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Science

The Cat Cam 223

Posted by CmdrTaco from the practical-uses-for-pets dept.
PhilHibbs sent us an article from wired that talks about Neuroscientists creating videos from a cats eyes using electrodes implanted in a cats brain. Here are some Pictures.
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The Cat Cam More

The Cat Cam

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  • Real ethical issues here (Score:3)

    by RobotSlave ( 1780 ) on Thursday October 07, 1999 @09:54AM (#1631008) Homepage
    It's easy to dismiss ethical issues as "crazed ravings by animal rights nuts," so I feel I have to state up front that I eat meat, wear leather, and use personal hygiene products tested on animals.

    The ethical questions would be much more obvious if the test subject were human, of course.

    A couple of starting points:

    When do we have the right to monitor the perceptions of a living organism?

    What effects does this procedure have on the organism? Can it lead a normal life once the probes have been removed?

    I think this is good research. I'm not opposed to it. But that's because I've thought these things through.

  • Mirror (Score:5)

    by Eponymous, Showered ( 73818 ) <(gro.riafud) (ta) (esaj)> on Thursday October 07, 1999 @09:54AM (#1631009) Homepage
    Here [deadbeets.com] ya go.

    Hope they don't mind me taking a load off their server. Be gentle, now!
  • There are a lot of times animal testing has no place, I'll agree with that. But when it comes to something that could provide sight for the blind, or other corrective surgeries that can improve people's lives in huge ways like this has the potential, I'm sorry, but I'd rather they test with cats than people. I like animals, but I also eat meat...
  • The scientist merely recreated what the cells were processing at an _intermediate_ stage of visual processing. This is where pattern formation and the like take place. This is not at the level of perception and is therefore not what the cat SAW. The higher level brain functions must further parse the data before an event that can be deemed to be what the cat saw takes place.
  • After viewing the page, view the image separately.

    Then run around screaming. Of course the server was slashdotted, it was serving out a 1MB jpeg and having the client browser reside it to 600xsomething!!

    The image could have easily been 80K if they had shrunk it using any image editor.

    I sometimes wonder about these people...

    Anyway, this is EXTREMLY interesting...

    I've read that the image the human eye physically sees is actually distorted, full of chromatic aberration, etc., and the brain compensates to make the image look perfect. Also, the resolution of the human eye isn't that high. There is a central point called the fovea that has an extremely large amount of retinal cells. Notice how, in order to read, you must move your eyes constantly from word to word; this is because the fovea is the only point with sufficient resolution to view things with pristine sharpness, and the fovea is rather small. This is also why idiots who look at solar eclipses can do so much damage to their vision even if only a tiny part of the retina is damaged.. their fovea gets roasted and this is where you see all the detail!

    What this means is, the data stream coming from the human eye probably isn't that large. If we could only figure out the interface, constructing an adequate artificial eye would probably not be that difficult. Interfacing is the key, and this experiment shows that we are that much closer.
  • I am also a meat eater, but I think performing tests on animals is something entirely different.

    Plugging in electrodes, or intentionally giving animals cancer doesn't compare to killing something for the purposes of nourishment. The later goes elsewhere without our involvement, the former doesn't

  • Ack... what were they thinking??? Smart enough to record the freaking eyesight off a cat but not smart enough to shrink the graphics down a smidge! The images are mostely graphs and charts... 1 meg jpegs?
  • That is the whole point. All the spy stuff is just not likely to be practical any time soon - probably easier to put a tiny camera into your victim's eyeball than to run all those probes in the brain.

    But cracking that code is an incredible achievement, and I suspect it has major implications beyond the visual. It means we know more about how nerves and brains work.



    Fear my wrath, please, fear my wrath?
    Homer
  • First of all, about the cats. They are probably a bit less miserable than you (like to) think. Their heads are possibly restrained to impede movement artifacts on the electrode's recording. They are probably trained to stare at a fixation point for a food reward. I *doubt very much* that their eyelids are clamped open as someone here suggested. The data during eyeblinks is probably *extremely* important for their studies.

    And FYI, not all scientists are inhuman monsters. :) Some of us actually try to minimize discomfort as much as the paradigm will allow.

    Unfortunately, If they are using standard implant electrode technology, it's not very stable. This means that over time(days-weeks) you will lose access to those cells. Also, they had to laboriously catalog (I assume) the response of each and every cell, and then apply each cell's response as a filter on a small area of space as shown in the figure.

    Any inevitable drift in the electrode would screw this up big time, requiring a complete recataloging of spike waveforms and their spatial filters.

    So I wouldn't expect this to be field mountable without some major advances in neuron recording technology. The metal wire in the brain is just too invasive in the long term.

    As for implanting them in cats and soldiers as mobile spies, why not just use a camera mounted to their head (with maybe a gaze tracker if you want to monitor precisely what they're looking at)? I don't understand what the benefit of this technology is, compared to a small camera. There is an immense "pain-in-the-ass" factor of using it practically.

    Not to say it's not important, this is awesome news. I just don't think it has much practical application as a spy cam in the near future. Now creating artificial eyes, that's something, and this is right on target.

    Go humans.

    -Illserve
  • *insert Superman theme here*
  • In a related development, neuroscientists found that if they simultaneously stuck sharp electrodes under the skin of a human and of a cat, the sensations produced were remarkably similar.

    Seriously - I find this to be a very disturbing study. I'm not going to cop a holier-than-thou attitude here; I myself have done painful neurological experiments on living rats for no better reason than to satisfy a course requirement. And scientifically, this study is tricky work, well done. However, you really have to question the motives here. This is the ultimate in gee-whiz graphics, and by posting it on slashdot for a bunch of non-neuroscientists to ooh and ahh at, we're really buying into that.

    Donna Haraway has written about the importance of vision in science [dragonfire.net] (Before you dismiss her as just another of those postmodern feminist theorists who of course don't know what they're talking about, like Randy's overstereotyped ex in Necronomicon, you should read her
    "Cyborg Manifesto" [stanford.edu]). She's arguing that no picture, not even natural vision, is as direct and honest as it seems to be. As science strives (rightly) for true objectivity, it tends towards several kinds of false objectivity. Pictures are one such method. They seem natural - it's easy for the layman to say "Oh, that's what a cat sees," rather than "That's a picture constructed by scientists as an educated guess about what a cat sees". This is not as bad as the false objectivity that says "Who are you to challenge my objectivity? You're not white and male, so whatever you say is obviously biased.", but it's a step in the wrong direction.

    The way to fight this kind of false objectivity is to appreciate what went into making the image. When you see something, appreciate that it's actually being projected upside down on your retina, multiplied by three color/response curves, broken down into shapes and movement, and so on; the mechanisms of your vision bias you to pay attention to some attributes and unavoidably ignore others. And when you see a picture, appreciate how constructed that is. In this case, that means that the picture came to you through a very unhappy cat, into some electrodes, through some statistical software, and through the web. Anyone who can look at these pictures without feeling some real suffering in sympathy with that cat is not truly objective enough to be a scientist.

    [Of course, most
  • Are /.ers so stereotypically enamored with Borg and cybermen and such that the best we can think of is espionage and prosthetic eyes?

    Everything technological that has any 'neato' status -- from the radio to the television to computer graphics to the Web ends up becoming an entertainment (and/or marketing) tool.

    Forget speculation about how far we are from Tek chips (btw, see last weeks news) or SQUID drives for your coolness predictions. Movie writers would probably enjoy the idea of being able to rig an actor up for vision-recording.

    Imagine a real-life Truman Show done from Truman's own eyes.

    This would also be a benefit for research done on what people look at, what attracts their attention based on their eye focus and its duration on any object. Xref the research done last month on banner ads or the research done on a good driver's attention patterns.

    (Which ultimately would lead to advanced marketing research, of course -- how effective an ad is based on the attention it gets.)

    Now, for maximum coolness potential, what I want to know is, does this technology pick up the aberrations in vision in a person on drugs? That sort of thing could cut drug use in half or more. :)

    (On a more serious note, if they can also tap and reconstruct audio reception, I'd also like to be able to record my dreams. Wouldn't you?)
  • (oops, cut myself off there, in the middle of my disclaimer.)

    I was saying that these are complicated ideas, and in order to summarize I've simplified a little.
  • Just what I want to see - a cats-eye view of a mouse beaten to semi-consciousness.

    Or a wet paw swiping over the screen every 5 seconds as the cat washes its face.

    Or if it was like a very old cat I once had, the bottom of its food bowl when it fell asleep with its face in the cat food.

  • What if this results in prostheics for humans who have misdeveloped or missing eyes? Would you consider it wrong then?

    This is not just a matter of curiousity. This is genuine research. Research with making humans see images (who have no eyes) with direct interaction with the brain from electrodes has already been done to a small degree.

  • First, all science fields have to make efforts to connect with normal Joes. If they don't, public support falls, and funding falls. This is an excellent example of such an attempt, more power to them.

    Were they hoping to gain fame? Of course they appreciate the prestige of making a public show, they're still human. Why are they less deserving of the fruits of their labor than anyone else revered for their contributions to science, technology, or the arts?

    As for the "seeing like a cat" comments. Yes it's an oversimplified statement, but that doesn't mean this work is not important. It's part of an attempt to understand the changes that occur in visual information as it progresses through the brain, which is critical for understanding vision (and thereby make artificial eyes, understand consciousness, yadda yadda).

    You can debate the importance of that if you want, but if you accept that that's a valid field of study, this is a necessary stepping stone IMO.

    -Illserve




  • How about attaching a giant-squid-cam to a sperm whale? A GPS and depth sensor might be good too, so we can find out where these suckers hang out.
  • ...is the back of the cat's eyelids. Or 75%, if they used my cat.

    Seriously, this is cool, groovy cool. We're on the way to make borg-things.

    The new sports fad will be the "Eye-Cam". We'll see the game like it's never been seen before...

    __________________
  • At the B. Dalton Bookstore where I work, this issue of Scientific America came off the shelf yesterday, as we got the new issue in. So, it may be hard to find at newstands, but hopefully they'll post it on the web soon.

    The article was very intriguing, and the rest of the issue had some cool stuff in it, too.

    (Sorry for the off-topic post.)
  • The possible medical applications are quite clear, but it is going to be a long way before a non-invasive method or a human-computer interface will be developed. I think the most important part about this research is to show to the public the current state of brain research. The experiments from Berkeley are not a breakthrough - but they show the way neuroscience is developing.

    Another thing shall be stressed - the working of a peripherial signal transduction nervous systems is peanuts compared to the complex brain functions, like image recognition and interpretation.
    An article in Nature [http] on how the brain interpretes what the eyes see shows how complex it all is.

  • Very very fuzzy, but recognizable. You can see shapes and shades but almost no detail. They are on the right track though, and it's pretty exciting stuff.

  • Oops (Score:1)

    by Yath ( 6378 )
    Bad way to serve an image. Post a 1 meg jpeg, and have the browser resize it down to 600x450? A jpeg of that size could be about 50k. I hate it when people do that!
  • Seeing eye cats
    Night vision cat goggles
    LickCam!

    Or in the case of a Borg cat, imagine 7 of 9
    with 8 breasts??? Sorry, that's a Borg in a
    catsuit.

    Really, the possibilities are endless. :)
    Now if they'd only enable me to click a MUTE
    button for one of our cats...
  • Top things to view on the Kitty Cam

    1. Kitty watching owner have sex
    2. Kitty watching owner take a shower
    3. Kitty watching owner sit on the toilet
    4. Kitty watching owner get dressed

    My cats' favorite pasttime is "watching owner", so I can just see it now, I take in a stray and end up being plastered all over the porn (Pussy-cam) web sites. Lovely.

    Of course they'd have to be really patient to sit through scenes of kitty snoozing, and then not looking at the really "interesting" things while they're going on. Heh.
  • Ok, ok. So perhaps that Chinese thing was a bad example...I'm just saying that animals have no say in the world. Not like we should rush right out and try to give them speech...but I'm just saying. I eat meat, chicken, fish, etc. But for once I'd like to see the animal come out on top, and not be used for these sorts of experiments. You may think I'm contradicting myself, by saying I eat meat and that we shouldn't kill animals. I admit it's wrong.
    But the criminal thing you've got to understand. "Eye for an eye." Besides, criminals could speak out against scientific testing. Animals can't.
    Scientific research like this worries me anyway. We hear about these things, then that person/animal goes away from public view, then comes back a few years later and we found out it's died or what not. Yeah it's cool, it's a scientific achievement.
    I love posting things like that. I like making people think : )

    miyax, who is scheduled to be removed from the gene pool at 5:45 eastern standard time (just kidding)
  • Much like the free computer and free internet service, Free Prosthetics. Need a new heart? no problem. All you have to do is sign this agreement to have advertisements superimposed on your periphery vision and we'll get you a brand new one grown fresh over at MIT. And dont worry about detrimental effects on your vision, our test cat only bumps into walls 1 time in 3.
    Dreamweaver
  • Do you mean that cats understand the concept
    of an experiment? You mean they can evaluate
    long term benefit to human species vs. short
    term detriment to themselves and decide if they
    feel generous? Further, do you mean that cats
    have a notion of good and bad?

  • How about:

    3. Say good-bye to the camcorder. Particularly useful for journalists. This idea was used a bit in Greg Egan's "Distress" [amazon.com] an excellent book, fantastic author.

    With better resolution, no need for a camera crew, although you'd need a mirror for shots of your self :-)

    BTW anyone know the max resolution we could get with a human eye?

  • I think it IS public for people at many educational institutions. It's probably IP-masked or something.

  • Re:Cats as voyeurism-enabling devices (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Of course, I remember reading in the Drudge report a year or two ago about how some scientist had figured out how you could control a cockroach with implanted electrodes and a microphone and perhaps turn it into a mobile "bug". What fun.

  • Joke? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    That must be a bad joke....wouldn't that be the ultimate Big Brother scenario? Break your leg, and during surgery you get some electrodes implanted... scary :)
  • I went to a college party last night and there were scientists there - I can only remember up until midnight.
    This morning I wake up, my head hurts like someone has drilled a hole in it and my vision is screwed.
    Bastards - if you're reading this through my eyes now, I'm coming to get you.

  • Excellent! (Score:3)

    by miracles ( 93948 ) on Thursday October 07, 1999 @09:25AM (#1631054)
    This will totally allow us to use modified fish or for deepsea stuff... and if they can possibly figure out a noninvasive way of inputting rather than outputting from the visual cortex, we won't need monitors anymore!

  • Yes I would consider it wrong. Do we spend our time researching to help the thousands of animals with genetic defects? No. Why should they be forced against their will to 'help' our research.
  • This could help explain what the hell my cat is always watching.
  • This is easy to fix. They just implant them on new born babies. That way nobody will know what happens.

    Already being done. We're all just power sources living inside a gigantic virtual reality world, or haven't you seen The Matrix yet?

    There is no spoon!
  • This may be cool. Once they figure out what the eyeballs send to the brain, they might be able to make an artificial eyeball.

    I hope the artificial ones don't come in a visor that looks like an air-filter from a '75 Buick.
  • Just because cats may not be as 'clever' as us, doesn't mean they should be sacrificed in the name of science.

    Why should we decide there fate?

  • great news (Score:2)

    by PD ( 9577 )
    This is really great news, because it's a demonstration that the current theory might be on the right track.

    If the researchers had been unable to get their images, then they would have had to rethink the basics again.

    Deciphering vision is but the first step in making borg. It would be wonderful to make Geordi's eyes for blind people, and some new inner ears for deaf people. Borg don't have to be bad at all. I think borg-like devices will help a lot of people.

    A question: How complicated is the vision system compared to the signals on the spinal cord? Could these same ideas be used to realize the dream of Christopher Reeves to walk again someday?

  • Survival of the fittest to the n-th degree.

    Bully syndrome. I'm bigger than you. Ergo I'm better than you.

    *sigh*

  • While this is a really really neat idea, I can't think of very many real-world applications for it.

    (Due the fact that either the firewall at my job sucks or the site has been slashdotted, I haven't actually been able to see the site yet, but...)

    Things you could do with it-
    1. Implant it in sex offenders. Check the records when someone accuses them. You can apply this to just about any other class of criminals known for repetitive behavior. Very high potential for misuse.

    2. Find out what the pets really do when you're not at home. Or what animals do when observers can't study them.

    That's about it that I can think of. Any other ideas?

    -Ender
  • You're talking to the same society that requires doctors (whoever) to swab the injection site of a prisoner about to get a lethal injection so it is less prone to infection ... ;)

  • Cat scan (Score:3)

    by TAiNiUM ( 66843 ) on Thursday October 07, 1999 @09:27AM (#1631065)
    Reminds me of a really evil but kinda neat site www.cat-scan.com

    Yes its bad i know, but i can't help but share :)

  • Applications and ethics (Score:3)

    by aibrahim ( 59031 ) <slashmailNO@SPAMzenera.com> on Thursday October 07, 1999 @10:14AM (#1631066) Homepage Journal
    I am making a huge assumptive leap in the capabilities of the science we see here. I know a lot of what I postulate below is far removed from what can actually be done, but it may be an eventual outcome...though I hope a distant one.

    The military might find it attractive to implant this type of system into its troops in the field, and those dolphins they train to redirect enemy torpedoes. (Yeah I know, they say they quit that, but they can always restart it.)

    There is a "bright" side of course, this type of recording could be used to train people how to do a by giving them the experiences of someone skilled in that area. You could learn how to play hockey by being Wayne Gretzky for an afternoon.

    It is a bit of a stretch, but if this method is extended to other processes you could "teach" certain purely cognitive processes by example. Wouldn't it be neat to learn to do Physics by being Stephen Hawking for a few days. That is about the only way to gain a real insight into how he solves problems and how he understands the universe.

    Before this type of "learning" could take place there may have to be a non-invasive method for retrieving the necessary data patterns from a brain.

    Unfortunately the possibilites for abuse are so high, it is scary. Just because we can do a thing doesn't mean we should do a thing. It has already been mentioned that certain entities may want to use these possible future systems to monitor criminals.

    What if the government decides to monitor anyone with access to classified information ? What if they decide they want to monitor people who are percieved to be a threat ? Let's say they get used to that sort of thing over time, will they then want to monitor everyone all the time ? After all if you have nothing to hide...

    What are the boundaries ? What kind of world can this technology create ? What kind of world should this technology create ? Before moving forward too quickly we should understand the extremes of the application possible.

    Science Fiction has shown dystopic visions of civilizations equipped with ultimate personal monitoring technology. (1984, Borg...) Has anyone seen a Utopian vision of a community with this technology ? What does it mean to bereft of all personal privacy ? Can humans remain sane without their privacy ? Which, if any, of our thoughts and actions does any government or community have a "need to know ? Is this sort of thing ever appropiate, regardless of the benefits it may provide to civilization ?

  • That's sick man. No no I mean really sick.
    The ArachnaCat? I thought the spideys in Doom II were bad that things gonna give me nightmares.
    and the testimonials? My cat needed help balancing. You gave him extra legs now he's great.
    I'm gonna go twitch in the corner muttering things about bionic cats taking over the world.
    -cpd
  • We need to help these poor guys who get posted on Slashdot & don't have industrial-grade servers. I consistently am unable to follow links from /. due to server overload. We should consider putting together some sort of automated bait-and-switch mechanism for the low-end servers that get /.ed. We could try to get some developer time and web space donated to provide multiple automated backups of sites as they get posted, then have a proxy that figures out which backup is not overloaded and automatically delegates web hits to the appropriate backup. Of course, such a system would be good for a lot more than just saving the /.ers from having to hit the reload button a googleplex times. If someone cares to organize such an effort, I can donate developer time (Java/C++/Perl/whatever). Regards, Wurp bobbymartin@hotmail.com

  • Cats as voyeurism-enabling devices (Score:3)

    by kinesis ( 13238 ) on Thursday October 07, 1999 @10:21AM (#1631069)
    Alternately, this could be the ultimate voyeur tool

    Voyeur: Yeah, baby... take it off for Daddy! That's it... show me the goods-- Hey! Damn cat! Stop playing with blinds, there's a naked woman in there! No, no! Look the other way!
  • Wouldn't you notice the stitches on the back of your head? No to mention the pounding headache.

  • Power and Heat problems. (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Bugging animals with microphones for espionage purposes has been done. I have held in my own hands a cat skull with wires fused to the skull that led to microphones in the eardrums.

    Anyway, the problem with application of this sort of technology is mostly in the power supply, and in heat dissipation requirements. There's no safe place (for the cat) to put a battery, and the heat generated can cause problems. The reason I only have the cat's skull, now, is because kitty didn't live very long...
  • I am sorry to spoil your day, but GPS does not really work underwater.
  • >Of course an animal with explosives strapped to it could make an interesting terrorist weapon.

    That damn Taco Bell Chihuahua gets my vote as a test subject. Put down the chalupa, indeed...
  • They put electrodes in Jon's visual cortex?!?!?
    Maybe this explains his weird opinions and bizarre writing style! ....oh wait, they said "cats", not "Katz"... nevermind.
  • I'm rather against testing on animals, but testing on prisoners is no better, if not worse.
  • Perhaps most importantly, every such piece
    of progress is a leap for AI. Being able to
    build a brain in a factory is very appealing,
    since this would allow one to make artificial
    thinking machines and eventually replace humans
    with a more efficient civilization, because
    we humans consume too much and our lives are too
    short to be truly productive. This is also
    desirable for cataclysmic events: no more
    dinosaur extinctions - if conditions change
    factories make reoptimized generation in a matter
    of hours.
    Imagine a world without environmentalists
    or any other crap that exists because our human
    form requires it. Hopefully this will happen
    _before_ this civilization runs out of oil.
  • "their will"????????????????
    Are you on drugs????????????
  • J. Danforth got his name for a real obvious reason - he's unusually dumb, even by the highest dumb cat standard. Millie, on the other hand, got her name because, in the words of my wife, "she looks like a Millie". There was no White House connotation meant there, though both cats entered our lives during the Bush administration.

    The Bush Millie was a Springer Spaniel. She died a year or two ago, if I recall.
    - -Josh Turiel
  • Of course, if you could implant a SONY memory stick (ala AIBO robo-dogs) in the cat, then the cat could just drop off the data it collected once it had left the building.

    Either it'd cough it up like a furball or bury it somewhere after expelling it elsewhere. In which case you'd need a radio transimitter in it anyway to locate it.

    Still, I think the whole thing is pretty cool. Does this mean they'll eventually be able to say, get signal from a video camera and 'insert' it into this same area of the brain in order to allow blind people to see? (by having a tiny camera in their glasses or something). If they can decode the signal it probably wouldn't be too much harder to encode the signal and make the neurons fire. This is all of course assuming the process for humans isn't too different than that for cats.

    We're getting closer to the whole Matrix thing ;)

  • Sorry for being both off-topic and a little down on slash, but this site doesn't seem stable enough to put the mirrors here... Slashdot is always slashdotted!
  • Let them do thier own research.
  • maybe by the time the second generation of these devices come out we will all have scanners
    http://www.exn.ca/mini/startrek/
  • >A GPS and depth sensor might be good too,

    Er, good luck getting the GPS signals down that deep. And sperm whales prolly navigate more by sonar at those lightless depths.

    >so we can find out where these suckers hang out.

    On the squids' tentacles, obviously! :-)
  • I could have told them exactly what my cats see. They see food. And that's about it. Every once in a while my cat J. Danforth sees the little red dot from my laser pointer, which he is convinced is a small rodent, and my other cat Millie only sees food and places to sleep.

    - -Josh Turiel

  • They are low res and blurry, but there's an undeniable similarity between the "real" images and the decoded images. Assuming this isn't a hoax, the protocol has been cracked.

    ---
  • For an exploration of a version of this, I recommend "Synner's" by Pat Cadigan. Her earlier work "Mindplayers" also plays with the theme of direct sensory input to the brain.

    Not Stephenson, but not bad.
  • This sounds like rather cruel and I might add, crude, experimentation.

    Most of the comments on this thread have reflected little if any care about the animals involved in this "research". Do the cats voluntarily keep their eyes open? Or are they forced? When they finish with the images, do they just trash 'em, or what?

    Please, take the time to reflect on the difference between Silicon and Organic constructs, and the gishy, gooey, very real and sloppy feelings that the latter endures for our curiosity.

    Hence, Curiosity Killed The Cat.

    :P

  • You can view the paper Here [jneurosci.org] in HTML or download the pdf Here [jneurosci.org]

    Three cheers for journals which make their stuff public access !!!

  • Does this mean they'll eventually be able to say, get signal from a video camera and 'insert' it into this same area of the brain in order to allow blind people to see?

    Depends on the type of blindness you have. Lets assume they are able to make devices high-res enough to give a good image...

    If your blindness is due to eyes that don't function[for whatever reason],then pumping this bitstream down to the brain might provide some sort of image.

    However, if you have cortical blindness, all bets are off. These people have damage in the part of the brain that interprets visual signals. Therefore, even if you provided them with the highest quality image possible, they wouldn't be able to interpret what they were "seeing".

    As an aside, I had a friend in med school who worked on this type of problem at the NIH a couple of years ago. IIRC, they installed a 256-pixel device in a blind patient. He did report being able to see flashes of lights from the device. I have a feeling we're going to hear much more about this in the not-too-distant future.

    docwolf.

  • Cat brains have been, for years, used in experiments because of their similarities to the human brain...If this can be done in cats, I'll bet it can be done in humans in time.

    This would be the ultimate wartime "bug"...Kidnap an enemy. Drug him, pop open his head, the works.

    Rig an extensive, remote version of this...plug the brain cells that control vision. Voila, he leads you to his plans, allies, everything. And if you mess up, well, dang. You just scrambled a badguy's brain. Could be a lot worse. Like stepping in a hairball first thing in the morning, or cat hair all over your black wool trousers...

    That would be really freaking cool, if it weren't so frightening.

  • Face it, if they could do it, most of our pet cats would chow us for breakfast.
  • super glue definately.

  • Witness (Score:1)

    by acb ( 2797 )
    Once they figure this out enough to be able to tap into the human optic nerve and get decent images out, it could lead to a major advance in journalism and filmmaking; implanted video recorders tapping into the optic nerve and storing the images for later downloading. (Greg Egan's Distress describes one such system.)
  • BTW anyone know the max resolution we could get with a human eye?

    I once read that it's pretty poor; the reason why we perceive things at a high resolution is because our brains correct the input based on subsequent images and heuristics.

    Mind you, this discovery may change this estimate.
  • I just got in a big argument with a close friend about all this. I suppose I've always been: Technology and Science for the sake of technology and science. He, of course, sees the day the governement is using the future of this technology to read our minds.... I see the following: 1: Record your dreams and be able to play them back. For someone who has trouble remembering his/her dreams, this is a beautiful thing 2: And this is in no particular order, sight for those blinded by eye problems (be them from birth or accident). Let's face it, if you can read the synapses, you can write to them, to use a computer ROM/RAM point of view, but for synapses, it's so much more so. It's just electrical impulses, and if you can read them, you don't even have to understand them completely to reproduce them. (Example: Mice wired with a button that provided sexual stimulation. The exact mechanics weren't understood, but the basics was all that was needed.) 3: If you can record sight, you can record sound and smell, touch, etc. Okay, it's not "there and now", but it sure can't be too far off. This is VR like we dreamed of years ago.. 4: These guys aren't reading the images from the visual receptors, they're about half-way into the chain of visual reception. That's a big difference from tapping right into the nerves of the visual cortex. These guys are half-way (probably in an exponential way of speaking, but light years ahead of where I thought all this technology was) into the visual interpretation. That's a hop skip and a jump from reading AND recording dreams... 5: Okay, what did my friend and I argue about? I used to work as a programmer for some guys that made equipment for spooks. They had a PCMCIA card with a little "antenna" wire that could pick up ethernet traffic from about 3 feet away from the actual cable. It just picked up the "induced" current which cause magnetism or something like that (electronics ain't my thing). Okay, so my friend is say, if they can do that with ethernet, don't you think the government can do that with brains? My answer, yeah, sure, and what are we looking at? Maybe a future of no lies. Maybe a future where we're all wearing goofy "brain jamming" helmets. All in all, science and technology for science and technology. I can find a million things bad about any scientific advance, but I can find two million things good about it. When it comes to the day of $10,000 to get a brain implant to record my dreams, I'll be the first guy in line. Sorry, you guys are gonna have to wait...
  • By Wim Wender. Go see it. Same thing but with humans... And a recorder!

  • Sense/Net Star (Score:3)

    by DrFardook ( 27432 ) on Thursday October 07, 1999 @10:50AM (#1631106) Homepage
    Damnit, that cat is the world's first fucking
    Sense/Net superstar. It should be eating off
    fine china for the rest of its life while the
    masses hail it as a godamn messiah of newest
    revolution in entertainment. Instead it will
    be returned to its numbered cage and end its
    life at Gillette doing first hand product
    testing.

    Is this any way to treat a pop icon?

    What's the cat's name? What color is it? Can I
    have it?

    I hope y'all remember Gibson's Tally Isham.

    This cat is the world's first Isham... and we treat it in such a shabby manner.


    Dr. Fardook
    lycos@bway.net

  • Re:This could be trouble....for someone (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    If your facility has adequately hardened walls to prevent EM "leakage" (such as computer monitor displays, etc.) then no radio transmissions, including any eminating from a cat, should be leaving the building anyway. Of course, if you could implant a SONY memory stick (ala AIBO robo-dogs) in the cat, then the cat could just drop off the data it collected once it had left the building.


    (Boy, and the NSA gave Furbies such a rough time, imagine what they do to a cat with a transmitter or camcorder)

  • Whats really sad is that out of the 60 odd messages I have seen, most them seem to thinks its cool. I would have to agree with you. Although I haven't been to the website, I would like to see how many of them would be willing to submit themselves as test subjects.
  • Sorry, I actually meant to say "The Matrix". Guess I was hallucinating at the time ;-)

  • Nifty idea, but unless the fish also has a really good memory and we're able to come up with a way to extract that memory, this won't be happening anytime soon. The simple fact is, low-powered radio waves don't work underwater. You'd have to implant an ELF (extremely low frequency) transmitter in the fish in order to get anything, and even then, the fish would have to be about the size of a large office building. And the transmission rate would be reeeeaallly slow...like, say, that of a 1200 bps modem (although I'm no expert).
  • There was a villian called Mojo in the old X-men comic books that implanted cameras into the eyes of the X-men and created a popular TV Show : The X-babies. Just thought I would share my pathetic comic book lore.
  • Spinal cord injuries, like serious brain damage caused by Parkinsons, Altzheimers etc right now are more open to treatment with stem cells ( cells that morph into the whatever tissue you like from a non specific stem state), they have already done some experents including on humans, where implanted cells have brought back at least some functionality to the damaged areas.

  • If the roles were reversed (Score:3)

    by DonkPunch ( 30957 ) on Thursday October 07, 1999 @11:05AM (#1631117) Homepage Journal
    I know for a fact that my cat would insert implants in my head with a dull butter knife if it meant he could control the can opener and doorknob. :)
  • just a side note, but gillete actually stopped testing on animals.

  • Re:Journal of Neuroscience isn't public (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    uhh, the Journal of Neuroscience won't let you view this paper unless you have an on-line account. On-line accounts are available free to subscribers of the paper edition, not to everyone else. on Three cheers for on-line services that don't allow public access! () off
  • Damn, this could lead to the "borrowed experiences" things from the movie Strange Days. For those of you who didn't see it (you should), they had these webs that you put on your head and you could experience whatever was recorded by the person. They kept the experiences on little mini-disc things and they were bought and sold like drugs. My favorite was the guy who was "sold" on the idea by getting to experience a 19 year old girl taking a shower. :)
  • I agree wholeheartedly. They should lock those scientist-wannabes up for animal cruelty. Animal testing should hold no place in modern science.

  • I recall reading more than one SF stories in which a character had a live feed hooked up to their eyes either for news reporting, or some sort of "you are there" entertainment.

  • 1200 bps....wow, it's more like spb (seconds per bit) for reliable ELF EAMs -- basically, it's a Morse signal that says "USS Ustafish, COMSUBEASTLANT sends, so wake the hell up and get your sorry keister to antenna depth toot sweet. We gotta SSIX message for you to suck down off the comm bird." Only it's done in far fewer bytes. And with an antenna you would not believe.

  • They need to hook this puppy (or cat as it were) to a webcam. Then I could replace the JenniCam SlashBox with with CatCam! Live furball hacking all day! ;)

  • Strange, people don't look like canopeners (Score:3)

    by Cy Guy ( 56083 ) on Thursday October 07, 1999 @09:28AM (#1631154) Homepage Journal
    According to my cat, I look like a giant canopener, unless she has just been fed in which case I look like a doorman.


    Of course once in a while I do look like a comfy chair, which is why the cat is still around.


    By the way, first post. Also, the picture site seems to have already been hit by the slashdot effect.

  • Have we ever slashdotted a cat before?

    I'm getting nothing. Never send a kitty to do a grown cat's job! ;)
  • Have we ever slashdotted a cat before?


    Yeah, I hope that wasn't a live feed... We might have slashdotted the cats brain. The scientists are probably wondering why its head is smoking.

    Kintanon
    For the humor impaired, you just missed it.
  • It wasn't that bad, really. We held the cat's eyes open with little strips of duct tape, but rewarded them with extra servings of tuna after the research was finished. Some of the cats proved reluctant to wander about and look at things, so we prompted them with mild electric shocks. At the end of testing, all cats were fine.

    Unfortunately, to maximize returns on our research, we were then forced to mash up the cats brains and put them in a blender, in preparation for DNA testing.

    Be comforted to know that the cats were treated humanely and frequently rewarded with petting, stroking and repeated iterations of the words "nice kitty".

    Yours Truly,

    The Scientists

  • The problem's not the GPS' guts per se, but the antenna. There are lots of ways for subs to overcome this. For example, they come to "antenna depth" whereby they trail a floating wire of the requisite length that's optimal for the bandwidth they want to receive. Also, there are the ESM and other antenna masts at the top of the sail.

    Normally the navigator wants to get a fresh fix on the GPS birds (or another, previous sat constellation put up precisely for the purpose -- acronym escapes me, damn Alzheimer's coming on) on a regular basis, but with all the depth-changing and gyrations required, sometimes it's better (read: quieter) to just stay at patrol depth, so the skipper will tell him the hell with the fix for the time being, there's nothing much to collide with beyond the thirty-fathom line on the charts anyway.

    The only reason a sat fix is necessary at all is to periodically "tighten up" the sub's intertial-nav fix, which is good to within less than the width of the sub's attack center (control room) when it's dead on, but tends to spread out as the fix becomes less accurate over time.Believe it or not, with all this high-tech gee-whiz nav stuff, there aren't many QMs around who could competently use a sextant if everything else were out of commission. I think they're going to stop, or already have stopped, teaching sextants at Annapolis.

  • You can see the images at
    http://www.vermontel.net/~vengnce/slashmirror/reco n_figure2.html [vermontel.net]
    Go easy on my server, please!

    I'm sorry. What I meant to say was 'please excuse me.'
    what came out of my mouth was 'Move or I'll kill you!'

  • Re:great news (Score:4)

    by zuvembi ( 30889 ) <I_charge_100USD_ ... e@unixbigots.org> on Thursday October 07, 1999 @09:38AM (#1631194) Homepage
    Could these same ideas be used to realize the
    dream of Christopher Reeves to walk again someday?

    I'm not sure how well this type of technology would apply to spinal injury repair. I do know that more conventional treatments (chemical, forced tissue growth, some others) are starting to make decent advances in this direction. Scientific American had a very good article on precisely this about one issue back.

    September 1999 issue


    Repairing the Damaged Spinal Cord
    John W. McDonald and the Research Consortium of the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation

    Paralysis caused by spinal cord injuries has often been seen as irreversible, because disrupted areas of the cord do not regenerate. New treatments under study, however, aim to minimize or reverse the damage from trauma.


    Unfortunately they don't have this one online, you'll have to pop down to the newstand to pick it up. I personally think sciam is definitely one of the mags everyone should have a subscription to.

    But it looks like (probably) within our lifespan, or even in the next 15-20 years we might be able to correct spinal damage. It's all speculative of course, but still, at least there's some hope now.
  • I think every place I've ever worked has had a large stray cat population. Somehow, they always seem to be able to get into the fenced-off areas of the premises. And there's always something requiring one type of clearance or another going on (that's what happens in the defense world....).

    Anyway, I'm sure that just about any place w/ enough people has some population of stray animals. Imagine if Boris & Natasha happen to collect up the animals one day, and implant the next generation of these electrodes in the cats, along with transmitters. Suddenly, you've got a large roving population of cameras around places you really don't want pictures taken.

    Even if they weren't able to get into any type of restricted area, you'd still likely get several shots of the employees, so you'd know who to target when trying to "turn" someone.

    They could even go so far as to train animals from birth to perform certain tasks, such as getting into rooms with doors slightly ajar, knocking over file folders with papers in them and looking at the papers for X seconds, etc. Who would suspect a stray of spying?


    Alternately, this could be the ultimate voyeur tool. "Hi, I got you this pet kitten."
  • They should be using babies.
  • Deciphering vision is but the first step in making borg. It would be wonderful to make Geordi's eyes for blind people, and some new inner ears for deaf people. Borg don't have to be bad at all. I think borg-like devices will help a lot of people.

    Microsoft have succeeded in making Borg for years :)

    And I can tell you from experience that the implants are a bugger to get out... I had to use a 1/4" mortar drill bit, and some conc. sulfuric acid...

    I still have the scars today ;)

    simon
  • Already being worked on. In the most recent issue of Popular Science (all right, so it's not SciAm, but it is a heck of a lot easier to read!) they had an article about eye implants. They had a blind guy and implanted an interface around his retina, and were able to drive recognizable signals through it. The first thing the guy saw was a letter. At first he thought it was a U, but then he resolved it into an H- which as it happened was the first letter of his name.

    If you see the issue on the newsstands still, it's the one where there's a lady experiencing, er, the heartbreak of aluminum foil.

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