Bionic Rats

EmmaLouise99 pointed us over to an article in which scientists have gotten rats to control a simple robot arm through the activity of brain cells. The report comes in this month of Nature Neuroscience, and the obvious applications are for paralyzed people. I remember reading in Discover as well about a similar situation with little go-karts and insect brains-hooking up the sections that controlled wing movement, and letting them they think they were flying, but actually controlling the karts movement.

Comments

Jacking In

[Dunx]

I suppose the implications of Neuromancer/Matrix-style neural interfaces are almost too obvious to mention, but it goes to show that jacking in to the network is closer than expected.

What I would like to know is whether the rats' normal cognitive functions were affected? That is, apart from the obvious hint of having a huge great wire sticking out of their heads, were the rats unaware of the probes and behaving in a pretty much normal way? I wouldn't fancy a neural interface if I'm not me after its installation.

Apart from this small detail, I can see the following barriers to using this technology for general control of computers:

• invasiveness - is this kind of technique ever likely to be implementable without massively invasive surgery? Keyhole techniques don't really apply when you have to drill a hole to get in.
• training - in these experiments, great care was taken to learn what neural activity indicated thirst in the subjects. Is there any way this individual training could be genericised?

Cool thing, though.
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Linux Driver for Rat?

[Pablo!]

Catch-all comment: So when does the linux driver come out?