The Future of Mind Control of Physical Objects 176
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.'"
Re:Not so fast... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Cool I guess (Score:1, Informative)
FA18's can already do this.
Re:Taoism has a prior art claim on The Force, too (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:"...the main benefit is for rehabilitation..." (Score:1, Informative)
Theres still implications of risk, the devices they use for these applications are incredibly invasive.
You install tubes that permeate your skull, and those tubes are laced with wires.
Electrodes are inserted to, and placed on the brain, and the devices that you connect to are in no way mobile.
Additionally, when controlling devices such as jet planes, you're talking about a piece of hardware that costs millions of dollars.
Flying at Mach 2, and pulling massive amounts of G's is all well and good, but if you lose your wireless connection for even a split second, it could mean the destruction of said multi-million dollar piece of military hardware.
the military would much rather have a person in the seat of that plane, who can account for small problems when they arise, and even big ones, without the risk of losing connection. it puts the pilot at risk, but the financial side of it is more important to military bodies.
Flaunting Ignorance (Score:4, Informative)
"...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.
An somewhat more educated assesment (Score:4, Informative)
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