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Mind Over Matter: Robots and Monkeys |
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Dr. Samuel Says -
Weirdness
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Written by Dr. Samuel Centralia, Ph.D., D.D.S., Esq.
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Wednesday, 16 January 2008 |
Interesting article in the Times this week, concerning the area of brain-machine interface research. Loyal readers know that this has long been a hobby of mine, ever since working on the ED-209 project at Oni Consumer Products back in the 1980s. That didn't end well.
So the Times report details a neuroscience experiment at Duke
University in North Carolina, in which a monkey was able to control a
robot just by thinking about it. Let me retype that: A monkey was able to control a robot just by thinking about it. I love it when the mainstream press reads like bad science fiction.
 But
it's all true. The monkey's brain signals, monitored by electrodes,
were used to control a bipedal robot set up on a treadmill. When the
money thought about walking, the robot walked. What's more, the monkey
was in North Carolina -- and the robot was in Japan.
From the Times: The
experiments … are the first steps toward a brain-machine interface that
might permit paralyzed people to walk by directing devices with their
thoughts. Electrodes in the person’s brain would send signals to a
device worn on the hip, like a cell phone or pager, that would relay
those signals to a pair of braces, a kind of external skeleton, worn on
the legs.
Actually, this area of research has been around a while, with some pretty spectacular results. Take, for example, the case of Johnny Ray,
a 53-year-old patient who became paralyzed from the neck down following
a massive stroke, leaving him essentially unable to communicate. One of
Ray's doctors, neurologist Phil Kennedy, won FDA approval in 1998 to
conduct a human trial procedure in which wireless electrodes were
attached directly to the brain. After a period of recovery and
training, Ray was able to move the cursor on a computer monitor simply
by thinking about it, thereby enabling him to communicate. Similar
cases followed, and this nascent field of biotechnology is flourishing
today.
Just thought you might like to know.
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