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Brain Interface Lets Monkeys Control Prosthetic Limbs
himicos was one of many readers to point out one recent success of scientists working to develop working brain-machine interfaces, writing "A team at the university of Pittsburgh has finally advanced a 2002 technology enough for use in prosthetic limbs, the targeted application all along. Training computer models to the firing patterns of the neurons in the parts of the brain that control motion, they are able to project the intentions of a monkey to a robotic arm, which follows the will of the animal.
The sad thing about the articles is that the beauty of the mathematics used to create and train the models is totally ignored." Reader phpmysqldev adds a link to coverage at the BBC, and writes "This of course brings significant hope to amputees and other other people with physical disabilities." (Note that this research has been going on for quite some time.)
This post totally made my morning. I salute you!
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"You'd prefer they started out by sticking electrodes into humans with no idea what they were doing?"
Did you read anything I wrote above?
I clearly explained why, when this procedure moves onto human beings, it will be in the form of EXPERIMENTS - i.e. are you seriously suggesting that the way to find out which parts of a HUMAN brain to put the electrodes in, is to examine a MONKEY brain? I see you couldn't actually address anything I wrote about the PAIN and SUFFERING the monkeys are going through. I know the brain can't feel anything - so what? Your skull sure as hell can.
And the fact that people can have brain surgery while awake means we can EASILY do this in human volunteers (i.e. those whose limbs don't work, and want to undergo this procedure), instead of wasting time torturing monkeys.
And again I ask:
"Why am I incapable of feeling the suffering of others, and why is that not a problem?"