Slashdot Mirror
The Cat Cam
PhilHibbs sent us an article from wired that talks about Neuroscientists creating
videos from a cats eyes using electrodes implanted in a cats brain.
Here are some
Pictures.
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Slashdotted already :( Would somebody who's seen these pictures already describe the quality?
It's easy to dismiss ethical issues as "crazed ravings by animal rights nuts," so I feel I have to state up front that I eat meat, wear leather, and use personal hygiene products tested on animals.
The ethical questions would be much more obvious if the test subject were human, of course.
A couple of starting points:
When do we have the right to monitor the perceptions of a living organism?
What effects does this procedure have on the organism? Can it lead a normal life once the probes have been removed?
I think this is good research. I'm not opposed to it. But that's because I've thought these things through.
Here ya go.
Hope they don't mind me taking a load off their server. Be gentle, now!
Ah.. The time of the neural interface is soon at hand. Mmm... Neural-Quake.
There are a lot of times animal testing has no place, I'll agree with that. But when it comes to something that could provide sight for the blind, or other corrective surgeries that can improve people's lives in huge ways like this has the potential, I'm sorry, but I'd rather they test with cats than people. I like animals, but I also eat meat...
The scientist merely recreated what the cells were processing at an _intermediate_ stage of visual processing. This is where pattern formation and the like take place. This is not at the level of perception and is therefore not what the cat SAW. The higher level brain functions must further parse the data before an event that can be deemed to be what the cat saw takes place.
just = (My)Opinion.toCents();
There already exist pinhole ccd cameras with fm transmitter bugs about the size of a common housefly. These are used by law enforcement in the US, mostly in gang, drug and organized crime surveillance. The unit's actual size is about a tenth of an inch in diameter and a little over a quarter inch long, cylindrical shaped with a sharp point at the tail end, very handy for pushing up into a ceiling tile so that the pinhole opening is flush with the surface of the tile. Damn near impossible to spot visually from below. A tiny lithium battery powers the unit for about 30 days. They typically transmit in the 2200MHz band and the receivers can still pick up a fairly good image as far away as half mile. Best way to find them is with a portable spectrum analyzer. haha
Don't get depressed. Future tech is always salivatingly desirable because it doesn't quite exist... yet its details are can be very well imagined and fleshed out with modern tech. So close and yet so far.
On the other hand, people in the past probably salivated over tech we have now. We think nothing of it because it all seems so ordinary and commonplace to us. Cybernetically enhanced hmans in the future will see themselves as "ordinary" and be depressed that even newer tech doesn't quite exist yet.
The grass IS always greener.
After viewing the page, view the image separately.
Then run around screaming. Of course the server was slashdotted, it was serving out a 1MB jpeg and having the client browser reside it to 600xsomething!!
The image could have easily been 80K if they had shrunk it using any image editor.
I sometimes wonder about these people...
Anyway, this is EXTREMLY interesting...
I've read that the image the human eye physically sees is actually distorted, full of chromatic aberration, etc., and the brain compensates to make the image look perfect. Also, the resolution of the human eye isn't that high. There is a central point called the fovea that has an extremely large amount of retinal cells. Notice how, in order to read, you must move your eyes constantly from word to word; this is because the fovea is the only point with sufficient resolution to view things with pristine sharpness, and the fovea is rather small. This is also why idiots who look at solar eclipses can do so much damage to their vision even if only a tiny part of the retina is damaged.. their fovea gets roasted and this is where you see all the detail!
What this means is, the data stream coming from the human eye probably isn't that large. If we could only figure out the interface, constructing an adequate artificial eye would probably not be that difficult. Interfacing is the key, and this experiment shows that we are that much closer.
- =^o.o^=
I am also a meat eater, but I think performing tests on animals is something entirely different.
Plugging in electrodes, or intentionally giving animals cancer doesn't compare to killing something for the purposes of nourishment. The later goes elsewhere without our involvement, the former doesn't
Ack... what were they thinking??? Smart enough to record the freaking eyesight off a cat but not smart enough to shrink the graphics down a smidge! The images are mostely graphs and charts... 1 meg jpegs?
--
RumorsDaily
That is the whole point. All the spy stuff is just not likely to be practical any time soon - probably easier to put a tiny camera into your victim's eyeball than to run all those probes in the brain.
But cracking that code is an incredible achievement, and I suspect it has major implications beyond the visual. It means we know more about how nerves and brains work.
Fear my wrath, please, fear my wrath?
Homer
We apologize for the inconvenience.
First of all, about the cats. They are probably a bit less miserable than you (like to) think. Their heads are possibly restrained to impede movement artifacts on the electrode's recording. They are probably trained to stare at a fixation point for a food reward. I *doubt very much* that their eyelids are clamped open as someone here suggested. The data during eyeblinks is probably *extremely* important for their studies.
:) Some of us actually try to minimize discomfort as much as the paradigm will allow.
And FYI, not all scientists are inhuman monsters.
Unfortunately, If they are using standard implant electrode technology, it's not very stable. This means that over time(days-weeks) you will lose access to those cells. Also, they had to laboriously catalog (I assume) the response of each and every cell, and then apply each cell's response as a filter on a small area of space as shown in the figure.
Any inevitable drift in the electrode would screw this up big time, requiring a complete recataloging of spike waveforms and their spatial filters.
So I wouldn't expect this to be field mountable without some major advances in neuron recording technology. The metal wire in the brain is just too invasive in the long term.
As for implanting them in cats and soldiers as mobile spies, why not just use a camera mounted to their head (with maybe a gaze tracker if you want to monitor precisely what they're looking at)? I don't understand what the benefit of this technology is, compared to a small camera. There is an immense "pain-in-the-ass" factor of using it practically.
Not to say it's not important, this is awesome news. I just don't think it has much practical application as a spy cam in the near future. Now creating artificial eyes, that's something, and this is right on target.
Go humans.
-Illserve
*insert Superman theme here*
In a related development, neuroscientists found that if they simultaneously stuck sharp electrodes under the skin of a human and of a cat, the sensations produced were remarkably similar.
Seriously - I find this to be a very disturbing study. I'm not going to cop a holier-than-thou attitude here; I myself have done painful neurological experiments on living rats for no better reason than to satisfy a course requirement. And scientifically, this study is tricky work, well done. However, you really have to question the motives here. This is the ultimate in gee-whiz graphics, and by posting it on slashdot for a bunch of non-neuroscientists to ooh and ahh at, we're really buying into that.
Donna Haraway has written about the importance of vision in science (Before you dismiss her as just another of those postmodern feminist theorists who of course don't know what they're talking about, like Randy's overstereotyped ex in Necronomicon, you should read her
"Cyborg Manifesto"). She's arguing that no picture, not even natural vision, is as direct and honest as it seems to be. As science strives (rightly) for true objectivity, it tends towards several kinds of false objectivity. Pictures are one such method. They seem natural - it's easy for the layman to say "Oh, that's what a cat sees," rather than "That's a picture constructed by scientists as an educated guess about what a cat sees". This is not as bad as the false objectivity that says "Who are you to challenge my objectivity? You're not white and male, so whatever you say is obviously biased.", but it's a step in the wrong direction.
The way to fight this kind of false objectivity is to appreciate what went into making the image. When you see something, appreciate that it's actually being projected upside down on your retina, multiplied by three color/response curves, broken down into shapes and movement, and so on; the mechanisms of your vision bias you to pay attention to some attributes and unavoidably ignore others. And when you see a picture, appreciate how constructed that is. In this case, that means that the picture came to you through a very unhappy cat, into some electrodes, through some statistical software, and through the web. Anyone who can look at these pictures without feeling some real suffering in sympathy with that cat is not truly objective enough to be a scientist.
[Of course, most
Preferential Voting: easy as 1-2-3
No more Shadowrun for you. Or Strange Days. Or even Wiliam Shatner novels.
Are /.ers so stereotypically enamored with Borg and cybermen and such that the best we can think of is espionage and prosthetic eyes?
:)
Everything technological that has any 'neato' status -- from the radio to the television to computer graphics to the Web ends up becoming an entertainment (and/or marketing) tool.
Forget speculation about how far we are from Tek chips (btw, see last weeks news) or SQUID drives for your coolness predictions. Movie writers would probably enjoy the idea of being able to rig an actor up for vision-recording.
Imagine a real-life Truman Show done from Truman's own eyes.
This would also be a benefit for research done on what people look at, what attracts their attention based on their eye focus and its duration on any object. Xref the research done last month on banner ads or the research done on a good driver's attention patterns.
(Which ultimately would lead to advanced marketing research, of course -- how effective an ad is based on the attention it gets.)
Now, for maximum coolness potential, what I want to know is, does this technology pick up the aberrations in vision in a person on drugs? That sort of thing could cut drug use in half or more.
(On a more serious note, if they can also tap and reconstruct audio reception, I'd also like to be able to record my dreams. Wouldn't you?)
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
(oops, cut myself off there, in the middle of my disclaimer.)
I was saying that these are complicated ideas, and in order to summarize I've simplified a little.
Preferential Voting: easy as 1-2-3
They already have technology that lets blind people see crudely. The problem is the blind people absolutely detest it. It is totally disorienting. Like random input into a part of the brain that has never been stimulated before.
Could these same ideas be used to realize the dream of Christopher Reeves to walk again someday?
I know where that idea's headed.
Surgeon #1: With these new bionic implants, Christopher Reeve will be a new man.
Surgeon #2: We'll make him better than before....
(insert futuristic sounding 70's disco music)
Just what I want to see - a cats-eye view of a mouse beaten to semi-consciousness.
Or a wet paw swiping over the screen every 5 seconds as the cat washes its face.
Or if it was like a very old cat I once had, the bottom of its food bowl when it fell asleep with its face in the cat food.
MrCreosote Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump! "You're right! There isn't enough room to swing a cat in here!"
What if this results in prostheics for humans who have misdeveloped or missing eyes? Would you consider it wrong then?
This is not just a matter of curiousity. This is genuine research. Research with making humans see images (who have no eyes) with direct interaction with the brain from electrodes has already been done to a small degree.
First, all science fields have to make efforts to connect with normal Joes. If they don't, public support falls, and funding falls. This is an excellent example of such an attempt, more power to them.
Were they hoping to gain fame? Of course they appreciate the prestige of making a public show, they're still human. Why are they less deserving of the fruits of their labor than anyone else revered for their contributions to science, technology, or the arts?
As for the "seeing like a cat" comments. Yes it's an oversimplified statement, but that doesn't mean this work is not important. It's part of an attempt to understand the changes that occur in visual information as it progresses through the brain, which is critical for understanding vision (and thereby make artificial eyes, understand consciousness, yadda yadda).
You can debate the importance of that if you want, but if you accept that that's a valid field of study, this is a necessary stepping stone IMO.
-Illserve
How about attaching a giant-squid-cam to a sperm whale? A GPS and depth sensor might be good too, so we can find out where these suckers hang out.
If the species in question has spycams embedded in it, they can gather evidence for the rape trial and ensure conviction.
{RIMSHOT}
...is the back of the cat's eyelids. Or 75%, if they used my cat.
Seriously, this is cool, groovy cool. We're on the way to make borg-things.
The new sports fad will be the "Eye-Cam". We'll see the game like it's never been seen before...
__________________
That was about as scary as the six million dollar man and even less believable.
At the B. Dalton Bookstore where I work, this issue of Scientific America came off the shelf yesterday, as we got the new issue in. So, it may be hard to find at newstands, but hopefully they'll post it on the web soon.
The article was very intriguing, and the rest of the issue had some cool stuff in it, too.
(Sorry for the off-topic post.)
Another thing shall be stressed - the working of a peripherial signal transduction nervous systems is peanuts compared to the complex brain functions, like image recognition and interpretation.
An article in Nature on how the brain interpretes what the eyes see shows how complex it all is.
Bad way to serve an image. Post a 1 meg jpeg, and have the browser resize it down to 600x450? A jpeg of that size could be about 50k. I hate it when people do that!
I always mod up spelling trolls.
Top things to view on the Kitty Cam
1. Kitty watching owner have sex
2. Kitty watching owner take a shower
3. Kitty watching owner sit on the toilet
4. Kitty watching owner get dressed
My cats' favorite pasttime is "watching owner", so I can just see it now, I take in a stray and end up being plastered all over the porn (Pussy-cam) web sites. Lovely.
Of course they'd have to be really patient to sit through scenes of kitty snoozing, and then not looking at the really "interesting" things while they're going on. Heh.
Ok, ok. So perhaps that Chinese thing was a bad example...I'm just saying that animals have no say in the world. Not like we should rush right out and try to give them speech...but I'm just saying. I eat meat, chicken, fish, etc. But for once I'd like to see the animal come out on top, and not be used for these sorts of experiments. You may think I'm contradicting myself, by saying I eat meat and that we shouldn't kill animals. I admit it's wrong.
But the criminal thing you've got to understand. "Eye for an eye." Besides, criminals could speak out against scientific testing. Animals can't.
Scientific research like this worries me anyway. We hear about these things, then that person/animal goes away from public view, then comes back a few years later and we found out it's died or what not. Yeah it's cool, it's a scientific achievement.
I love posting things like that. I like making people think : )
miyax, who is scheduled to be removed from the gene pool at 5:45 eastern standard time (just kidding)
We test things on cats because they aren't good for anything else. Let us learn from the great bumper sticker ..... "Earth First... we will strip mine the others later" Words to live by don't you think.
Humans of much greater importance than the rodents that plague the inner cities of america. If we can take the information that we learn from the filthy trash diggers and save one persons life or make someones life easier why not. I wouldn't sacrifice one human life to save an animal. Not yours and not the chinese. But if you want to sacrifice yourself to the cause I wouldn't hold you back..
Much like the free computer and free internet service, Free Prosthetics. Need a new heart? no problem. All you have to do is sign this agreement to have advertisements superimposed on your periphery vision and we'll get you a brand new one grown fresh over at MIT. And dont worry about detrimental effects on your vision, our test cat only bumps into walls 1 time in 3.
Dreamweaver
"If a man hasn't discovered something he will die for, he isn't fit to live" -- MLK, Jr.
Do you mean that cats understand the concept
of an experiment? You mean they can evaluate
long term benefit to human species vs. short
term detriment to themselves and decide if they
feel generous? Further, do you mean that cats
have a notion of good and bad?
Heeereeee miyax, miyax, miyax...GET 'EM!!!
You can just use a simple camera with a very long extension cord.
How about:
3. Say good-bye to the camcorder. Particularly useful for journalists. This idea was used a bit in Greg Egan's "Distress" an excellent book, fantastic author.
With better resolution, no need for a camera crew, although you'd need a mirror for shots of your self :-)
BTW anyone know the max resolution we could get with a human eye?
Christopher Reeves can fly.
I think it IS public for people at many educational institutions. It's probably IP-masked or something.
Of course, I remember reading in the Drudge report a year or two ago about how some scientist had figured out how you could control a cockroach with implanted electrodes and a microphone and perhaps turn it into a mobile "bug". What fun.
That must be a bad joke....wouldn't that be the ultimate Big Brother scenario? Break your leg, and during surgery you get some electrodes implanted... scary :)
This morning I wake up, my head hurts like someone has drilled a hole in it and my vision is screwed.
Bastards - if you're reading this through my eyes now, I'm coming to get you.
Beowulf!!!!!!
(Just a joke. Really. I haven't a clue.)
This will totally allow us to use modified fish or for deepsea stuff... and if they can possibly figure out a noninvasive way of inputting rather than outputting from the visual cortex, we won't need monitors anymore!
This research was funded by "Confuse-a-Cat, Inc."
Yes I would consider it wrong. Do we spend our time researching to help the thousands of animals with genetic defects? No. Why should they be forced against their will to 'help' our research.
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
This could help explain what the hell my cat is always watching.
This may be cool. Once they figure out what the eyeballs send to the brain, they might be able to make an artificial eyeball.
I hope the artificial ones don't come in a visor that looks like an air-filter from a '75 Buick.
Just because cats may not be as 'clever' as us, doesn't mean they should be sacrificed in the name of science.
Why should we decide there fate?
This is really great news, because it's a demonstration that the current theory might be on the right track.
If the researchers had been unable to get their images, then they would have had to rethink the basics again.
Deciphering vision is but the first step in making borg. It would be wonderful to make Geordi's eyes for blind people, and some new inner ears for deaf people. Borg don't have to be bad at all. I think borg-like devices will help a lot of people.
A question: How complicated is the vision system compared to the signals on the spinal cord? Could these same ideas be used to realize the dream of Christopher Reeves to walk again someday?
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Bully syndrome. I'm bigger than you. Ergo I'm better than you.
*sigh*
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
While this is a really really neat idea, I can't think of very many real-world applications for it.
(Due the fact that either the firewall at my job sucks or the site has been slashdotted, I haven't actually been able to see the site yet, but...)
Things you could do with it-
1. Implant it in sex offenders. Check the records when someone accuses them. You can apply this to just about any other class of criminals known for repetitive behavior. Very high potential for misuse.
2. Find out what the pets really do when you're not at home. Or what animals do when observers can't study them.
That's about it that I can think of. Any other ideas?
-Ender
Loose things are easy to lose. You're getting your hair cut. They're going there to see their aunt.
You're talking to the same society that requires doctors (whoever) to swab the injection site of a prisoner about to get a lethal injection so it is less prone to infection ... ;)
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
Reminds me of a really evil but kinda neat site www.cat-scan.com
:)
Yes its bad i know, but i can't help but share
The military might find it attractive to implant this type of system into its troops in the field, and those dolphins they train to redirect enemy torpedoes. (Yeah I know, they say they quit that, but they can always restart it.)
There is a "bright" side of course, this type of recording could be used to train people how to do a by giving them the experiences of someone skilled in that area. You could learn how to play hockey by being Wayne Gretzky for an afternoon.
It is a bit of a stretch, but if this method is extended to other processes you could "teach" certain purely cognitive processes by example. Wouldn't it be neat to learn to do Physics by being Stephen Hawking for a few days. That is about the only way to gain a real insight into how he solves problems and how he understands the universe.
Before this type of "learning" could take place there may have to be a non-invasive method for retrieving the necessary data patterns from a brain.
Unfortunately the possibilites for abuse are so high, it is scary. Just because we can do a thing doesn't mean we should do a thing. It has already been mentioned that certain entities may want to use these possible future systems to monitor criminals.
What if the government decides to monitor anyone with access to classified information ? What if they decide they want to monitor people who are percieved to be a threat ? Let's say they get used to that sort of thing over time, will they then want to monitor everyone all the time ? After all if you have nothing to hide...
What are the boundaries ? What kind of world can this technology create ? What kind of world should this technology create ? Before moving forward too quickly we should understand the extremes of the application possible.
Science Fiction has shown dystopic visions of civilizations equipped with ultimate personal monitoring technology. (1984, Borg...) Has anyone seen a Utopian vision of a community with this technology ? What does it mean to bereft of all personal privacy ? Can humans remain sane without their privacy ? Which, if any, of our thoughts and actions does any government or community have a "need to know ? Is this sort of thing ever appropiate, regardless of the benefits it may provide to civilization ?
Don't post innacurate information
If you do, I swear by my pretty floral bonnet I will end you.
That's sick man. No no I mean really sick.
The ArachnaCat? I thought the spideys in Doom II were bad that things gonna give me nightmares.
and the testimonials? My cat needed help balancing. You gave him extra legs now he's great.
I'm gonna go twitch in the corner muttering things about bionic cats taking over the world.
-cpd
We need to help these poor guys who get posted on Slashdot & don't have industrial-grade servers. I consistently am unable to follow links from /. due to server overload. We should consider putting together some sort of automated bait-and-switch mechanism for the low-end servers that get /.ed. We could try to get some developer time and web space donated to provide multiple automated backups of sites as they get posted, then have a proxy that figures out which backup is not overloaded and automatically delegates web hits to the appropriate backup. Of course, such a system would be good for a lot more than just saving the /.ers from having to hit the reload button a googleplex times. If someone cares to organize such an effort, I can donate developer time (Java/C++/Perl/whatever). Regards, Wurp bobbymartin@hotmail.com
Alternately, this could be the ultimate voyeur tool
Voyeur: Yeah, baby... take it off for Daddy! That's it... show me the goods-- Hey! Damn cat! Stop playing with blinds, there's a naked woman in there! No, no! Look the other way!
Bugging animals with microphones for espionage purposes has been done. I have held in my own hands a cat skull with wires fused to the skull that led to microphones in the eardrums.
Anyway, the problem with application of this sort of technology is mostly in the power supply, and in heat dissipation requirements. There's no safe place (for the cat) to put a battery, and the heat generated can cause problems. The reason I only have the cat's skull, now, is because kitty didn't live very long...
They put electrodes in Jon's visual cortex?!?!? ....oh wait, they said "cats", not "Katz"... nevermind.
Maybe this explains his weird opinions and bizarre writing style!
01101100 01101001 01101110 01110101 01111000 01110010 01110101 01101100 01100101 01110011
Now wouldn't it be neat to have one of those things implanted in a fly's eye, and use it in meeting surveillance? "I'd love to be a fly on the wall at that meeting", now you can with flycam!
I'm rather against testing on animals, but testing on prisoners is no better, if not worse.
J. Danforth got his name for a real obvious reason - he's unusually dumb, even by the highest dumb cat standard. Millie, on the other hand, got her name because, in the words of my wife, "she looks like a Millie". There was no White House connotation meant there, though both cats entered our lives during the Bush administration.
The Bush Millie was a Springer Spaniel. She died a year or two ago, if I recall.
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
Either it'd cough it up like a furball or bury it somewhere after expelling it elsewhere. In which case you'd need a radio transimitter in it anyway to locate it.
Still, I think the whole thing is pretty cool. Does this mean they'll eventually be able to say, get signal from a video camera and 'insert' it into this same area of the brain in order to allow blind people to see? (by having a tiny camera in their glasses or something). If they can decode the signal it probably wouldn't be too much harder to encode the signal and make the neurons fire. This is all of course assuming the process for humans isn't too different than that for cats.
We're getting closer to the whole Matrix thing ;)
Sorry for being both off-topic and a little down on slash, but this site doesn't seem stable enough to put the mirrors here... Slashdot is always slashdotted!
maybe by the time the second generation of these devices come out we will all have scanners
http://www.exn.ca/mini/startrek/
I could have told them exactly what my cats see. They see food. And that's about it. Every once in a while my cat J. Danforth sees the little red dot from my laser pointer, which he is convinced is a small rodent, and my other cat Millie only sees food and places to sleep.
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
You're right. They should be using all those babies that the Professor is going to kill.
Then we could rip out all their internal organs and mail them off for fetal research to cure AIDS.
That's much better than upsetting a cat.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
For an exploration of a version of this, I recommend "Synner's" by Pat Cadigan. Her earlier work "Mindplayers" also plays with the theme of direct sensory input to the brain.
Not Stephenson, but not bad.
--sugarman--
Or The Black Cat by EA Poe?
"In Ulthar it is the charming law that no man may kill a cat..."
Most of the comments on this thread have reflected little if any care about the animals involved in this "research". Do the cats voluntarily keep their eyes open? Or are they forced? When they finish with the images, do they just trash 'em, or what?
Please, take the time to reflect on the difference between Silicon and Organic constructs, and the gishy, gooey, very real and sloppy feelings that the latter endures for our curiosity.
Hence, Curiosity Killed The Cat.
Oh great! Cyberpussies. How will I ever keep track of all the real pr0n sites now?
You can view the paper Here in HTML or download the pdf Here
Three cheers for journals which make their stuff public access !!!
Depends on the type of blindness you have. Lets assume they are able to make devices high-res enough to give a good image...
If your blindness is due to eyes that don't function[for whatever reason],then pumping this bitstream down to the brain might provide some sort of image.
However, if you have cortical blindness, all bets are off. These people have damage in the part of the brain that interprets visual signals. Therefore, even if you provided them with the highest quality image possible, they wouldn't be able to interpret what they were "seeing".
As an aside, I had a friend in med school who worked on this type of problem at the NIH a couple of years ago. IIRC, they installed a 256-pixel device in a blind patient. He did report being able to see flashes of lights from the device. I have a feeling we're going to hear much more about this in the not-too-distant future.
docwolf.
I don't know if anyone here has read the book Author C. Clark did about the massive earthquake. In it he talked about "cam - heads" reporters with cameras in there head... imagine a photographer that could take a picture exactly as he saw it... eliminates the need for all the fancy equipment huh? Of course resolution would have to be improved, but that happens with time anyways... the major problem would of course be storage of the data, after all you can't just tape a hard drive to your head. Credendo vides By believing one sees.
Cat brains have been, for years, used in experiments because of their similarities to the human brain...If this can be done in cats, I'll bet it can be done in humans in time.
This would be the ultimate wartime "bug"...Kidnap an enemy. Drug him, pop open his head, the works.
Rig an extensive, remote version of this...plug the brain cells that control vision. Voila, he leads you to his plans, allies, everything. And if you mess up, well, dang. You just scrambled a badguy's brain. Could be a lot worse. Like stepping in a hairball first thing in the morning, or cat hair all over your black wool trousers...
That would be really freaking cool, if it weren't so frightening.
Can't sleep, the clowns will eat me...
Once they figure this out enough to be able to tap into the human optic nerve and get decent images out, it could lead to a major advance in journalism and filmmaking; implanted video recorders tapping into the optic nerve and storing the images for later downloading. (Greg Egan's Distress describes one such system.)
I just got in a big argument with a close friend about all this. I suppose I've always been: Technology and Science for the sake of technology and science. He, of course, sees the day the governement is using the future of this technology to read our minds.... I see the following: 1: Record your dreams and be able to play them back. For someone who has trouble remembering his/her dreams, this is a beautiful thing 2: And this is in no particular order, sight for those blinded by eye problems (be them from birth or accident). Let's face it, if you can read the synapses, you can write to them, to use a computer ROM/RAM point of view, but for synapses, it's so much more so. It's just electrical impulses, and if you can read them, you don't even have to understand them completely to reproduce them. (Example: Mice wired with a button that provided sexual stimulation. The exact mechanics weren't understood, but the basics was all that was needed.) 3: If you can record sight, you can record sound and smell, touch, etc. Okay, it's not "there and now", but it sure can't be too far off. This is VR like we dreamed of years ago.. 4: These guys aren't reading the images from the visual receptors, they're about half-way into the chain of visual reception. That's a big difference from tapping right into the nerves of the visual cortex. These guys are half-way (probably in an exponential way of speaking, but light years ahead of where I thought all this technology was) into the visual interpretation. That's a hop skip and a jump from reading AND recording dreams... 5: Okay, what did my friend and I argue about? I used to work as a programmer for some guys that made equipment for spooks. They had a PCMCIA card with a little "antenna" wire that could pick up ethernet traffic from about 3 feet away from the actual cable. It just picked up the "induced" current which cause magnetism or something like that (electronics ain't my thing). Okay, so my friend is say, if they can do that with ethernet, don't you think the government can do that with brains? My answer, yeah, sure, and what are we looking at? Maybe a future of no lies. Maybe a future where we're all wearing goofy "brain jamming" helmets. All in all, science and technology for science and technology. I can find a million things bad about any scientific advance, but I can find two million things good about it. When it comes to the day of $10,000 to get a brain implant to record my dreams, I'll be the first guy in line. Sorry, you guys are gonna have to wait...
By Wim Wender. Go see it. Same thing but with humans... And a recorder!
...you could build yourself a cat scanner. (rimshot)
I expect we'll see cybernetic implant devices not just to correct injuries/birth defects, but for enhancement reasons. Imagine an artificial eye that can see in the infrared zone (night vision), etc. the possibilities are endless. Technologically enhanced humans will be the future.
You can view the paper Here in HTML or download the pdf Here
Three cheers for journals which make their stuff public access !!!
Oh, the paper has pictures also but you get a decent explanation as well.
Damnit, that cat is the world's first fucking
Sense/Net superstar. It should be eating off
fine china for the rest of its life while the
masses hail it as a godamn messiah of newest
revolution in entertainment. Instead it will
be returned to its numbered cage and end its
life at Gillette doing first hand product
testing.
Is this any way to treat a pop icon?
What's the cat's name? What color is it? Can I
have it?
I hope y'all remember Gibson's Tally Isham.
This cat is the world's first Isham... and we treat it in such a shabby manner.
Dr. Fardook
lycos@bway.net
Dr. Fardook drfardook@evilconspiracy.com
(Boy, and the NSA gave Furbies such a rough time, imagine what they do to a cat with a transmitter or camcorder)
Whats really sad is that out of the 60 odd messages I have seen, most them seem to thinks its cool. I would have to agree with you. Although I haven't been to the website, I would like to see how many of them would be willing to submit themselves as test subjects.
Sorry, I actually meant to say "The Matrix". Guess I was hallucinating at the time ;-)
Ideology is for ideots.
There was a villian called Mojo in the old X-men comic books that implanted cameras into the eyes of the X-men and created a popular TV Show : The X-babies. Just thought I would share my pathetic comic book lore.
Spinal cord injuries, like serious brain damage caused by Parkinsons, Altzheimers etc right now are more open to treatment with stem cells ( cells that morph into the whatever tissue you like from a non specific stem state), they have already done some experents including on humans, where implanted cells have brought back at least some functionality to the damaged areas.
Any sufficiently advanced man is indistinguishable from God
I know for a fact that my cat would insert implants in my head with a dull butter knife if it meant he could control the can opener and doorknob. :)
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
just a side note, but gillete actually stopped testing on animals.
uhh, the Journal of Neuroscience won't let you view this paper unless you have an on-line account. On-line accounts are available free to subscribers of the paper edition, not to everyone else. on Three cheers for on-line services that don't allow public access! () off
Damn, this could lead to the "borrowed experiences" things from the movie Strange Days. For those of you who didn't see it (you should), they had these webs that you put on your head and you could experience whatever was recorded by the person. They kept the experiences on little mini-disc things and they were bought and sold like drugs. My favorite was the guy who was "sold" on the idea by getting to experience a 19 year old girl taking a shower. :)
Left shift 1 for e-mail...
I couldn't agree more -- it is wrong to force the cat to undergo that when you can't meaningfully get an acknowledgement that it is okay.
.. let's see what apes do..
Otoh, I'd probably volunteer for that because I think it is cool, and could definitely have a lot of applications and uses.
At least it is "sort of" better than all the un-scientists who keep repeating meaningless tests on new species just so that they can publish. Like -- okay, we've established that Chimps act like they've been hurt when we blast electricity across their temples
So all living creatures apart from humans are mindless zombies? Not sentient creatures (okay, I'll grant you, most lower order creatures aren't sentient, but not the case with cats etc)
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
What jerk decided that it was alright to take other sentient beings and just start hacking on them? Oh, I forgot it is in the name of science and for our benefit so that justifies the cruelty. How primitive. IceMan (my login is hosed)
Heh, this reminds me of Red Dwarf. Specifically, the episode where Cat was looking for this one recorded dream of his involving a group of women and a large tub of yogurt. Interesting concept :-) I know I'd love to record my own visual impulses.
This also reminds me of "Cold Lazerous" (I spelt that wrong, oh well). It played on CBC (for us Canucks), and was a Britsh production. In it, they took the frozen head of a man from the 20th century (this was sometime in the future), and watched portions of his life. It was very interesting, and dealt with things like the head (and mind) developing a form of self-awarness.
Of course, what we're all waiting for are the implants that let us see through clothing (infra-red retinas, here I come!)...
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
maybe in a few years time, you could get loads of these cats and use them as a building security sydstem.
BE SAFE - BUY BEOCAT.
I think this invention could lead to organic cameras growing in spawning vats for cheap.
Test subjects were criminal cats!!
(I hope information will ease your mind, and everyone elses who thinks it is OK to do tests with criminals but not with animals.)
Girlfriend: You were looking at that woman's butt!
You: No, I wasn't
Girlfriend: Yes you were. I have the tape to prove it!
I recall reading more than one SF stories in which a character had a live feed hooked up to their eyes either for news reporting, or some sort of "you are there" entertainment.
The cake is a pie
So how far are they in research where they won't need to do any sort of surgery to see through other people's eyes? To think Strange Days(with the ereet SQUID device) takes place only a couple months from now.
Gee, first the 10th planet, now this. Too much life imitating art
>Strange Days indeed. ...
Indeed. And that movie was supposed to take place in 1999. Just in time
The pics are /.'d. I had absolutely no idea they could do anything like this. If this is true as presented, this could nearly be Nobel material. I went to a couple of neuro conferences at the Santa Fe Institute, and all they showed there was simple experiments measuring potentials on individual neurons when monkeys were fed apple juice. This is a huge leap.
-- Moondog
Soon my army of mechanized KITTENS will take over the WORLD. Muahahahahahhaaha... *gak, cough*
Ahem. Anyway, this opens up all kinds of paranoid speculation about the NSA, but I think it's great. The sooner I can sit staring at an 18-foot monitor inside my brain while driving and talking on my cell phone, the better.
it was almost dead before it was posted to
slashdot. they have 3 pages, each with a 1mb
image on them
sorry. i don't have a mirror for it.
You seem to forget that cats' neuro systems are much less complex than humans, which makes studying how brains work much easier. You can't possibly expect they can succeed on any human tests unless they know the brain functions of simpler creatures, can you?
So what should they test on? Should they just stop all work that could help millions and millions of people live longer, regain site/movement/etc?
I personally think it would be far more cruel to say: Sorry, son, but the cure that could've saved your life had to be abandoned because too many cats were uncomfortable with the tests being done.
Think about it.
How about the Apes they performed head-transplants on?
This is cool, we are a couple steps closer to being able to dial-in to our pets get e-mail, telephone messages, and visual scans (audio?) of the house away from home. X10 could make a lot of money off this if it were a do it yourself kit.
They need to hook this puppy (or cat as it were) to a webcam. Then I could replace the JenniCam SlashBox with with CatCam! Live furball hacking all day! ;)
Of course once in a while I do look like a comfy chair, which is why the cat is still around.
By the way, first post. Also, the picture site seems to have already been hit by the slashdot effect.
Work for Change & GET PAID!
This is the first step towards full fledged cyborgs.
Hmmm. Scary, but cool.
http://www.icalledit.com - Predicting the future, one post at a time
Don't get me wrong, I think it's creul pretty creul to attach electrodes to any mammal's brain and do anything. But since we're already doing this... I think it would be cool if we take it a step further and try giving the cat with the electrodes hooked up to his/her brain some LSD. We could use this information to try and figure out how LSD actually works. (no one really knows for sure) It would be interesting to see if hallucinations showed up on the reconstructions of the images.
Cool. Now the cool geeks will have kitty cams on the web, rather than the passe' web cams of years past.
--R
Cats' visual perception isn't that good. Cats don't see food, unless it moves. Cats can only smell food. If you have a pet cat, try putting food down on the opposite side of the bowl from where the cat is, and watch the cat try to find it. The cat will put its nose down right in front of where it's standing and start sniffing around. If the food ain't there the cat will get really confused because the cat can smell the food, but can't see it. Try it sometime, it's pretty funny to watch.
http://newgrounds.com/cat/index.html Ok, they go to the exstemes, but it's along the same lines.
Have we ever slashdotted a cat before?
;)
I'm getting nothing. Never send a kitty to do a grown cat's job!
Geeky modern art T-shirts
Sounds a bit cruel to me. I sure wouldn't like to have anything implanted in my brain. Maybe the scientists should just do it to themselves instead.
...to cure blindness in human beings, I say: Too damned bad for the cats. That's life in the food chain, baby.
Maybe when someone shows me a cat crying its little eyes out for the decimation of native species in Australia (Want to save koalas? Kill your fucking cat!) I'd reconsider, but for now, I say to hell with the allergenic little vermin.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Surely though, in context of the parent post it deserved to be moderated up one (Funny), not down one. Given the choice, that's what I'd have done.
I can't see how anyone sane would take this as genuine flame-bait, especialy if marked (Funny).
Anyway, to make this on-topic, I'd like to suggest that "the future" is approaching faster and faster. It scares me, but I like it.
Medication be damned, I prefer the leprechauns over you wierdos any day
you are objecting to the use of cat (for some unknown reason), therefore you should be the subject for the next experience. Specially with your argument "China's got 1 billion" (implying killing Chinese is preferable to killing American murderers, and to killing American cats) ; I have no objection to have you removed from the gene pool.
Rob should mirror pages like this. Or at least warn them so they can setup a mirror.
Can you imagine guard dogs with wireless video transmitters? Or dolphins? Or CNN journalists?
Make way for the Borg.
In sports, Helmet Cams will be soooo 20th century.
Soldiers and spy's would take on new dimensions. Hell, the military and intelligence communities probably did this years ago, heh.
http://www.play.com/products/snappy/
Well if you can get the images out, we can put them in, I can see some mad scientist right now cooking up the stimulus for a cat to continually view a ball of virtual string or a VR mouse scurring around. That said, if they would just wire me up for a hands free video of my life I would be very greatful, plus of course some image enhancement technology so I can zoom in if I see something interesting, then I could post it all on the Web for a record of my life, and of course the naughty bits could go into alt.binaries.sex.multimedia.wiredgeek
- No I didnt take my Lithium doctor
Any sufficiently advanced man is indistinguishable from God
Why do people continually feel the need to test "scientific research" on animals? The animals have done nothing to us. For cripe's sake, let's use people. China's got 1 billion (no offense to the Chinese), or why can't we use criminals?
I think this technology is pretty cool, but why try it out on a kitty? What makes them think the kitty doesn't object to this? What makes them think the kitty even wants this sort of technology implanted in him in the first place? Because people can object to this, and kitties and animals can't? Is that why we test on them? Gee, I can understand my black lab pretty well...
On another, more pleasant note, does anyone remember the site, "Talk to My Cat?" This guy had this cat which always sat around his computer, possibly because it was warm or something. Anyway, this guy set up this machine that, when somebody typed something in a text box, the machine would transform that text into speech, and literally talk to the cat. For all I know it was a big hoax, but it was still a cool concept. This was quite a few years ago...anyone remember it?
Guess that's quite OT, but this article kinda reminded me of the site : )
miyax
You can see the images ato n_figure2.html
http://www.vermontel.net/~vengnce/slashmirror/rec
Go easy on my server, please!
I'm sorry. What I meant to say was 'please excuse me.'
what came out of my mouth was 'Move or I'll kill you!'
There seem to be quite a few people on death row in the USA. What better way for them to repay society than to give up their lives in the quest for enlightenment?
Maybe now the prices on digital cameras will come down.
What are we going to do with all the blind cats?
Uhh, would anyone who got thoses pics be so kind as to put up a mirror? Thanks.
Naw, it was slashdotted even before it was posted. I was testing a new proxy server this morning, so I went to the Wired web page (huh, all the other boxes I play with around here already had Slashdot cached. Go figure!). I tried to click on the link to see the pictures, and the page was already unavailable. I tried searching the site, but no luck.
:-)
Didn't stop me from submitting it myself, though!
Little Debian: America's #1 Snack Distro!
I want one of these. If it can also record my hallucinations, I could make a movie that would blow people away and save tons of money on CGI costs. It would make the "Blair Witch Project" look like an amateurish piece of fluff...
Ideology is for ideots.
Looks like we killed there site with love... It's like dead dude...
It's dead Jim.
Isn't there anything you can do?
Damn it Jim I'm a docter not a sysadmin!
--- eman I don't know what it does, but I like the blinking lights.
I can't wait to record my dreams!
And to display memories, or store them to my HD.
Hello! I am Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die
I think every place I've ever worked has had a large stray cat population. Somehow, they always seem to be able to get into the fenced-off areas of the premises. And there's always something requiring one type of clearance or another going on (that's what happens in the defense world....).
Anyway, I'm sure that just about any place w/ enough people has some population of stray animals. Imagine if Boris & Natasha happen to collect up the animals one day, and implant the next generation of these electrodes in the cats, along with transmitters. Suddenly, you've got a large roving population of cameras around places you really don't want pictures taken.
Even if they weren't able to get into any type of restricted area, you'd still likely get several shots of the employees, so you'd know who to target when trying to "turn" someone.
They could even go so far as to train animals from birth to perform certain tasks, such as getting into rooms with doors slightly ajar, knocking over file folders with papers in them and looking at the papers for X seconds, etc. Who would suspect a stray of spying?
Alternately, this could be the ultimate voyeur tool. "Hi, I got you this pet kitten."
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." --H.L. Mencken
So supposedly their is some poor cat with a 50 pin SCSI (maybe USB?) cable hanging out of his head?
Thats pretty sick.
Microsoft aggravates my tourettes syndrome.
I'm no (neuro)biologist and I've never done much with neural nets but this seems obvious: the eye uses a simple and reasonably well understood mechanism, not dissimilar to a video CCD, to translate light into electric signals on the optic nerve. These signals are fed into a neural net and that net does whatever wierd shit neural nets do to convert the signals from the retina into 'ideas'. So I would expect that if I put little sensors right on the back of the retina, at the start of the optic nerve, I would get signals I could probably decode into a decent, high-res movie of whatever the eye is seeing. No great step forward there. At the other end, if I put sensors somewhere deep in the neural net that's processing the signals, I might get lucky and find a synapse that triggers whenever a particular face comes into view or whenever something potentially edible comes into view, or whatever. In between these extremes what I am going to detect is going to be whatever intermediate signals are generated by the processing of the neural net that gets the information from one of these two extreme states to the other. This is going to be impossible to predict or decode but is probably going to be more like the input signal when you are nearer to the input. Even the most experienced builder and trainer of neural nets AIUI won't be able to predict or decode the intermediate states between input and output in such a net. So what these guys have done is tapped the signals inside the neural net, close enough to the input that they aren't so distorted as to be unrecognisable but far enough away that some processing has evidently happened though we can't deduce anything from it. In the article it even says they tried some deeper taps and found things that were affected by the cat's vision but in ways they couldn't decode. So what does all this tell us? It tells us that these guys are pretty good at extracting detailed signals from inside some poor cat's brain. That seems to be about it. Of course this kind of basic research is always at the start of the long path that leads to something interesting but I'd say it's a little early to start getting excited. Merlyn Kline (merlyn@zynet.net)
This is the first big step in the human-computer hookups needed for the "cyberspace" envisioned by authors like William Gibson and Neal Stephenson. The next logical step would be to try this process in reverse-- that is show a cat a prerecorded movie. Pretty crazy stuff. I can envision myslef "jacking in to the net" in 15 years provided the following requirements are met:
1- This can be done on humans... presumibly not too hard
2- Really high speed conenctions
3- Really sweet security (who wants to have their online porn hijacked and replaced with something icky?)
4- No regulation.... yeah, yeah reactionaries are going to hate this stuff...
Here's a random thought but how cool would it to be to run your own vision through some crazy video editing stuff before it got to you? You could make everything psycadelic at a rave or you could overlay slashdot healines, email and stuff in your vision... Who would need sunglasses when you could simply filter out bright light?
xm@GeekMafia.dynip.com [http://GeekMafia.dynip.com/]
*
*It will come, to anyone who thinks they can rape *a species and get away with it. It might not *come in form we are expecting, but it is *inevitable...
*
I thought they stuck wires into the cats brains, not raped them.... but maybe that was part of another experiment.
But seriously, some might complain about cruelty to animals and that we wouldn't treat humans like that etc..
What a lot of nonsense, we _would_ treat humans like that if we could get away with it..
Umm... when I say 'we' I'm not meaning me, uh-uh, no... the jury found insufficient evidence to prosecute me!!
.sig#8 'The whole wide world is a tiny town'
telnet://luna.cs.unm.edu:6767
Yeah I just see it now, when you goto purchase a kitten for your kids, the storman wil go "Will that be with or without video survalance?" Next they'll be pluggin into the cats audible senses, giving a new kind of bugging device, and the NSA will be doing bugs sweeps of all ferrel cats in a 1 block radius of the building.
> Want to save koalas? Kill your fucking cat!
Ok, who wants to join me in the ritual sacrifice of cats in Europe to help preserve koalas??
Ummmm... jcr.... you are sure this will help aren't you??
.sig#2 'I'm a biro person really. Cheap and expendable'
so how about we put a HD in the fish's head?
They test on kittens so people can go 'oh k00l, d00d, thatZ neaT0.' .. All that money, time, and life spent for you people. Sickening. And i'm not even a big animal rights person. I just think people are showing how pathetic they really are. There isn't one reason why these tests needed to be done other than to impress k3wl d00dz.. If they want to really impress people, they can do it on themselves. It's their tests, not the kittens.
For every site not backed up by a big server (ie: any university or personal site), /. should mirror the relevant contents locally (say: mirror./..org) BEFORE posting the story. The mirror should stay active up until the story drops off the main page of /.
See subject.
(in bed with your girlfriend Getting it on)
you: Holy crap! The cat is watching us!
Girlfriend: So!? It's a cat! it's not like it would care.
You: No, but the millions of people online might.
While the work on cats is interesting science, there are more serious ethical issues involved than those impacting on the ethical treatment of cats.
This story reminds me of an episode of Patrick McGoohan's remarkable 1969 TV series "The Prisoner". In the episode "A. B. and C." the Prisoner is hooked up to electrodes, given a drug, and Number 2 can watch on TV as the Prisoner's dreams unfold. (The Prisoner was a great achievement, by the way).
There are serious implications to our right of privacy here, of hooking people up to machines to extract the information stored in their brains. We are breaking down the final barriers of our ability to keep our thoughts to ourselves. Lie detectors are a joke compared to this threat to our privacy (should its potential ever be realized).
It will come, to anyone who thinks they can rape a species and get away with it. It might not come in form we are expecting, but it is inevitable...
They should be using babies.