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Neuroscientists At MIT Developing DNI
coolphysco1010 wrote to discuss the possible development of a direct neural interface, ala 'The Matrix', that could eventually allow for instant object recognition. From the article: "Now, neuroscientists in the McGovern Institute at MIT have been able to decipher a part of the code involved in recognizing visual objects. Practically speaking, computer algorithms used in artificial vision systems might benefit from mimicking these newly uncovered codes ... In a fraction of a second, visual input about an object runs from the retina through increasingly higher levels of the visual stream, continuously reformatting the information until it reaches the highest purely visual level, the inferotemporal (IT) cortex. The IT cortex identifies and categorizes the object and sends that information to other brain regions."
for adult entertainment.
I'm going to be first in line for the new computer interface brain implants. Hopefully they don't run windows.
I don't want to see the results when they start trying to recreate those nueral patterns in the monkeys brains. Honesty, to say that observing these kinds of patterns brings us any closer to injecting images directly into the brain, when we have so little technology to do that (knives and chemicals basically) is ludicrous. I suppose the writer, rather than the scientists, can probably take all the credit for that exaggeration.
Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others. -Groucho Marx
I'm looking to purchase a dentist chair.
Hole in the headrest preferable.
The implications for using this technology to cure blindness (one day, obviously not immediately) are wonderful! This is the kind of thing science was really meant for - helping humans live better lives. Kudos to MIT!
The article reads more like they are reverse engineering pattern recongition systems as the brain sees and interperates objects, which sounds closer to the movie Brainstorm.
Burn Hollywood Burn
I read an article many years ago about them doing this to live human patients. Via a fiber cable brain wet-ware implant, a blind man was able to discern colors and rudimentary objects. He did have a short seizure during the interview; however, once the subject got passed that he immediately requested that the researchers continue.
. htm
Unfortunately this was so long ago I cannot remember the magazine or relocate the article. But googling artificial vision shows a few parts of history and HOWSTUFFWORKS has a full set of details
http://health.howstuffworks.com/artificial-vision
Maybe they could simulate the feeling of taking a really great dump.
Task Mangler
Seems to me they are just recording from IT neurons. There's no input to the cortex. I haven't read the science paper (is it out yet?) but it really seems like they are just analyzing the firing patterns of IT neurons while the monkey looks at objects. Nothing new here technology-wise.
I just finished reading "Neuromancer" (for about the 10,000th time) and so this seems pretty cool. But I've always wondered how they deal with the potential for allergies... from what I understand, in theory you can become allergic to basically anything at anytime without warning, so you wouldn't want to get a fancy new implant only to die of anaphyllactic shock while watching porn....
Putting syrup in coffee is some form of blasphemy.
That *is* an interesting result, since (computer) neural net research generally tends to favour a designs with a complete overkill in the number of neurons.
Said it before and i'll say it again, bring on the drunken boxing! Hmm, mabye the complete Kama Sutra. . . But defineatly the drunken boxing.
If you pay your taxes you support terrorism!
i am not at MIT, but I can tell you this aint about to happen any time soon.
i am working on optical neuron-computer interfaces, and this is probably the most efficient and direct route for reading neurons. I know of researchers who can also stimulate neurons to fires via light, so in principle, we could build a complete neuroptical computers tomorrow... if neurons were not complete bastards to work with.
you see, they just dont like to stay place. where i research, they often build tiny fences to keep them in place, but even then, they go shooting theyre axons anywhere they feel, with no concern for the feelings of the researcher.
we also grow neurons on microchip surfaces, which allows for high speed and high resolution stimulation and reading of single neuron activity, but in two dimensions, which is excellent for retina etc.
but the neuron-chip or old fashioned neuron-electrode are hard to place, and optical reading of neurons still has bugs to sort out (id guess from 4-10 years more basic research). whenever you see these cool brainscan pics with MRI etc, remember theyre resolution is on the order of millimeters, and thats a lot of complexity lost.
http://www.biochem.mpg.de/mnphys/ has a nice review of the problems involved, if you like hardcore solidstate chemistry, silicon physics, and neurobiology
this could make LSD obsolete!
^^
in the next few days. The SFN just started in Washington.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
I remember reading a long time (at least 10 years, perhaps 20?) ago about direct stimulation of the visual cortex;
now at the time they were just doing a few blobs intended to help the blind.
This looks like it is moving a bit further up the chain a bit which should be interesting;
in the end it is just vision however.
...eventually we will all be assimilated.
What if the IT cortex was bypassed: The computers would get or simulate the input, and recognize and categorize the object and the computer would send that data directly to the other parts of the brain. Now the human doesn't see the ball, but knows there's a ball in front of them, and it's red, and about the size of their head, etc (all the details), but doesn't see it, just has a "feeling" that a ball is there.
Make your computer faster: rm -rf
But what if we're already in the matrix.. that would be a direct neural interface inside a direct neural interface... Talk about a mind bender.. or should I say 'spoon bender'?
That's a really interesting idea - bypass the senses and go directly to the meaning portions of the brain. I wonder if you'd be able to tell your own conclusions from what was being fed to you?
This kind of stuff both excites and scares me. Whenever I hear about electronics/brain interaction (like the story about monkeys moving robotic arms using their brains), I think of the cyborg possibilities. The most interesting one to me is the ability to supplement your own faulty memory with a hard drive and your own thinking power with a processor. You'd take a little snapshot of every person you met and file it away with their name, never to be forgotten. If you needed to calculate something, you'd just run it through your stored equations.
Think about what school would do for you! If I could remember all the science, history and literature I've been taught and forgotten, I'd be a much more educated guy than I am now.
And of course you could add senses that humans don't have - more visual spectra, a magnetic sense or "location" sense based on GPS, etc.
What makes all this less exciting - besides welcoming our new cyborg overlords - is remembering how unreliable technology is. After seeing my roommate organize his life with PalmPilots, which invariably broke, I decided to stick with writing things down in a little notepad. It never crashes. Given the headaches we've all experienced with computer problems, imagine how you'd feel if a whole section of your brain quit working.
I discussed this with Peter Donaldson of the Neurological Prosthesis Unit in South London, it's like packet switching the British invent it but don't fund it and the Americans take it on, fund it and get all the money and glory, oh well.
Any sufficiently advanced man is indistinguishable from God
You know it's going to happen.
One of the original Memory Stick ads had a guy with a card slot in the back of his head and a Stick was about to be placed in it. At the time, I though Sony was subconsciously telegraphing where they'd like all of this to go. These days, I'm certain. What's really scary is the sheeple will go for "Neural Rights Management" if it means he gets to watch Survivor 15.
Disclaimer: I am currently drunk, so the following comments may seem a little more disjointed than usual.
I remember when I was playing Shadowrun, and delved into Cyberpunk 2020, and loving the idea of having a character who could directly interface to a computer - in Shadowrun it was via a "datajack", located directly behind the ear and mounted in the hard skull tissue for maximum anchorage.
The idea is not new. I remember reading about a guy called "Jerry" who'd had a special series of wires - I think fibre optic - running into his head and connected into his brain, set up some time around the mid seventies.
With these systems running to a, relatively, small computer on his belt, he was able to discern largish, monochrome coloured objects from a certain distance and within a post card field of view. In the seventies.
Jerry's problem was not that the computer had power supply problems, or its actual size, but the software running the system was not very sophisticated and couldn't create very accurate distinctions between, say, a man and the hat on his head.
Fortunately, Jerry had been born with sight, so he could distinguish between certain shapes that he'd seen before.
Expand the idea. Give direct neural input to the parts of the brain that receive sound and touch. You now have the "Matrix" of Shadowrun - shapes, sounds, rudimentary touch, and sight.
I saw that someone else in this forum mentioned Windows, probably as joke. The key thing is that if you write the input controls in just the right way, you don't need an OS to run it. The brain is an extraordinary parallel processing computer. Before you pick up that cup of coffee/soft drink/alcohol, think about all the various thoughts that just went through your brain for the simple task of picking up the cup.
Look for $object. $object located $here. $closest appendage ==...
There is so much happening in your brain, even just reading this post, that it would be difficult to write down every step you do even when you're simply pressing a button on the keyboard.
The key to creating a DNI is not thinking about the real-time OS to use - because no computer runs like our brain -, or what protocol to use - because the protocols are all dependent on OS's we use on computers -, but to think of the optimal way to get the information about here, to here, inside your head.
Once you do that, you can create input from anywhere, which is both a scary and exciting thought.
We could have movies that literally immerse us in the action/drama/comedy/what ever, computer games that simulate the game creator's idea of a gaming universe and lets us run wild, or security systems that let us roam like wild viruses or worms through a system...
Do you know what I think is the only real problem standing in the way of expanding this tech to the point where we can watch movies, program, play games, or surf the web with our brains?
The interface? Our brains are meat and chemicals, and can be mapped. The input? I say "that's a red ball", and immediately you see it as a red ball, and then - when you're actually looking at the object - you decide for yourself whether or not it looks red or not. The connections? Optic fibre or copper? We'll sort out a simple, clean way to hook up without hurting ourselves.
The big problem I see is bandwidth. Let's go back to the idea before of how much parallel processing goes on in the brain. Try opening up ten applications on your computer - separate ones - and then telling them to perform CPU intensive tasks. Notice the slow down?
This is the same as someone doing one task, and you come along and ask them to do another. They may be able to do it, but it'll be a little harder to do that as well as the other ten, twenty, or even thirty, things they're already doing, both conciously and sub-conciously.
Motor actions, input-output actions and reactions - touch/taste/feel/smell/sight actio
His name is Robert Paulsen...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Could you test potential camouflage patterns with this and find which cause the most difficulty in visually deciphering? Or one day have computers generate camouflage on the fly based upon the surroundings.
It's not a "code". There's no objective reality that the brain is decoding for mere "referential integrity". The brain is organizing its responses to incoming sensory info, in a feedback loop with itself, including resonating "memory" response signals. Sure, object representations are recognized as repeats of previous object representations, and dispatched to brain areas sensitized to those representations. But it's not like objects outside the body have standard codes, the same from person to person, like say insulin has in our DNA. That would be way to static for us to survive in this changeable world. We're making it up as we go along, and living in the reality we generate. The closer our mind's model matches the world we encounter, the smarter we are.
--
make install -not war
is not my friend.
The world is already a giant hologram where you can do or undo whatever you feel like.
Plugging your head into an artificial world is like wanting to play space-invaders on a simulated computer interface inside a game of Quake. No thank-you. We already have the perfect interface out here where the graphics and sound are of the highest quality and there is no chumpy, 'Save' button to make things boring. And there are plenty of cheats keys in the structure of reality if you have the courage to seek them.
Anyway, people who crave to 'plug in' are kind of creepy. Being around them makes me vaguely worried that at any moment I'll get shot in the back with a big plasma gun.
-FL
Imagine the possibilities, now even the slashdot crowd can get girls, just hack her brain ;-)
I'm a dreamer, the world is my playpen. But hey, I'm a serious person, I can't dream all the time.
I'm getting a bit tired of MIT getting press for research that has already been done years ago. In this case in particular, see the Dobelle Institute: here , here , and here , for instance.
Seriously. Don't exacerbate the inflated delusions of these guys by pretending that their research is unique or "cutting-edge". Expect more of them.
as they don't actually connect to the neurons, but read the neuron acticity patterns, probably through fast MRI scanners. and there's no feedback either - they don't send any data to the neurons (other then through the natural eye of the monkey in the tests)
I'm not really as concerned with the implications of being able to inject images into the human brain, while that may be somewhat useful. It's likely the visual cortex may have many subtle differences as well between human and chimpanzee brains--- so this is likely to be a much more difficult set of technology to translate for human use. What's interesting about this is the fact they're claiming that an incredibly complicated set of algorithms, that have been evolved over billions of years in our brains, can be reverse engineered.
In AI we've yet to find what algorithms are responsible for consciousness, for visual recognition, and a myriad of other problems. They're all just sitting in our brains, likely on the lowest level of the neuron, waiting for us to extract them. This has infinitely more applications than forcing images into people's brains.
We already have something called transcranial magnetic stimulation. See:
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnum
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/vision/medical-vision
http://www.biomag.hus.fi/tms/
http://www.mp.uni-tuebingen.de/mp/index.php?id=94
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_magneti
http://pni.unibe.ch/TMS.htm
Wow this reminds me of a book I read called Nanotime. Pretty killer read, too. I just hope we don't have to be fully awake when they insert this into our brains, like in the book!
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
This translates to a cortical probe(maybe sub-cortical) sticking out the back of a monkey's head with leads that go into the brain. Charming. One of my biology professors does research on frogs in a similar way and frogs don't seem to mind.
In the short term, I suspect there would be more immediate applications for voice recognition than for visual object recognition, though I am still pulling for these guys if it leads to cars driving themselves.
A-Bomb
Below is the full article in the event that the above link is inaccessible.
U.S. Scientist Quits Stem-Cell Alliance
By a WALL STREET JOURNAL Staff Reporter
November 12, 2005; Page A5A
A prominent U.S. scientist is withdrawing from an international collaboration to create human embryonic stem cells.
Gerald Schatten, a cell biologist at the University of Pittsburgh, said he was severing all collaborations with the laboratory of Dr. Woo Suk Hwang of Seoul University.
Dr. Hwang, a veterinarian, has drawn international applause for leading the first effort to clone human embryos and extract their stem cells. Last month, he announced the formation of the World Stem Cell Foundation, an international alliance aimed at spreading that technology.
Dr. Schatten, who was to have led the organization's board of directors, says he is now severing collaboration with Dr. Hwang, due to questions over the source of human eggs used in a 2004 cloning project, and errors in a 2005 paper coauthored by the scientists.
A 2004 news report in the journal Nature said at least one female laboratory worker had provided eggs for the project, an allegation that Dr. Hwang has denied on several occasions. Under U.S. rules, collecting eggs from women working on a cloning project would be considered unethical. In the original paper, published by the journal Science last year, the scientists said the eggs all came from anonymous donors.
Considering the progress we've made in distinguishing cognitive states (is this person looking at a face, a house, a squirrel, etc?) in human subjects using fMRI (an extremely noisy dataset), I'm not surprised that they found that there's enough information in a few neurons to perform classification.
Really, the best pop-sci term to describe this would be "mind reading" -- the high level goal is to have a function that transforms physical space to some sort of cognitive space. I guess you could say it's the "I" of the I/O DNI in the matrix.
Holy crap! Nerddom just took a giant step towards the Sci-Fi fantasy of experiencing actual sex by playing back some factory worker dude's recorded memories of banging that cheerleader you were always staring at!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Sort of. TMS is very crude; even with a figure-8 coil that focus the magnetic field you are still stimulating an area of cortex with diameter of a couple centimeters. And you can't really "feed in information" you can just zap the thing (stimulating it or knocking it out depending on how you time the pulses). So TMS is not the answer here...
having a direct neural interface connector implanted in the back of our heads will bring new meaning to the term "jack off".
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
my post was intended only to show how something MIGHT be done; tms might be improved someday. time will tell.
"Possible development"
"could eventually allow"
"computer algorithms"
A computer connot possible process information the way the brain does.
Any DNI is a transducer and traanslator because the two things operate very differently. Why the hell try to copy how the brain does it on a machine that can't? Try to improve on the process by making the computer do what it does best instead.
Object recognition via similarlity calculation has been available in holographic storage devices. It is inherent in their operation (see SciAm Dec 94(?) article on holographic storage devices), and the operation they perform is far more similar to the way the brain works ("Brain and Perception", K. Pribram, particularly the application of Gabor's mathematical description of holography to the electrical field of the brain). This calculation operates at the speed of light. The device best suited to detecting the output is the eye.
Bypassing the best suited system with a less suited system sounds an awful lot like Minsky's comment about whether a submarine can swim.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
rTMS is cool, but you can really only stimulate the surface of cortex, and the resolution is pretty crude -- several orders of magnitude above the single neuron level.
the thing is, in computer games, stupid pointless shit like my girlfriend randomly dying doesn't happen.
Dumbest love story ever. Boy falls in love with girl, girl kisses boy, girl randomly dies.
I worked in a lab this summer at UPenn that does neural computation on silicon in a very different way... they build the neurons themselves out of silicon! This technology could ostensibly someday be used to generate the stimuli that could then be fed to the optic nerve or other parts of the brain. They'd need to first advance their now-relatively-simple models and then build a DNI, but they're on the way.
http://yoda.seas.upenn.edu/boahen/
Did you see the pool? They flipped the bitch!
Dumbest love story ever. Boy falls in love with girl, girl kisses boy, girl randomly dies.
Hm. I had that happen as well, and I'm honestly not kidding.
So. . , how random is it that we should be discussing unfair, random events using that point as the example?
'Random' is an illusion. --And high drama and pain are useful learning tools for advancing souls. The desire to seek solidity and stability in an ever-changing universe and why it doesn't work and how one can exist happily regardless is one of the many lessons we must learn during the various lives we journey through.
-FL