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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'!"
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.
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?
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.
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I'm tired of scientests refusing to admit the full implications of their work.
Its more a case that due to the astronomical cost, difficulty, and less than ideal results, for the forseeable future medical use is the only application where the cost isn't too high, and the risk is acceptable, and the clumsy results are still infinitely preferable to what's available otherwise.
Long term sure, maybe we'll be operating our computer, car, and TV by thought. But nobody is going to pay $250,000+ for a system that lets them change the channel with an 80% accuracy of it getting it right.
On the other hand, for someone paralyzed from the neck down... even clumsy control would be a godsend.
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 will be completely freed from the destructive and dangerous effects of exercise and physical movement!
This space available.
I was thinking more along the lines of the military when he said the implications. We already have planes that can fly without a pilot (UAVs). If a person could wholly be inside a plane mentally (in a sense), imagine the increased control one could have, without the limitations of G-forces on a pilot's body or the fear of real death. And the military definately has the budget.
The Force in Star Wars is only a thinly veiled reference to The Tao.
Not so much referring to the Tao (The Way), which in it's purest form is not a "force" at all.
The Force of Star Wars fame is actually referring to Ch'i (or Qi in current transcription), which is referred to in the Tao Te Ching. It is also known as Ki in Japanese thought, and is equivalent to Prana in Hindu thought. Native American thaught also has something similar.
The concept predates Taoism by quite some time.
"...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