Neuroscientists At MIT Developing DNI

coolphysco1010 wrote to discuss the possible development of a direct neural interface, ala 'The Matrix', that could eventually allow for instant object recognition. From the article: "Now, neuroscientists in the McGovern Institute at MIT have been able to decipher a part of the code involved in recognizing visual objects. Practically speaking, computer algorithms used in artificial vision systems might benefit from mimicking these newly uncovered codes ... In a fraction of a second, visual input about an object runs from the retina through increasingly higher levels of the visual stream, continuously reformatting the information until it reaches the highest purely visual level, the inferotemporal (IT) cortex. The IT cortex identifies and categorizes the object and sends that information to other brain regions."

No 12 monkeys

[noc_man]

I read an article many years ago about them doing this to live human patients. Via a fiber cable brain wet-ware implant, a blind man was able to discern colors and rudimentary objects. He did have a short seizure during the interview; however, once the subject got passed that he immediately requested that the researchers continue.
Unfortunately this was so long ago I cannot remember the magazine or relocate the article. But googling artificial vision shows a few parts of history and HOWSTUFFWORKS has a full set of details

http://health.howstuffworks.com/artificial-vision. htm [howstuffworks.com]

Re:Matrix?

[Tune]

Or Strange Days [imdb.com], which could be considered a (lose) remake of Brainstorm.

Well, actually the article focusses on intercepting the sensoric data and making sense of it. I believe scientists have for some time been able to make sense of the basic sensoric data; stuff like using a cat's eye to produce webcam quality images. This research seems directed at interpreting the signals at a much deeper level.

Though very interesting, it's still a one-way extraction process (ie. *not* synthesis) which is just completely unrelated to anything i saw in The Matrix, but I may have stumbled into an excuse to view that movie again ;-)

sorry to dash your hopes, but...

[Xochi77]

i am not at MIT, but I can tell you this aint about to happen any time soon.

i am working on optical neuron-computer interfaces, and this is probably the most efficient and direct route for reading neurons. I know of researchers who can also stimulate neurons to fires via light, so in principle, we could build a complete neuroptical computers tomorrow... if neurons were not complete bastards to work with.

you see, they just dont like to stay place. where i research, they often build tiny fences to keep them in place, but even then, they go shooting theyre axons anywhere they feel, with no concern for the feelings of the researcher.

we also grow neurons on microchip surfaces, which allows for high speed and high resolution stimulation and reading of single neuron activity, but in two dimensions, which is excellent for retina etc.

but the neuron-chip or old fashioned neuron-electrode are hard to place, and optical reading of neurons still has bugs to sort out (id guess from 4-10 years more basic research). whenever you see these cool brainscan pics with MRI etc, remember theyre resolution is on the order of millimeters, and thats a lot of complexity lost.

http://www.biochem.mpg.de/mnphys/ [biochem.mpg.de] has a nice review of the problems involved, if you like hardcore solidstate chemistry, silicon physics, and neurobiology

Re:Just recordings

[FleaPlus]

This reminded me of the research by Quian Quiroga et al in which they performed single-neuron recordings from MTL (upstream of IT, if I recall correctly) in humans. In that study they found neurons which would respond selectively to particular objects, such as Jennifer Aniston, Halle Berry, and the Sydney Opera House. Here's the abstract:

R. Quian Quiroga, L. Reddy, G. Kreiman, C. Koch & I. Fried Invariant visual representation by single neurons in the humanbrain. [caltech.edu] Nature (2005) 435, 1102-1107

It takes a fraction of a second to recognize a person or an object even when seen under strikingly different conditions. How such a robust, high-level representation is achieved by neurons in the human brain is still unclear. In monkeys, neurons in the upper stages of the ventral visual pathway respond to complex images such as faces and objects and show some degree of invariance to metric properties such as the stimulus size, position and viewing angle. We have previously shown that neurons in the human medial temporal lobe (MTL) fire selectively to images of faces, animals, objects or scenes. Here we report on a remarkable subset of MTL neurons that are selectively activated by strikingly different pictures of given individuals, landmarks or objects and in some cases even by letter strings with their names. These results suggest an invariant, sparse and explicit code, which might be important in the transformation of complex visual percepts into long-term and more abstract memories.

Re:sorry to dash your hopes, but...

[FleaPlus]

What are your thoughts on using autonomously adjusting electrodes [caltech.edu] to deal with the problem of neurons shifting about? Granted, the current systems are rather bulky, but much more compact ones are under development.

Re:No 12 monkeys

[groomed]

The Vision Quest [wired.com] in Wired 10.09 of September 2002.

The article, as well as the feasibility of Dr. Dobelle's (who has died in 2004) research, are sketchy at best. Apply truckload of salt.

Re:sorry to dash your hopes, but...

[Xochi77]

cute, but check out- http://scholar.google.com/url?sa=U&q=http://www.bi oon.com/biology/UploadFiles/200502/200502160347225 62.pdf [google.com] "Functional imaging with cellular resolution reveals precise micro-architecture in visual cortex" also, i forsee the development of light-gated ionchannels, such as the one i mentioned before, that can be opens at various wavelengths, much like gfp has been mutated from green to the whole blue-red spectrum. geneticaly specified reading of neurons has furthers to go, but it will happen, and soon i think. in the end, why go with hacking into the brain to insert electrodes and chips etc, when two-photon microscopy can see though tissue?

Re:It's about time!

[Yvanhoe]

Immediatly, a large range of blindness can be cured by implants, either by putting a CCD array inside the retina or, in case of damage in the optic nerve, a camera can be wired to the visual cortex. Right now, some blind people see ( with a low res, b&w image but see nonetheless) thanks to implants.

link [seeingwithsound.com]
other link [brown.edu]

But yes, with the technology presented in the article, I suppose one could even cure blinds that have a damaged visual cortex.

Re:Sweet mother of brain implants.

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't work well. I was involved in artificial vision implant work a few years ago, and the current spread from the electrodes is too large to stimulate the small numbers of neurons necessary to give anything other than a "light blob". The lab put a grid of 5x5 electrodes in a human eye and the human reported on what they could perceive from current applied to it: the surgery was only done on people about to have their eye removed anyway for medical reasons, to be at little risk of hurting a good eye.

If the electrodes could be improved, with work like that of David Edell at http://www.ninds.nih.gov/funding/research/npp/sow/ N01-NS-2-2347SOW.pdf [nih.gov], then it might become possible to actually provide the shape of a letter to an artificial eye. But not even tapping the brain directly will get past the need to localize current for the nerves, and fascinating things happen around smaller and smaller electrodes that make it very tough. It's also delicate, expensive work, with lots of need for using lab animals and careful data and record keeping to be sure you're measuring what you think you're measuring. The concept of giving someone a neural jack that provides high-bandwidth computer data of any sort is, and remains, utter fiction.

Surprisingly, the implants for artifical hearing work very well: having the auditory nerve laid out, low frequency to high frequency, along the bony tube of the cochlea helps localize the current to just the nerves you want to hit with each electrode.

Re:It's about time!

[Anonymous Coward]

Kudos to MIT!

Every visual neuroscientist, ever, has been working on "deciphering part of the code involved in recognizing visual objects." Poggio and DiCarlo's contribution is mostly that they were able to record from a large number of neurons simultaneously in the inferotemporal cortex (IT). It's a logical (but interesting, to be sure) progression of work that has been done for decades in IT -- most of that work done elsewhere.

Neural prosthetics and DNI are the bullshit that people trot out to make neuroscience interesting to the public. It's worth pointing out that neither of the actual named scientists in this work raise the possibility, and in fact, other than the abstract, there's nothing that even hints at the idea. These guys aren't working on a DNI. They're doing basic science. Years, decades down the road, some engineers might take the work that built on Poggio and DiCarlo's work and turn it into a DNI. Or at least, we can so hope.

Name a university, and I can guarantee that the odds are that they'll have some basic science research underway with as much potential for the betterment of society as this stuff. So when you say "kudos to MIT" like this, remember that you're praising their PR department, not their scientists.

it's not DNI at all

[darkeye]

as they don't actually connect to the neurons, but read the neuron acticity patterns, probably through fast MRI scanners. and there's no feedback either - they don't send any data to the neurons (other then through the natural eye of the monkey in the tests)

We have non-invasive signal injection technology

[lightyear4]

We already have something called transcranial magnetic stimulation. See:

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumb er=1300793 [ieee.org]
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/vision/medical-vision/ surgery/tms.html [mit.edu] -- most relevant to discussion, has section on visual signal injection
http://www.biomag.hus.fi/tms/ [biomag.hus.fi]
http://www.mp.uni-tuebingen.de/mp/index.php?id=94 [uni-tuebingen.de]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_magnetic _stimulation [wikipedia.org]
http://pni.unibe.ch/TMS.htm [unibe.ch]