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The Future of Mind Control of Physical Objects
mattnyc99 writes A month ago we discussed the accomplishment when researchers got monkeys to feed themselves with a robotic arm controlled by their brains. But after all the recent successful experiments with brain-computer interfaces, will the technology ever make it out of the lab and into hospitals — or even into our hands, for the closest thing imaginable to The Force? Popular Mechanics takes a look at the future of mind-machine control, speculating on several theoretical applications once brains can adapt to devices via direct communication between, say, synapse and prosthetic. Quoting the field's leading neuroscientist: 'For the foreseeable future, the main benefit is for rehabilitation. But the research is showing that the brain can act independently of the body. One day, you could be sitting in an office and controlling a device from across the room — or in another building. And it's not just flicking a switch. It could be a nanotool that's moving through a tiny environment, and you can control it and see what it's seeing.'"
With the assistance of my arms and hands, I find my mind can control all sorts of physical objects very easily.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
Considering we are just now getting to the point where gesture/Multi touch UIs are becoming usable, I am a bit skeptical of the whole Jean grey UI thing.
If I had the option, I would opt to have my brain placed in a jar attached to a robot body in the event that my heart gave out or something.
I have to imagine there is someway to keep the brain alive chemically. If an artifical blood-like fluid could be manufactured that carried oxygen and nutrients to the brain, and some sort of electro-stimulus interface could transmit visual and audio data, it seems plausible (in a cartoonishly plausible way) that we could survive the deaths of our bodies and live on for several more decades as purely intellectual beings; an existence I would enjoy almost as much as my current existence. And don't get the impression that I'm willing to discard my body because I'm hopelessly fat and sedentary. I love my body. I have a black belt, I workout out at the gym, and I am physically active. But when those capabilities go away, I would love to live on and experience the intellectual future.
That's not what she said.
I'm tired of scientests refusing to admit the full implications of their work. It hold back society and fosters an atmosphere of complacence. There is no reason at all, if it can be used to control a prosthetic, it can't be used for telepresence, using my computer, driving my car or any thing else. Anything at all.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Let's stick probes on something and say that we understand it because it produces semi-predictable pattern of electrical signals. Woohoo, we're so heading towards neural interfaces like The Matrix!
About ten years ago I saw someone controlling a cursor (badly) on a computer screen using electrodes planted in a headband. Last couple of years it hasn't been much better and now they're shoving things right into the brain. Seems like the tech is going backwards if anything, and frankly until it is non-invasive I don't think it's going to catch on much - even in the medical field, even for those paralysed from the neck down, there are better options that getting wires in the brain.
Just think of how inconvenient it would be to have a brain-controlled TV while having friends over. You'd either be fighting over the controls or the channels would switch to porn the second a commercial popped up.
What if mastering a prosthetic interface is like learning to speak a language without an accent, something that's almost impossible to do as an adult?
What if people who grew up before this technology gets perfected won't be able to compete in the workforce?
"For the foreseeable future, the main benefit is for rehabilitation"
Is he sure of that? What about for control of vehicles? I imagine DARPA's foaming at the mouth for the first brain-controlled tank.
You mean like the OCZ's Brain Wave Interface Headband that was posted here a little over a month ago?
No surgery, and it affords some control of the mouse cursor without any arm movement.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
Anyone interested in the dark side of direct neuro-prosthetic communication should watch ghost in the shell: stand alone complex.
In this show, set in the near future (about 25 years from now), a common means of entry into enemy strongholds involves directly hacking people's motor functions and turning them into marionettes.
A constant arms race is underway pitting entry vs "attack barrier" defenses which lash back against neuro-hackers and attempt to fry their brains.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
I suppose it would be like an epileptic attack. If you did something like a DDOS attack, you'd run into the boundary that neurons can fire at most 3 times a second.
Maybe the Borg started off as a very advanced MMORPG.
Why do I ask that? Because 1/7th of a second is roughly how long it takes for an electric pulse from your brain to reach your fingers.
Why is that important?
First Person Shooters...
Defective Logic
Other than the functional ability of moving my brain around from location A to location B and replicating, isn't the body more or less a tactile feedback machine for my brain more or less?
I have always thought of my brain as being the little alien dude in Men In Black controlling that mechanical body.
Why do we keep seeing links and stories from these two? They were great fun as magazines when I was 12, but please!
Perhaps there should be an article category -- "sensationalism/ridiculous speculation" that I can filter out. I can already hear the replies -- "You haven't been on /. long have you?" It's not this isn't news for nerds. Maybe I'm just not as nerdy as I once was, or my brand of nerdism includes a desire for less fanboy-ism.
If the answer is war, you are asking the wrong question
I'm in the middle of a novel by David Brin titled Earth. In it he describes a futuristic version of a human-machine interface called a "sub-vocal" which reacts to nervous impulses for speech before they turn into physical movement. He imagines that such a think only works for someone with a very clear mind and sharp focus because drifting thoughts may cause bad signals. In the story, this manifests as obscure commands to the interface and sometimes verbalizing thoughts that normally would have qualifies as "inner monologue".
While it is only a story, the author is a real sharp cookie, and it seems quite plausible to me that hyper-sensitive electronics could go wonky if the operator were not 100% focused on them - and when are we really 100% focused on anything? I do not have total focus on driving if I'm conversing with someone, listening to music, or thinking about my day. Could obscure thoughts wreck my ming controlled car?
...the only person who feels that the human thought patterns are too flakey and un-predictable to be put in this sort of situation. Anyone who has ever tried to take up meditation will tell you how frustrated, as well as surprised, they were to find out that you're really not in control of your thoughts as much as you would think.
We don't have to limit ourselves to the physical world (think Neuromancer). A few years ago, a friend of mine showed me a tale (forgot the url, sorry) about a scientist creating 3D pictures and doing advanced CAD using a neural interface and a holographic display. Imagine not even needing a mouse pointer to modify a curve, but instead just imagining what the curve will look like. And of course, having realtime feedback.
Add a little AI to it so you can tell the program what parameters to modify as you're molding the object being designed.
Now imagine if you could program software this way using the a VR (and user-friendly) equivalent of UML.
Let's see, scanning.....scanning....yep, not a single Borg or Krag reference.
I'm looking forward to my brain being transplanted to a titanium frame so my life can continue as an evil overlord in the Technodrome.
I don't know where the OP got the idea that neural control of an artificial hand is the closest idea we have to The Force. The Force in Star Wars is only a thinly veiled reference to The Tao.
Don't be too quick to take a nap once that synapse parser starts getting the REM raw data. I would recommend a 'sleep' mode on that circuitry.
Application of this technology has been designed to death in the cyberpunk literature! From replacement body parts, to mind-controlled drone vehicles, to full immersion VR. Skip Matrix, go directly to Snow Crash, get a Shadowrun Cybertech sourcebook on the way (Man & Machine or Arsenal).
We will be completely freed from the destructive and dangerous effects of exercise and physical movement!
This space available.
If in America : "Scientists have recently developed a handfree TV-remote-control, so now all you fat bastards don't have to waste those precious joules operating a regular remote.
If in Japan : "Scientists have recently developed an obedient sexbot which knows exactly what you want; tentacles sold separately."
If you quote this signature there'll be 72 copies of Windows ME waiting for you in Heaven.
All this talk about human assisted robots reminds me of a game I played back in my youth:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Must_Fall:_2097
Ask me about repetitive DNA
It will be more like dancing or martial arts.
Learning to move your body (and it's individual parts) in a particular way.
Doing a shitload of simple, repetitive exercises until you learn to do it with grace that makes it look natural.
A note to whoever will be developing this technology:
Making the training moves "danceable" (following a rhythm or a tune) will probably greatly reduce the duration of "the learning period".
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
They call it Audeo.
It was discussed here at Slashdot couple of months ago.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
We are starting to work out the DNA link and aging so that may not be the issue. 10 to 20 years most likely have some kind of long term solution to it.
More of a issue is storage. Ie when brain runs out of space to store stuff. We have never lived long enough to know exactly what happens to us at that point. Most people with senile dementia is slow able to reversible because its not chemically linked. Its linked to the old saying Use it or Lose it. Many studies have been done bring first grade teachers in to start teaching people with senile dementia as they start using there brain again most of the problem goes away. For the ones that it does not its something going wrong in brain chemically most likely from dna or cell damage.
Yes biggest problem is if you loss you inputs for a large amount of time. You will lose it one way or another. Or become lazy and start off loading all thinking to a computer then you will get senile dementia.
You discover that eBay prices are suddenly all in "Quatloos"
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
I fail to see how this is amazing. decode the signals your brain sends to your muscles... and instead put computers there. those signals will move the robotic equipment. easier said than done, but with this we can cure the paralyzed, i say, continue this research... and then we can have ultra omega super humans that can fight wars for us... kinda like a brain in a jar -_- (scary, aint it)
Well, at least this partially explains why my (formerly always recoverable) Windows machine won't boot any more since I got my Mac. Could also be the dents in the motherboard from the baseball bat I suppose.
Enders game by Orson scott Card is about something like this, this kid is trained to play some video games and gets really good, then the games get really complicated and he's the big commander, then after its all over he is told that it is all real (oops I spoiled it). Quick order the book from ebay and forget I said this cause I think it is a good book. Just remember that the writer is a bit of a christian (I guess all Americans are...)
like phosphorescent desert buttons singing one familiar song
this may have been said, but suppose this just isn't going to be available for what some may call an unreasonable amount of time suppose these people just released the technology like the people at reprap, molecubes and fab at home are... what would that hurt if the technology is not going to be available? a loss of future profits? then is it a matter of money? are they being selfish, or are they just being reasonable and prudent? that would be nice.
contribute at wikademia
"...via direct communication between, say, synapse and prosthetic."
No, don't say 'between synapse and prosthetic' because that's definitely not going to provide the information necessary to send a command of any kind. Synapses do not represent qualia (the 'quantum of thought'). Neurons don't either. It requires a softwired network of neurons to contain a single element of thought. Softwaired because all neurons are hard wired to all others with a maximum separation of 6 synapses, the average being 3. The neurons not required for a particular qualia are prevented from participating in synchronized firing. The result is 10^3 to 10^5 neurons firing together. All those neurons participate in other of such functional networks at other times, the difference being the addition of some neurons that weren't in the first network. Sometimes many of the neurons in one functional network participate together in another but the second collection represents a very different thought, feeling, etc.
The interested can read up on it in "The Organization of Behavior" by Donald O. Hebb (for which those functional networks are named: Hebbian cellular assemblies). Just the first chapter. Hebb himself said everything necessary is there, and all the subsequent chapters expand on it. I'm taking potshots at Popular Mechanics not for being a poor source of informed neuroscience, but because they've had plenty of time to do their background research but obviously didn't. Hebb's book came out in 1949.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Having been part of the computational neuroscience community, and fully up to date on brain controlled operation of a robot arm by a monkey in 2001 my assesment would be that we will see all kinds of applications of full brain control.
The way these systems work is by implanting a grid of probes on the cortex (underneath the skull bone and dura mater). This is the main problem in terms of adaption to humans, but this is the only way to get the detailed measurements of neural activity that can be analyzed and interpreted for use as a control signal.
The funny thing is, which I found amazing at the time, that first, you don't need that much probes to measure usable signals. I believe 45 probes is enough to distill arm drection in the monkeys case (from millions of 'randomly' participating neurons) and second, the adaption to the control comes naturally :The monkey at one point will simply sease to lift his own arm and instead use the robots.
So in my opinion brain control is here, it just needs to be refined. The implants are relativley safe because there is no immunoresponse under the dura mater, I'm not sure how long they remain operational, but it could be years.
Sonemone working on this is Justin C. Sanchez check out www.pubmed.org Cheers, Use clean energy
What would happen when you dream?
Monsters from the id!....
First thought looking at the pic was: AMAZING!!!! Second thought: what do the animal rights organizations have to say about this? Wouldn't mind knowing why these experiments weren't done with human volunteers instead of animals?
What makes anyone think that the brain can exist as an entity on it's own? (As a working entity Im mean, i.e. capable of conscious thought).
The brain is not just the big blob inside our skulls, it includes all the neurones in our bodies and all the chemical messengers(hormones), all of which need the rest of the body to work.
The mind-body separation is a philisophical separation, not a physical one. (Not to be confused with the blod brain barrier which arises purely from the fact that the brain is slightly more fat soluble than the constituents of blood).
The brain has developed through evolution as part of our body, not as a separate entity. Of all the organs in the body, it is the one that relies on the rest of the body for it's existence. A kidney or the heart can function on it's own for a while (with a little help).
America, Home of the Brave.
Or is my arm somehow non-physical?
There is no such thing as physical. It's all between the ears (if there were such things as ears)
But the biggest obstacle of all could be the interface itself. Only with the promise of restoring bodily functions would most human test subjects agree to have electrodes permanently implanted in their heads. Barring some bizarre shift in values (and a corresponding spike in unethical surgeons)
Wussies, bring on the unethical surgery, I don't want to be bound to these pathetic flesh limbs.
Everything emits a frequency. Adjusting are brainwaves to these frequencies will allow us to do just about anything. Maybe?
But it also is not present with digital clarity. The advantage of computer storage is that it is fast and as ordered as you choose to make it. Humans have had a hard time doing three things at once as long as we've been deserving of the name (FWIW) but computers just get slower as they do more things, not more confused. At least, not inherently :P But also, our memories are notoriously unreliable.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Link please :)
My mind struggles to convince my ass to move... Usually the ass wins!
This isn't The Force. This is Doctor Otto Octavius.
might also bee a nice feature. and it's how i read your post title...philo
Given that at least 4 companies I know of are testing though control gaming units (I.E. you wear a headband full of sensors and use that to control a character in game, particularly Second Life), and given the number of computer controlled toys available, I expect that within three years the I.T. Techs at most firms will have a number of thought controlled nerf dart guns set-up around their department.