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Single Neuron Wired To Muscle Un-Paralyzes Monkeys
GalaticGrub writes "A pair of paralyzed monkeys regained the ability to move their arms after researchers wired individual neurons to the monkeys' arm muscles. A team of researchers at the University of Washington temporarily paralyzed each monkey's arm, then rerouted brain signals from a single neuron in the motor cortex around the blocked nerve pathway via a computer. When the neuron fired above a certain rate, the computer translated the signal into a jolt of electricity to the arm muscle, causing it to contract. The monkeys practiced moving their arms by playing a video game."
Who's the grad student who had to break those monkeys spines?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
But can you teach them to type??
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
"Monkeys learn to play video games." I actually think that's more amazing.
Currently hooked on AMP
Paralyzed video game playing monkeys are rejoicing the world around.
In Washington, monkey punches you.
It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times. Blurst of times! Stupid monkey!
Let us not become the evil that we deplore.
Why not hook the monkey brain right up to a robot arm and let them play the game, assemble Nike shoes. Robot arms wouldn't wear out as quickly as monkey arms.
Amazing! This is truly a wonderful time to be a monkey.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
they mounted a scratch monkey first.
He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.
-- J.R.R. Tolkien
oo oo aa aaa aaaaa
snort
oo ooooo
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The researchers who published this should have 'Correlation is not causation' written in giant billboards in front of their houses.
Just 2 monkeys regained movement after the experiment does not mean that rerouting brain signals past blocked nerve pathways using a single neuron controlled by a computer did anything at all. They should have waited until they had ruled out other possibilities, like divine intervention, before publishing results. For shame!
Seems ripe for exploitation...
"...Quit hitting yourself! Quit hitting yourself..."
--Edward Dassmesser
Can a human control a monkey arm?
If so, can we control its entire body?
If so, can we do it remotely, through a wire to a cell phone.
If so, how long until someone decides to use monkeys as freedom fighters?
Yes, science should never go down this path, but hey, it is still possible to look down the paths
God spoke to me.
Whoever tagged this article "shockthemonkey" is awesome.
route the video game to another monkey
This article explains everything.
But can they play Crysis?
Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.
Where's the video of the mokeys playing video games with the bionic nerves?
That explains those WoW players flinging poop at me.
This really bodes bad for humans and Gaming.
I mean really, a chimp can play anything ea games puts out with a fricking brain block in place...
Oh the shame.... //starts flinging excrement on c&c 3 games
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
"[...] Even though the rewired brain cell was chosen at random, the monkeys quickly learned to move their paralyzed wrists. [...]"
THAT'S the power of random decisions. when you don't know how to do something, you try it randomly. That's the kind of things that programming teachers don't seem to understand; you never think deeply about the exit condition of a loop; you simply choose it randomly and then you test it. Rationale will be unveiled some time after.
Am I the only one who's more interested in the medical significance of this, instead of the silly aspect of monkey-gaming? Holy crap guys, use your brains.
This means that we have the potential to repair neural damage, potentially severe damage as well!
I see particular use with pacemakers. Rather than just pulse the heart at a given frequency, read what the brain wants the heart to do, and do that! You could do the same thing for the lungs as well, although I'm not sure how often someone who damages that nerve makes it to the hospital in time.
Other use could be with amputation victims. Helping restore function to reattached appendages/digits, or controlling prosthesis...
I wonder if, further down the line, it would be possible to do this to sensory nerves as well, not just motor control/response...
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Right, because permanent damage was done to the monkeys.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromuscular-blocking_drugs
Trolly troll-troll!
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
That site is real, isn't it? For the first few minutes of reading I convinced myself that it was just a funny hoax site, but the deeper I went into it the more scared I became...
Would it be irony if I prayed to God to free us from religion? I still don't have that whole irony thing down yet.
And as you tread the halls of sanity, You feel so glad to be, Unable to go beyond. I have a message, From another time..
Researchers discover that previously paralysed monkeys which play more than 200 consecutive hours of GTA-IV have a greater propensity for violence, instigating one-on-one attacks with one-another using blunt objects. In this amazing display of self-realization, the monkeys we able to determine that successive blows to the back with an aluminium baseball-bat would do little damage. One monkey was quoted as saying (in American Sign-Language, of course), "Hey what's the worst that could happen, I wake up tomorrow and I can't walk? The jerk in the lab-coat that snapped my spine already and destroyed all feeling I have below my neck. I can't get any pleasure out of my favorite past-time activity, you know, spanking the monkey..."
Researchers we also amazed that monkeys could sign ellipses with no comprehension of punctuation. A working theory is that the lack of the desire to masturbate has driven the monkey's brain to develop at an accelerated rate. And while frequent masturbation may not make you go blind, it might make you as dumb as a monkey.
On a side-note, I found this secondary article very, if not more, enlightening. It makes me wonder how smart I would get if I jerked it less...
"There ought to be limits to freedom." -George W. Bush
Sorry... it just occurred to me as another arm-motion-practice activity which would come naturally to any monkey.
leave these poor animals live their live in the forests and stop martyrising them like this !!!
If this is true, then I suppose it could be because monkies are very afraid of snakes, and the 's' character looks like a snake on keyboard and screen. Notice people make a hissing noise when they say the letter!
The slashdot blurb amused me, because I think the fact monkies played computer games is just as interesting and important as the neuron work (although not novel, I believe). For example, the religulous right in America is extremely dangerous and their ignorance of the universe and humanity is challenged by our (painfully slow) discoveries about animal intelligence.
Next up, getting them to dance. Dance monkey boy, dance...
> the computer translated the signal into a jolt of electricity to the arm muscle
Ah, so these are actually *cyborg* monkeys now.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
I just got my ass handed to me by "1337_bananaz" in Counter-Strike. Looks like we have our culprit right here.
Right, this is great and all, but what game did they play to show off these skills?? If it was spore, they probably spent less time "practicing moving their arms" and more time "on phone with EA support"/"in line at store refunds counter"... c'mon, lets report on the *facts* here slashdot!
Well I for one welcome our new Single Neuron Simian Overlords
I don't have a sig.
They were made paralyzed by "scientists" aka torturers/mutilators. That's an important distinction.
It really amazes me that we still allow this kind of "research" on sentient beings, who are well aware of themselves and their surroundings.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
Somehow I have a hard time believing that a monkey who's trying to figure out why he's half-paralyzed would be even remotely interested in "playing video games."
This seems to me to be an experiment that's pushing the bounds of ethics.
A friend of mine happened to work in the Primate dept. at Santa Cruz in the 1960s when they inherited the Harry Harlow rhesus monkeys used in the famous 1950s isolation experiments. They were totally psychologically screwed up for as long as they lived. While I'm not an animal rights extremist, the sort of experiment described in the OP makes me uncomfortable. If humans were involved in such an experiment, they'd be able to know what was happening to them. But monkeys being "temporarily paralyzed," while it may not harm them physically, seems likely to have some psychological effects that I think could justifiably be called cruel.
Cluster fsck? Dude, just wait for luster to port over to a ZFS backend. Then, no more fsck EVER! I love Sun Microsystems! I am the Lizard King!
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.