OT: Hardware-to-Organism Interfaces (h2oi)

[Nocturnal]

But Henriquez and other neuroengineers do see one particularly enormous roadblock in the way of DARPA's goal. According to Rudolph, it would be unethical to implant electrodes in the heads of healthy soldiers.

HA! HA! HA! HA! HA HA! Since when has ethics ever been a roadblock to military technology? It would be no problem to find a hundred fighter pilots and commandos who'd volunteer to have their brains drilled into.

[JurijD]

MY THOUGHTS ON THIS SUBJECT:

1. Hmm in my experiance the biggest problem in getting any cyber-implant to work for a long time is the human immune system. Even the simplest artificial heart valve causes MAJOR problems because its pLastic negatively charged surface triggers the complement system and activates Neutrofiles and a whole bunch of other immune cells to attack it. These people have to eat huge ammounts of immuno-suppressors just to prevent their own body killing itself.

2. The neural-machine interface is not as easy as it is portrayed in some popular pseudo scientifical articles. Controlling a cats muscles with electrical impulses and trying to hook up a nerve and an electrical wire are two very different things. Our nerves don´t conduct electrical currents in a manner even remotely simmilar to an electrical conductor. Triggering a nerve impuls by hitting a nerve with an electrical charge is one thing... but being able to induce controlled impulses in a nerve and/or read the output of a nerve is very difficult and for the most part impossible for now.

3. Apart from that just trying to for example reconnect say your Nervus Radialis (a nerve that controls some muscles in the hand) after a 1cm gap in it occured after an injury is not even remotelly possible because of the simple fact that a nerve is composed of millions upon millions if neural axons that twist and spiral inside of it and trying to get the right ends to meet for the greater part of these is science fiction for now. Not to mention that even if you could figure out which axon connects where we just don´t have the nano technology to reconnect them in a manner that would be preceise enough.

4. Any kind of limb re-attachment sugery is very difficult and almost always leads to rejection by the host. And even if it does not the host never gets any kind of good motor control back in that limb (even if it is his/her own limb that is being reattached). Some struggle for years to even get a reattached hand just to close under their own will.

5. Although the prospect of attaching electrodes to the visual cortex in the brain and having them input impulses into it for vision might seem simple it is far from that. You see our brain doesn´t process images like a computer. We have several regions that perform different "calculations" like: shape, color, movement, seeing edges etc. And we are a loooooooong way from being able to input the right impulses into the right areas of our brain to restore vision. The people that got these implants for the most part weren´t able to see anything. SOME saw vague flashes of light... naturally as someone was sending electrical impulses into their visual cortex But for them to be able to really SEE and COMPREHEND color, movement, shapes etc. hehe, well that is PURE science fiction for now and will remain that for a long time.

6. Recently advances were made and as far as I know the US airforce was trying to figure out a way for their pilots to control aircraft by thought only. Perhpas you saw these experiments: a guy sits in front of a computer with a whole bunch of wires comming out of his head and then he "thinks" about the mouse moving in RIGHT and the mouse moves right.... These results are based on our brain generating area-specific electrical charges when we are thinging of the thing over and over again. And using this technique they were never able to get any fine control... if the subject trained for months he was able for example to move the mouse up, down, left and right; nothing more.

In conclusion:
Scifi makes it look easy but hehe, its really very difficut and we won´t be able to produce any meaningful H2Oi-s any time soon... say in the next 2 or 3 decades. For us to be able to do useful H2Oi we need:
- vastly superior computers... think 100-1000x faster than today
- improved knowledge of the human immune system
- a huge leap in neurology & neurochemistry
- at lest basic nano-robots to complete the fine machine-organism connections for us

I´d sure like to get to know the borg queen I´m sure she´d have some interesting info to get us started in the right direction

[ February 06, 2004, 13:28: Message edited by: JurijD ]

[Puke]

while all those things are obsticales, your list of required technology for surmounting them is just way off.

the computers we use for existing implants, including the ones that can restore partial vision, are quite rudimentary. the computers used to design them are advanced, but what we have seems sufficient.

we already have some level of advanced nanotech, but certainly dont require any 'nanobots' to work with small items. as i said, we are already incaseing little clumps of microscopic cells in little microscopic cages, and I have seen photos of individual neurons grown onto tiny little circuit Boards with itty-bitty little electrode pegs to hold it in place and stop it from growing away from (rejecting) the electronics.

its not as far fetched as you'd like to think.


one 'art' project i read about recently, involved hooking up a slice of goldfish neurons to input and output electrodes. the input sent in impulses based on a very low resolution web cam. the output sent a data stream that controlled a multi-armed plotter that would draw pictures in a handfull of colors. one of the kickers was that the brain cells and the plotter were on different sides of the planet - but thats not as impressive as having goldfish brains drawing pictures in response to stimuli.

[dmm]

Originally posted by geoschmo:
Ummm, no, not total fantasy. Well, maybe "mind reading" as in, hook someone up and see what they are thinking, like in that Natalie Wood movie. [/QB]

Yeah, that's what I meant. You're not going to be able to think your thoughts into Office 2010. (Good thing, too. Imagine doing a report that way with your boss looking over your shoulder!) But speech-to-text should work by then, and maybe the grammar checker will be worth using.

I did read the article, and it was helpful, just the kind of thing I was asking for. Thanks.

[dmm]

JurijD:
Thanks, lots of good points.

The immune system certainly is a nuisance! (Not one I want to do without, though.) I think that you are right to be pessimistic about replacement parts that are anywhere close to the original equipment. But I think that some primitive stuff is not quite as far off as you imply. For instance, one expt on replacement retinas worked well enough for the patients to distinguish between circles and rectangles. They couldn't leave it in -- it was too big, and the immune system would have rejected it anyway. But it did show that interfacing to the optic nerve was sufficient -- you don't have to interface to the brain directly.

Repairing severed hands....always makes me think of the ST episode where McCoy suddenly loses his alien-machine-induced knowledge right in the middle of the operation to re-attach Spock's brain. "My God, Jim, there are millions of connections! Nobody can re-attach a brain!" But they are making progress with "scaffolding" that encourages various kinds of cells to grow.

Certainly you are right that the problem is not so simple as we often think.

dmm

[narf poit chez BOOM]

- vastly superior computers... think 100-1000x faster than today

someone posted a link a while ago about a company that's developed an 8000GHZ optical computer. the article said about ten years to get it into mass production.

and I have seen photos of individual neurons grown onto tiny little circuit Boards with itty-bitty little electrode pegs to hold it in place and stop it from growing away from (rejecting) the electronics.

ugh. borg is bad.

They couldn't leave it in -- it was too big, and the immune system would have rejected it anyway. But it did show that interfacing to the optic nerve was sufficient -- you don't have to interface to the brain directly.

wonder if they could use electromagnets and not interface directly to get around that.

[ February 06, 2004, 19:45: Message edited by: narf poit chez BOOM ]

[geoschmo]

I think that what will be a big help to the problem with the body rejecting the implants will be to not use implants. Right now we have to use implants because we don't have transmitter/receptors sensitive enough to get the signals though the skin. A little bit more advancment in that area and you will be able to have a device on the surface, or maybe just below the surface of the skin, that can do the job. Less intrusive then sticking little wires in the brain tissue right next to the neurons.

The popsci article mentions some research in small scale devices that work like an MRI using some of the new fangled superconducting materials that are being developed.

Geoschmo