any worthwile scientific magazine, it is REQUIRED that the experiment have undergone this approval process. Publication is sort of the holy grail in the science world. Without it your work ain't worth shit. So we actually DO

Re:Ghoulish. Makes one think.

[groomed]

I'm going to be rude and ignore most of what you posted. Some of which I felt was useful, most of which I felt was unnecessarily defensive and pedantic.

I will just lift the one point from your post which I feel is central to the discussion. I would appreciate it if you could respond to it.

We can answer this question qualitatively by saying that there is a fundamental qualitative difference between humans and monkeys

Yes there is. Monkeys are not persons, and do not have "human rights". They now have "animal rights" in some countries, and no experiment will be permitted that does not take into account steps to prevent or minimize suffering of animals.

This is not an answer. Saying that monkeys and humans are different because humans are persons and monkeys are not sidesteps the issue. It does not explain on what basis this distinction can be made. The mere fact that one is human and the other is not sufficient. It does not answer the question of what it is that distinguishes humans from monkeys. If the distinguishing factor is some mental faculty like the capacity for language then where does that put people who are (severely) retarded, babies, etc. Thanks.

Re:Ghoulish. Makes one think.

[Dunbal]

I'm going to be rude and ignore most of what you posted.

OK. So will I. End of dialogue.

Re:Ghoulish. Makes one think.

[groomed]

I'm going to be rude and ignore most of what you posted.

OK. So will I. End of dialogue.

Pathetic. Your post was reasoning in circles ("it's not torture [...], otherwise the experiment would not never approved"), begging the question ("monkeys are not persons"), littered with canned responses ("only in your uninformed mind", "of course a monkey is worth less than humans"), and lapses into an argument from authority when it is exactly that authority which the Guardian article (no matter how tendentious it may be) calls into question. And it was badly formatted to boot.

I do not oppose animal testing. I have tried to outline the grounds on which we can justify it. I have tentatively concluded that such a justification is hard to provide on the basis of reason alone. Unless we accept the justification to be simply "because we can".

I do believe I should be more careful applying the word "torture". However if the procedure is as benign as you make it out to be, then why not just use humans. The observation that monkeys (by which I mean the large primates) are not persons begs the question, why not? Their agency is not inferior to that of babies, retards, and the senile and demented. On the contrary, it is exactly their close likeness to humans which makes them so suitable for experimentation in the first place.

Re:Ghoulish. Makes one think.

[Dunbal]

You have to admit beginning a reply with "I will ignore most of what you said" is not the best way to ensure willingness to listen to you on the part of the other person. Why should two parties communicate if one decides to ignore the other? Sounds too much like marriage...

My argument (which I tried to summarize a few lines before the part of my reply which seems to have triggered you) is based on the folowing: babies, mentally handicapped people, demented people are incapable of making decisions for themselves. A baby cannot tell the doctor "disconnect my life support" or "I want to continue treatment" or "My parents are Jehova's witnesses but I really want that blood transfusion so I can live.". Because they are human beings, and therefore have rights. But they are not persons - they cannot give consent under the law. Get a baby, a mentally handicapped person, a senile person or a demented person sign to a contract and see how legally binding it is. So in these cases we have to resort to speaking to family members, guardians, spouses, etc. We don't ask their pets, though.

Why? The ethical argument is that there is a fundamental difference between a person - someone who is free, autonomous, and along with that freedom has responsibility for their actions, and something that is not a person. A person can express their views and make informed choices. A human being whose heart is beating and has suffered neurological death is no longer a person. They cannot express their wishes, or be expected to make a choice. In bioethics this fundamental difference exists.

Although an animal can certainly express a preference and communicate that choice to us through their behaviour, there is no way you can explain to a monkey what an experiment entails and ask them if they agree to participate, or not, and hope to get an answer based on an informed choice. I am sure if given the choice, the monkey would rather have no contact with humans at all, and be living a normal monkey life in some jungle somewhere. But they are not. This won't happen either - short of freeing all lab animals. Then you have the argument: will an animal born in a lab be reasonably able to survive in the wild.

Now, on the other hand, there is a need for animal research. We're not talking about ridiculous experiments like "lets put shampoo in a dog's eye every hour for a week and see what happens", but research with new techniques or medications that have a strong theoretical possibility of working, and that show favorable results in vitro.

Your argument seems to be - let's skip the animal part, and go straight from the test tube to the human. At least that's how I understand it. The thing is that it's very difficult to guarantee that a procedure that works well in theory and in a controlled setting like the test tube or petri dish will work well on a human. What if the electrodes work fine, but the weight of the apparatus causes pressure sores after a couple days? What if everything is fine but for some reason after a day or so the plastic insulation on the wires was too porous, allowing bacterial invasion - causing the subject to die from septic meningitis?

There is always something that can be missed - something the researchers failed to take into account. Which is why before testing on humans, we test on animals. It's a damned shame if animals die during this testing. But there is an argument that states "better to have found this out by the death of an animal than of a human". Because most people consider animals to be of less "worth" than humans. Oh but I certainly agree that cruelty to animals is heinous, inexcusable behaviour.

Yet the only way to make sure that every aspect of an experiment involves as little risk as possible for a human, is by testing it on an animal first. If the animal suffered no ill effects, it's probable that a human would also suffer no ill effects. So THEN I go and seek permission for testing on humans, and if there IS some sort of unforseen side

Re:Ghoulish. Makes one think.

[groomed]

You have to admit beginning a reply with "I will ignore most of what you said" is not the best way to ensure willingness to listen to you on the part of the other person. Why should two parties communicate if one decides to ignore the other? Sounds too much like marriage...

Thanks for your response. I felt your original post was rather defensive and that a point-by-point reply would just antagonize you further. I worried that the discussion might degenerate into a trench warfare of sorts. I did not mean to offend you.

A baby cannot tell the doctor "disconnect my life support" or "I want to continue treatment" or "My parents are Jehova's witnesses but I really want that blood transfusion so I can live.". Because they are human beings, and therefore have rights. But they are not persons - they cannot give consent under the law. Get a baby, a mentally handicapped person, a senile person or a demented person sign to a contract and see how legally binding it is.

If even unconscious and severely incapacitated humans are afforded protection against involuntary testing, then how can one justify using healthy, conscious animals (and again, I really mean the large primates) as test subjects?

Saying that humans have rights by virtue of being human opens up the question; why do we believe humans (themselves being a kind of animal) have these rights? Is it because they are capable of suffering? But anyone who has ever seen a worm wriggle on a fish-hook knows that suffering is not limited to humans. So is it because humans are so intelligent? But then what about those humans which are not? And so on.

We can always appeal to "common sense" or tradition, but then we must remember that common sense and tradition have also been and are still being used to justify slavery and genocide. (And I regret dragging these into the discussion -- please understand that I do not wish to draw a comparison between these atrocities and your line of work -- just trying to illustrate the general inadequacy of common sense and tradition as an ethical foundation.)

We don't ask their pets, though.

This made me smile.

Now, on the other hand, there is a need for animal research.

Well, there is a need for research, and this entails experimentation. But since these experiments cannot, for legal and ethical and perhaps other reasons, be performed on humans, animals are used instead. The question is whether it is possible to present a coherent, rational argument (i.e. not one which appeals to "common sense", the authority of the law, or God) that can justify the use of highly developed animals such as large primates, but not the use of (say) severely incapacitated humans.

Your argument seems to be - let's skip the animal part, and go straight from the test tube to the human.

The argument is supposed to be a reductio ad absurdum. Since we obviously should not subject humans to involuntary testing, then since humans are a kind of animal, we are led to the question whether this reservation applies (or should apply) to other animals as well, and if so, which.

(We might alternatively take the matter to its logical extreme and say that if no animals are to be exempted from involuntary testing, then there is no reason why not also at least some humans should be subjected to involuntary tests, but obviously this is a revolting proposition.)

My argument is a very philosophical one, and as most such arguments it wallows in the luxury afforded by a lack of direct experience. I'm not even prepared to claim that my argument, if sound, has or should have practical consequences.

However, I do think the (apparent) lack of a rational, ethical justification should give us pause. Again, I'm not saying we should stop experimenting on primates (at least not right now). Just that it is a bit frightening if we cannot logically justify it.

(And no, there is

What's so special about this?

[LazLong]

I have several co-workers who operate their entire bodies with monkey thoughts....

Guys, this is not new.

[Lightning Hopkins]

Essentially the same thing was reported in the October 2002 issue of Scientific American. Time picked up on it the following year, as schmobag pointed out earlier.

This is certainly an admirable refinement of the experiment, but it is certainly not exactly new, either. It's a better robotic arm, a different monkey, and a different university (the original experiment was at Duke University, this one's at U. of Pittsburgh), but monkey robot arms are not a new phenomenon at all.

Controlled by probes inserted into...

[Esion Modnar]

I almost didn't read any further.

MIT already did this 4 years ago

[aztektum]

Thank God for Google's site: command

What I want to see is the arm move when they poke the monkey's brain with their finger.

no, it's a sign...

[PsiPsiStar]

...that scientists are getting fairly sophisticated at using monkeys.

Wow..

[adamisklingon]

does this mean that monkeys can finally have opposable thumbs? ...hey, no, wait.

seriously, though,

[adamisklingon]

this could change the world of prosthetics. also, it could help with better understanding dolphins, for instance. teach them to write, or sign language, and enable researchers to communicate on a higher level with them, if they are indeed capable of that sort of communication.

Humans are still superior!

[PsiPsiStar]

So we're not the only species which uses tools.

But we're still the only species which uses robot monkeys!

I hope you like bananas :-)

[northwind]

Use the force Luke......

Oh Boy!!!

[MoneyMan]

Schwartz' team hopes to overcome this problem and begin testing in humans within the next four years.

Gee, where do I sign up? </sarcasm>

--
mm

Re:Oh Boy!!!

[FleaPlus]

I suspect your reaction wouldn't be as sarcastic if you were quadriplegic.

Re:And for the next version...

[jwdb]

They are not quite taking electricity in the manner you think of. For one, when a neuron fires it generates an electric field by pumping ions out of its cell body, creating a voltage. Tapping this would only reduce the voltage of that one neuron (although if done too much, it might prevent the activation of the next one in the chain). The connection between that one and the next neuron is chemical, however, so you're only draining power from one neuron.

Secondly, there exist a number of electrical components that can amplify a voltage signal without drawing any power from the source. A mosfet, for instance, can easily give you an amplification of 5-10x while drawing almost no current from the source. This means you could put your probe next to a nerve and measure the signal with only a negligible influence on the signal itself.

Jw

Re:And for the next version...

[jwdb]

I believe that one of the problems with this is that you cannot read the signal from individual neurons, but only from large regions of the brain. This would be nowhere near exact enough to control the motion of fingers, for example.

Jw

Monkey Terminators

[1stFoRecon]

What were they thinking? Now, instead of just fighting Terminators or warrior monkeys, they are going to team up against us. We're DOOMED!!!!

Chimp?

[Viking Coder]

Isn't that a chimp in the picture?

For being an article about science, they certainly used the wrong word ("monkey" instead of "ape") a lot.

What goes around...

[hhlost]

Some people believe that the researchers will be reincarnated as lab monkies.

Sticking f-ing probes in an innocent monkey's brain?!?

Leave the monkies alone!

how about the other way around

[mshurpik]

I'm just curious, would a monkey's arm controlled by robot thoughts be more or less interesting?

Re:No, YOU are the tool.

[DrSkwid]

fuck off and don't come back, tnx