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."

Re:Sweet mother of brain implants.

[annex1]

Consider me second in line. I can't tell you how much of an improvement for the species this will be. Better yet, the blind may finally have a hope of actually receiving ACTUAL replacement vision, not a poor substitute. :D

Matrix?

[Auckerman]

The article reads more like they are reverse engineering pattern recongition systems as the brain sees and interperates objects, which sounds closer to the movie Brainstorm [imdb.com].

Just recordings

[venicebeach]

Seems to me they are just recording from IT neurons. There's no input to the cortex. I haven't read the science paper (is it out yet?) but it really seems like they are just analyzing the firing patterns of IT neurons while the monkey looks at objects. Nothing new here technology-wise.

Re:No 12 monkeys

[Timeburn]

IIRC, it was in Wired, circa about 1999 or 2000. The article covered research in South America (banned in the US), on a patient who had lost his vision, but whose optic nerve was intact. They interfaced directly into the nerve, stimulating it manually at first (This is when the seizure occurred).

The project was apparently quite successful, as the patient was able to move about the facility, pick up a phone from a desk, and even drive a car around the parking lot. Fairly low-res input, but enough to see shapes and movement.

Don't know what's happened with the project since, nor can I find the original article right at the moment, but it definately sounded promising.

Re:Sweet mother of brain implants.

[Artifakt]

I'm thinking of Walter a John Williams novel, 'Hardwired'. The protagonist has cyber-eyes, and bought them just when the company had gotten most of the bugs out, but while they were still trying unusual features like sepia tone overlays, film nior settings, and the like to see where consumer interest lay. They then dropped all these features to make cheaper, more basic designs they could sell to the broadest possible market. I'm with Alexander Pope on this one:

"Be not the first by whom the new are tried -
Nor yet the last to lay the old aside."

What if...

[nsasch]

What if the IT cortex was bypassed: The computers would get or simulate the input, and recognize and categorize the object and the computer would send that data directly to the other parts of the brain. Now the human doesn't see the ball, but knows there's a ball in front of them, and it's red, and about the size of their head, etc (all the details), but doesn't see it, just has a "feeling" that a ball is there.

Re:Cyborg possibilities

[Kjella]

The most interesting one to me is the ability to supplement your own faulty memory with a hard drive and your own thinking power with a processor. You'd take a little snapshot of every person you met and file it away with their name, never to be forgotten. Think about what school would do for you! If I could remember all the science, history and literature I've been taught and forgotten, I'd be a much more educated guy than I am now.

Not to go all Trinity on you, but why limit it to your own experiences? Basicly, say you wanted to recall the text of something you've never read, the HDD could supply it. That is simply on a request-response variety. You could do searches in information bases you've never read. You could do a two-way communication to make drill-downs. Let's say you were looking at a bird, and you could supply information to the base, the base might ask "questions" like color, size, beak, feathers, legs, sound to your brain to pull the information you want. The whole of wikipedia could easily fit on such a HDD. Sure there'd be a lot of trial and error here but this data could be gathered from everyone carrying it to improve the interface. It's more a matter if the human mind could keep up or if it'd go wacko from all this information at its fingertips. Then you could really talk about information overload.

Boon for Camouflage

[schwit1]

Could you test potential camouflage patterns with this and find which cause the most difficulty in visually deciphering? Or one day have computers generate camouflage on the fly based upon the surroundings.

Code Talkers

[Doc Ruby]

It's not a "code". There's no objective reality that the brain is decoding for mere "referential integrity". The brain is organizing its responses to incoming sensory info, in a feedback loop with itself, including resonating "memory" response signals. Sure, object representations are recognized as repeats of previous object representations, and dispatched to brain areas sensitized to those representations. But it's not like objects outside the body have standard codes, the same from person to person, like say insulin has in our DNA. That would be way to static for us to survive in this changeable world. We're making it up as we go along, and living in the reality we generate. The closer our mind's model matches the world we encounter, the smarter we are.

I'm currently doing similar work...

[mr. squishie]

...but on human subjects using fMRI. This research really isn't related to the matrix or DNI's directly, it's about seeing whether or not electrical signals from the brain contain enough information for a classifier (ironically, in our case, artificial neural networks) to distinguish between some subjective cognitive state.

Considering the progress we've made in distinguishing cognitive states (is this person looking at a face, a house, a squirrel, etc?) in human subjects using fMRI (an extremely noisy dataset), I'm not surprised that they found that there's enough information in a few neurons to perform classification.

Really, the best pop-sci term to describe this would be "mind reading" -- the high level goal is to have a function that transforms physical space to some sort of cognitive space. I guess you could say it's the "I" of the I/O DNI in the matrix.