Mind Over Machine 331
broKenfoLd writes "Monkeys moving robotic arms by manipulating a cursor on a computer screen, simply by thinking about it? Mice who cause their water tube to dispense some refreshing H2O just by wishing it? Signal processing and decoding has long been a dream of Matrix fans and lazy system administrators for years, and science is amazingly keeping up! Popular Science's Carl Zimmer has written a fascinating piece documenting recent progress in decoding brain signals and interpreting commands issued from thoughts alone. If you heard a single violin playing Beethoven's 5th, you would be able to tell what piece of music was being played even though the rest of the orchestra was not heard. In the same way, by monitoring a relatively few neurons, computers can recognize patterns and allow programming based on these patterns to say, know if a mouse is thinking about pushing his water lever.
You can pass the time waiting for Matrix-style video games and motionless system adminstration/utilization by reading the full article."
Shoulda seen this (Score:4, Informative)
Brain-Computer Interfaces for Communication and Control [sfn.org] at the society for neuroscience annual meeting. There are already paralyzed people using this type of technology (electrode and even EEG(!)) on an experimental basis.
Re:Just don't forget one thing! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Just don't forget one thing! (Score:2, Informative)
Mind Wide Open (Score:5, Informative)
This is more William Gibson rather than Matrix. (Score:2, Informative)
In the Matrix, the singals only control movement in a virtual environment. As for moving objects within the physical world, this is much more in the alley of William Gibson. I'd suggest reading Burning Chrome [amazon.com] as a start. These short stories, most which were written long ago in the late 70s (yes late 70s) to be published in Omni magazine (remember that?). In addition to tapping into cyberspace with a headjack, a person could hook up to a jet and pilot it with no hands (Turner in Count Zero).
If you also check out Gibson's Cyberpunk trilogy from the 80s, you'll see the reasoning behind the mind/machine link - the military began with hooking up monkeys to vitural cockpits to see if human pilots would be able to fly jets with no hands and ideally, romotely.
Re:This is all cool, but... (Score:2, Informative)
Yes. There exists no complete, accurate simulation of even an ordinary human cell; neurobiochemistry is even more complicated even before you try to model interconnections.
Now, currently, interesting things are being done with simplified models of the neuron in moderately large arrays, and it may be that we won't need a complete model of neural chemistry to create the first truly intelligent neural-net models. But even then, 10^10 elements is well beyond the capacities of even our best supercomputers to model.
I don't see any particular reason why the approach won't work, but even with a simplified model working, a frog-level intelligence is a 20+ year problem.
Where is all this going... (Score:3, Informative)
The article did touch on the ethics of placing such implants into healthy soldiers, but ethics and morals that would prohibit such activity tend to be very fluid.
Non-invasive techniques may one day be developed for interacting with machines through thought, but this technology is probably much further off than taking the short-cut of hardwiring the brain.
original paper by Miguel Nicolelis (Score:2, Informative)
html:
http://www.plosbiology.org/plosonline/?request=ge
pdf:
http://www.plosbiology.org/archive/1545-7885/1/2/