Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Biotech Upgrades Science

Brain Prosthesis Ready For Testing 534

Posted by timothy from the can-we-nominate-recipients dept.
jhouserizer writes "New Scientist is reporting that an artificial hippocampus is ready to undergo testing. The leader of the team of scientists is Theodore Berger of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. They hope these artificial hippocampuses can replace damaged (stroke, Alzheimer's, etc.) portions of your brain. I wonder what portions of 'you' would be noticeably different to your family & friends? I wonder how long it will be before we can have HUDs, such as in this story by Cory Doctorow?"
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Brain Prosthesis Ready For Testing More

Brain Prosthesis Ready For Testing

Comments Filter:

  • Sweet! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Rudy Rodarte ( 597418 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @05:14PM (#5497415) Homepage Journal
    It would start a market, particularly in college, when you need to know something. Just implant a piece of brain with some knowledge, kinda like the matrix.

    You: I need a bubble sort.
    Tank: Comin right up
    * Eyes flutter *
    You: Lets go!

    • Brain Implants (Score:3, Interesting)

      by totallygeek ( 263191 )
      I have wondered about stem cell injection working for learning as well. I mean, that nail-gun kid had his heart fixed by some stem cells being put into the heart, how about some stem cells into "dead" areas of the brain?

      • Re:Brain Implants (Score:5, Informative)

        by MarkusH ( 198450 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @05:33PM (#5497734)
        I have wondered about stem cell injection working for learning as well. I mean, that nail-gun kid had his heart fixed by some stem cells being put into the heart, how about some stem cells into "dead" areas of the brain?

        The reason it worked is that the doctors harvested muscular stem cells and implanted them in the heart, which is basically one big muscle. To do that with a brain, you will need to use neural stem cells. Interestingly, the most common place to get neural stem cells is from the hippocampal region.


        Of course, implanting neural stem cells into a brain may have some unintended side effects. Who knows what changes in thought patterns might occur with completely fresh neurons in a brain?

        • Re:Brain Implants (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Jerf ( 17166 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @06:26PM (#5498406) Journal
          Who knows what changes in thought patterns might occur with completely fresh neurons in a brain?

          No need to wonder; look at how "fresh neurons" behave in real life. In other words, look at newborn babies. The answer is "not much".

          Neural weights only really have meaning in highly specific contexts. Even if you could "copy & paste" neurons in your brain, the new location would render the neurons effectively noise, having no coherent effect, and thus having effectively no effect at all.

          Again, you can partially see this in the real world. We've watch people's brains adapt to losing vision and going to sound for their primary input, converting vision brain area to sound brain area in the process. It's not magical; the old vision stuff is effectively useless and completely re-purposed. Cognitive-level concepts are far, far, far higher then neural weights. So the old neurons are effectively full of garbage.

          That's the reason this is so impressive to me. We've more-or-less decoded how the ear transmits sound to the brain, and have devices that can do this now, albiet not quite as well as real ears yet. We've started with ocular implants, though I don't know if that uses direct ocular nerve stimulation. This is because there are reasonably rational patterns that the sense data is transmitted in.

          But once you're inside the brain, the nerve impulses have no objective meaning. "Thought transmission", if it is ever acheived by technology, won't be as simple as replaying neural impulses from one brain into another; there's no one-to-one correspondence between neurons, and certainly no corresponence to neural weights. (Odds are, we'd have to learn to use it, and it would 'just another' line of communication, not 'mind reading' as it was portrayed in past literature. Of course, if too much information is transmitted skilled "telepaths" might still get more information then the sender intended, just as reading body language can tell you more then the speaker intended.)

          To acheive any success with an internal brain structure, understood or otherwise, is (IMHO, this is subjective of course) orders of magnitude more interesting then the ocular implants, which were pretty impressive themselves.

          Again, I emphasize: This isn't magic. This is droll reality. Out of context, a neuron is nearly useless.

          • Re:Brain Implants (Score:3, Interesting)

            by Rorschach1 ( 174480 )
            This is what makes language interesting to me... it's sort of taking those abstract ideas and packaging it into 'cross-platform' compatible building blocks (i.e., words). It takes a good speaker/writer to effectively take a multifaceted, complex idea and break it up into those blocks in such a way that it can be re-constructed in the listener's own brain and fit together with what's already there.

            I think if we're going to have some sort of 'thought transmission', it'll be sort of a machine-assisted super language. You'd still need some kind of common frame of reference to start with, though. It makes my head hurt just trying to imagine where you'd start when trying to decode and quantify ideas directly from the brain.

            What I'd like to see is a 'mind's eye' feedback device - something that can build a picture from what you see in your head, and display it for you, like on a computer screen. You could picture a face, or a scene, or whatever. If you're like me and not a gifted artist, it'd probably be pretty rough at first, but by looking at it you'd be able to say 'no, that's not right', and fix details one at a time. Like working with a police sketch artist, but in real time.

        • Re:Brain Implants (Score:4, Informative)

          by TopShelf ( 92521 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @09:02PM (#5499515) Homepage Journal
          correction - they actually used stem cells from his blood [yahoo.com]. So who knows whether this technique might apply to other structures as well?

  • Hippocampus... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Stalemate ( 105992 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @05:15PM (#5497430)
    ...sounds like the name of a geek college.

  • easy (Score:5, Funny)

    by Bodhidharma ( 22913 ) <`jimliedeka' `at' `gmail.com'> on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @05:15PM (#5497432)
    It just has to say "I don't understand and "Where's my tea?".

  • Neural Nets (Score:2, Interesting)

    by aSiTiC ( 519647 )
    Fun stuff...on the path to Kurzweil's future.

    We can all upload our brains into Neural Net Hardware.

    Scarrrry......

    • Re:Neural Nets - Getting into the machine (Score:4, Interesting)

      by RedCard ( 302122 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @05:38PM (#5497829)
      In Kurzweil's future, I believe that he proposed uploading of the brain, but knew of no meaningful way to get 'you' into a computer.

      What he meant by this, of course, was that if you were to copy an image of your brain into a computer, then the real 'you' would still be outside the machine, watching the image of you play with all the bells and whistles and fun things that their new digital life afforded them.

      So, I would suggest the following:
      1) nano-machines are placed into your brain, where they spread out and cradle every neuron.
      2) as neurons die (old age, etc) the nano-machine become active, and emulate the neurons that they're cradling. These would be the Type I nano-machines.
      3) eventually, you have a completely robotic brain, devoid of biological tissue, but the structure of the brain still encodes it's function, so... how do we 'upload' without having the problem of two copies of you?
      4) the nano-machines are slowly replaced by a different kind of nano-machine... one that can only act as a transmitter/receiver of information, and cannot do any computation itself. These type II machines offload the processing that they would have to do to a computer outside your body, and as more and more type II's are introduced, more and more of the computing takes place outside of 'you'... now it's easy to see how 'you' could get into the machine...

      And that's that. Of course, some would suggest the following:
      1) make copy of person's brain in a computer
      2) kill the person

      But would that really transfer 'you' - your consciousness, and the perception of self? Or would it just be an emulation that thinks it's you?

      I don't know. Neither does Kurzweil, as far as I can remember.
      (Apologies to Mr. Kurzweil if I've misquoted or otherwise screwed up your ideas - it's been a while since I've read your work)
      • But would that really transfer 'you' - your consciousness, and the perception of self? Or would it just be an emulation that thinks it's you?

        I think it would be you. Think of it this way: if the emulation is good enough so that no observer can distinguish between the original and the emulation, then that person has been transferred.

        There's no reason to believe that the person being emulated is any more qualified an observer than anyone else. If it's good enough to fool outside observers, it's good enough to fool the person being emulated.

      • In both methods you mention, it's the pattern of thought and memory that's perceived as important, since Kurzweil discards brain tissue so easily in favor of nano-machines and machine processing. Personally, I agree with this assessment on both logical and religous grounds, as well as ethical grounds.

        If that's true, that means that both the 'you' inside your brain and the 'you' inside the computer in the 'copy and kill' method would both really be you. Both have memories, emotions, and preferences of the original. It would be unethical and immoral at that point to destroy either one.

  • Cool (Score:2, Interesting)

    by The Terrorists ( 619137 )
    They'd better make sure that the people recieving these brains intend to use them... for standardized research you had better implement a self-improvement program including Go, reading, crosswords for these folks.

    Most people would waste a brain extension. Any expansion in intellectual power must be preceded by an expansion in social capacity for learning.

  • o/` Everybody wants prosthetic
    foreheads on their real heads o/`

  • Record your life? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by sparkhead ( 589134 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @05:16PM (#5497461)
    The job of the hippocampus appears to be to "encode" experiences so they can be stored as long-term memories elsewhere in the brain. "If you lose your hippocampus you only lose the ability to store new memories,"

    So lets say they get this working. Would it then be possible to record every moment of your life and store it away?

    • Sure, but it's pretty useless until they replicate the part that decodes the memories... DOH

      [joking, if they can do this, they can certainly just re-route the inputs 'unencoded' elsewhere I'd assume]
    • That's an interesting question.

      If this device is simply taking input, processing it in a very specific way, then outputting it surely it would be possible to record the input and then play it back.

      Reminds me of that movie Strange Days a bit.

      Although I don't think it would record your perceptions but rather whatever you were remembering right then.

      • Bad form to reply to myself but I just realized I was being silly.

        This is only about RECORDING memories at this point. So replaying a recording would ... well I don't know but it'd be messed up.
    • Would it then be possible to record every moment of your life and store it away?

      Only if you sign a document giving the hospital exclusive copyrights, including movies, books, broadway plays, performance rights and derivitives. Any attempt to circumvent your brain prosthesis would then been construed as a voilation of the DMCA.

    • Keep in mind that this implant only passes signals on in a predefined way to other parts of the brain. From what I understand, the hippocampus isn't responsible for interpretation of the data, it just does some encoding and passes it on to our long-term storage.

    • Re:Record your life? (Score:5, Funny)

      by secolactico ( 519805 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @05:27PM (#5497650) Journal
      If you lose your hippocampus you only lose the ability to store new memories

      Hmmm... Remember Sammy Jenkis?
    • Hey man, what a cool idea. Next, hack into their brain and store a "memory" of them borrowing $100,000.00 from you. Or of being the original model for the goatse.cx man!
    • just in case you forget?

    • Re:Record your life? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by iabervon ( 1971 )
      It's not clear that the hippocampus actually gets all of the data; it may well be that the hippocampus only produces "tags" for memories, which get sent to the parts of the brain having the experiences, and those parts encode their current state and store it with the tag. In this case, the output of the hippocampus would serve to produce the associations you would have with every moment of your life, but not the moments themselves (or the content of the associations).

      In computer terms, the hippocampus would be the CPU issuing DMA requests; the data actually goes from RAM (short-term memory) to disk (long-term memory), without appearing in the output of the CPU. Recording the output of the CPU gives you all of the disk and RAM addresses, but not the actual data or the meanings of the addresses.

      This project doesn't attempt to understand how the hippocampus works, or even what its exact role in memory is (beyond the fact that, whatever is does, it is necessary to memory work); it attempts to duplicate the signals the normal hippocampus produces. For all we know, the hippocampus might be an incredibly complex clock, needed for memory but having no useful relationship to the experiences you're having.

    • Re:Record your life? (Score:5, Informative)

      by randyest ( 589159 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @07:08PM (#5498831) Homepage
      This is +5 Interesting only to those who didn't read (or understand) the article.

      Anyway, when I first saw this headline I was thrilled at the prospect of scientists anywhere actually understanding any chunk of brain well enough to replace it (with a semiconductor, no less -- those must be some awesome I/O buffers on that ASIC -- what's brain voltage, uV? nV?).
      Then I saw:

      No one understands how the hippocampus encodes information. So the team simply copied its behaviour. Slices of rat hippocampus were stimulated with electrical signals, millions of times over, until they could be sure which electrical input produces a corresponding output. Putting the information from various slices together gave the team a mathematical model of the entire hippocampus.

      They just brute-forced it! This is remarkable achievement, but moreso from tech implementation standpoint than a brain understanding standpoint.

      The point is, we don't have any clue at all about the uber-divx format that encodes human perception or memory. So the idea of storing it outside of the brain (or even viewing it, or cross-connecting 2 brains) is kinda silly at our level of understanding.

      We just found a little chunk (the hippocampus) that is essential to storing memories and happens to get whacked often enough by stroke and such. Then we did an all-possible-input-combos test on this chunk (using rat brains, apparently), recorded the outputs, and burned the whole thing into a look-up table in a chip, and (this is the cool part) connected the chip to a real brain, bypassing a broken hippocampus chunk.

      We just mimicked a relatively simple part of the brain with an exhaustive, brute-force approach that may not scale well to human hippocampi.

  • The first guy who uses the phrase... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonvmous Coward ( 589068 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @05:16PM (#5497466)
    ..."In Soviet Russia" here will get volunteered for the experimental surgery.

  • Got my new brain today. (Score:5, Funny)

    by chubso ( 524639 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @05:17PM (#5497476)
    Imagine calling in hacked for work.

  • The big question... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Lu Xun ( 615093 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @05:17PM (#5497479)
    is how long before someone overclocks one of these things? How many tops (thought operations per second) could you get? How would you cool something like that?

  • Geek Code! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Tackhead ( 54550 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @05:17PM (#5497481)
    OK, all you guys who put C++++ in your geek code [geekcode.com], sign up.

    (But you'll have to get in line behind me!)

  • Arizona State is a hypocampus... (Score:4, Funny)

    by L0stb0Y ( 108220 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @05:18PM (#5497498) Journal
    Yes, with the ever increasing student body, ASU is slowly becoming a hypocampus... ...and I think several of the students need some brain work done as well...

    *was that out loud?*

  • Oh swell.. (Score:2, Funny)

    by grub ( 11606 )

    I wonder how long it will be before we can have HUDs

    That would be wonderful. Script kiddie h4x0r5 your in-brain HUD and makes it so all you can see is the goatse.cx guy. [goatse.cx] No thanks, I'll keep my HUDless brain.
    • I think we can guess where to find a website called "goatse.cx". Is it really necessary to actually link to goatse.cx? It's not like you were even trying to hide it, either. Amateur ;-)
  • "Forgetting is the most beneficial process we possess," Williams says. It enables us to deal with painful situations without actually reliving them.

    Okay, it might be handy, but the MOST beneficial process we possess? I think REMEMBERING might rank up there somewhere.

  • Adaptation (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dr_dank ( 472072 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @05:19PM (#5497507) Homepage Journal
    "Forgetting is the most beneficial process we possess," Williams says. It enables us to deal with painful situations without actually reliving them.

    I am very interested in seeing how the brain would adapt to this. Would the brain always remember things or, in the case of trauma, learn to halt impulses before they reach the implanted area so that they are "forgotten"?

    • Re:Adaptation (Score:5, Insightful)

      by umofomia ( 639418 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @05:31PM (#5497714) Journal
      I am very interested in seeing how the brain would adapt to this. Would the brain always remember things or, in the case of trauma, learn to halt impulses before they reach the implanted area so that they are "forgotten"?
      While the hippocampus is critical in forming memories, it doesn't pass every single experience you have into memory. This device is the same... it merely mimics the hippocampus' behavior. The researchers even admitted that they didn't know how the hippocampus works. Rather they just reproduced the behavior that a working hippocampus would produce.

      • Geek Translation (Score:5, Funny)

        by einhverfr ( 238914 ) <chris...travers@@@gmail...com> on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @05:48PM (#5497964) Homepage Journal
        While the hippocampus is critical in forming memories, it doesn't pass every single experience you have into memory. This device is the same... it merely mimics the hippocampus' behavior. The researchers even admitted that they didn't know how the hippocampus works. Rather they just reproduced the behavior that a working hippocampus would produce.

        In other words, this device is to the hippocampus (a part of your brain involved in encoding data for storage) what Samba is to Windows.... ;-)

    • Re:Adaptation (Score:3, Funny)

      by unicron ( 20286 )
      oh hell yes..

      rm *nightwithfatchick

    • Re:Adaptation (Score:3, Interesting)

      by sql*kitten ( 1359 )
      I am very interested in seeing how the brain would adapt to this. Would the brain always remember things or, in the case of trauma, learn to halt impulses before they reach the implanted area so that they are "forgotten"?

      Consider a relational database, like Sybase. It maintains two types of data: the database itself, which analogous to what you know, and the transaction log, which is the experiences that taught you what you know. Example: you know not to touch a hot iron, because you had the experience of
  • Now I can drink all I want, and never have to worry about how many braincells I destroy.

    Hell, I bet I can sit as close to the T.V. as my heart desires too !

  • Cool Quote (Score:2, Insightful)

    by ronfar ( 52216 )
    I just want to highlight one of the cool quotes from the article:
    Berger and his team have taken nearly 10 years to develop the chip. They are about to test it on slices of rat brain kept alive in cerebrospinal fluid, they will tell a neural engineering conference in Capri, Italy, next week.
    Sigh... the biological sciences are so wonderful, first spider-goats and now slices of rat brain artificially kept alive in cerebrospinal fluid. Can Donovan's Brain (or for MiSTies, The Brain That Wouldn't Die) be that far off?

  • WHo was the programmer on this brian project? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Abby, Abby Normal.

  • War stories.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Metallic Matty ( 579124 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @05:21PM (#5497560)
    *taps prostetic arm*"I lost my arm in Nam.."

    *taps prostetic leg*"I lost my leg in Korea.."

    *taps head* "I lost my brain voting for Bush.."

    I have a feeling this will be modded down.. heh.
  • Anyone remember that episode of DS9 where that ambassador is hit by weapons fire that starts to degrade his brain, so they replace parts of his brain with artifical memory things.

    You ever see that ?!

    HAH! Talk about Art Imitating Life! Thats crazy! ;-)

  • Ethics? (Score:4, Informative)

    by big_groo ( 237634 ) <groovis AT gmail DOT com> on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @05:24PM (#5497613) Homepage
    Another ethical conundrum concerns consent to being given the prosthesis, says Anderson. The people most in need of it will be those with a damaged hippocampus and a reduced ability to form new memories. "If someone can't form new memories, then to what extent can they give consent to have this implant?"

    Isn't that why we have 'power of attorney'? When you're of sound mind, you appoint someone that you can trust to look out for *your* best interest(s).

    Case closed in my books...

    • Re:Ethics? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by machine of god ( 569301 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @05:48PM (#5497970)
      Perhaps, but that doesn't solve the problem. What attourney is going to decide that a (experimental) partial brain replacement is in the best interests of their charge. Especially if the person is living well otherwise.

      • Re:Ethics? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by brogen ( 21291 )
        That's assuming that the power of attorney is given to a family lawyer. Often guardianship/power of attorney is obtained by family members who care for a person who is no longer able to take care of financial/medical decisions.

        As a person in that situation (my wife had a stroke 3 years ago that left her with communication/cognition difficulties) I'd be willing to see what something like this would do, and given the choice of "would you like to be like you were before" I'm fairly certain she would agree. I'm not sure what would qualify as "living well otherwise" with some forms of brain damage.

        Unfortunatly, things like this are still a long way off, but here's hoping.
  • Can we just get a link to Cory Doctorow's site in the Related Links box for every story and be done with it?

    For crying out loud, reaction here to his stories ranges from apathetic to appalled. Isn't there some other writer Slashdot could pimp incessantly?

    Me, I want a HUD like Bud had in this book [amazon.com].

  • artificial intelligence? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by sammy baby ( 14909 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @05:25PM (#5497622) Journal
    Back in the day when I was studying to be a cognitive scientist (whatever that means), we did a lot of talking about what the nature of intelligence / mind actually is. There was a "strong anti-AI" camp which believed that Artificial Intelligence couldn't happen - even if you created a perfect simulation of a brain, you'd just be "simulating" intelligence, whatever that means.

    So, we proposed an experiment. Let's say you took a guy who had completely lost function in a very small, localized area of the brain, and built a machine capable of reproducing its function entirely. You stuck it inside the guy's head, and he was magically fixed.

    Now, make the area affected progressively larger - lets say, by replacing the whole hippocampus. Or the entire left hemisphere of the brain. Or, what the hell, the whole thing. At what point do you say that it's no longer a mind, and is "just" a machine?

    So, that's the first thing I thought of when I saw this story. Once we can perfectly replicate the functionality of every last bit of the brain, do we just have a really nifty toy, or a genuine mind?

    • Re:artificial intelligence? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Google is already smarter than me, sort of.

    • Re:artificial intelligence? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by wind ( 94988 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @05:45PM (#5497923)
      Why not both?

      I remember those kinds of debates, and it always seemed to me that people got very hung up on the idea that only human experiences count for anything. There was this assumption that AI's goal is to become human is the sense that it actually experiences mental states identical to those of humans. But - what's wrong with having sophisticated mental states that aren't human mental states?

      It will be really interesting once this sort of prostetic brain surgery happens - to be able to interview the patients and see if they really feel as if their mental states are different as a result of the new "tissue".

    • There was a "strong anti-AI" camp which believed that Artificial Intelligence couldn't happen - even if you created a perfect simulation of a brain, you'd just be "simulating" intelligence, whatever that means [...] Once we can perfectly replicate the functionality of every last bit of the brain, do we just have a really nifty toy, or a genuine mind?

      I am not an AI expert, but I think that the main difference between the mind and the AI is that random, uncontrolled processes are incorporated in your thoughts, which is not the case for AI (unless this random component is simulated?) The encoding in your brain works like lossy compression.

      This is the basis for the generation of imaginatory processes and the fact you can't recall a picture with the precision of a computer.

    • Isn't that the premise behind the Turing test?

      I agree it acts exactly like a mind would, but it's not a mind.

      I've seen the cams and pistons and bore and stroke and valves and shafts and spark plugs, coils, compression, explosion, expansion etc. I agree it acts like an internal combustion engine, but how do I know it's an actual internal combustion engine, and not just acting like one?

      The point being, we judge our own mind solely by how it acts, depite knowing it's just simple electrical impules and synaptical thresholds, so we can only just an artificial mind on the same basis.

      A good book that adresses all these issues (not as much with AI, but with mind) is "The Minds I", by Douglas Hofstadter and Danial C Dennett.
    • Just out of curiousity, is "whatever that means" an official sanctioned term for putting after things when you're a cognitive scientist? It seems like it should be. Whatever that means.

  • Why emphasis on disabled ? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Why are these stories all based upon making the disabled normal? What about making the normal more powerful?

    But in the end there is no debate. Those who stand in the way of progress will be killed by the products of progress (implanted guass rifles). Those who make the disabled normal will be killed by those who make the normal something more.
  • I can think of a few political leaders that could use one.

    As a Texas Liberal, you can imagine who one of my first choices for leaders-needing-more-than-room-temperature-IQs is. ;-)

  • Oh great (Score:3, Funny)

    by foistboinder ( 99286 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @05:26PM (#5497633) Homepage Journal
    Now we'll have a bunch of people running around and saying things like "Stapling machine, Mrs Zambesi"

  • Dupe? (Score:2, Funny)

    by verloren ( 523497 )
    "If you lose your hippocampus you only lose the ability to store new memories,"

    And I thought duplicate stories on /. were just an oversight!

  • Mandatory Singularity Panic Post... (Score:3, Funny)

    by xchino ( 591175 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @05:31PM (#5497711)
    Soon we'll be more hippocampus than human.

  • This is cool. (Score:5, Funny)

    by rice_burners_suck ( 243660 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @05:32PM (#5497729)
    This is what scientists should do. They should figure out interfaces to each part of the brain. By the time all of this is figured out, nanotechnology, biotechnology and quantum computing will have come a long way and become nearly perfected. Utilizing these technologies, implants would be placed in the brain which connect it to the Internet through all the wireless technologies present, satellites, etc. They'll put satellites out in space, orbiting all over the planet, so that no matter where you are, you'll get high speed internet access directly from your brain. Your conciousness will spread all over the internet, as will everyone else's. Ten years after this process begins, every human being on the planet will have these implants in their brains. Then, scientists will figure out a way to cause a little bit of evolution so that people will eventually be born with the implants already present. When that is complete, we'll be the Borg. The only thing they'll have to do after that is put big rocket engines sticking out of two opposite sides of the Earth so that Spaceship Earth really will be a spaceship and we can all fly around the universe without ever leaving our planet. That's also a lot safer than taking spaceships which might have hull breaches or get lost in space or whatever. This way, if we do get lost, who cares? We're still at home anyway, kind of like a turtle. Oh yeah, and since our sun will stay behind, they'll install big huge lights in the lots of satellites that I talked about a moment ago, and these will provide the light that we need. They'll be bright enough that we won't notice. Did I mention that we'll also control the weather, the tides, the animals and everything else? Yeah. I think all of this will happen in ten years time. (Or only five or six, if Microsoft goes out of business so that we can stop worrying about all the problems they're causing and concentrate on ADVANCING technology instead of stopping it for the purpose of making a quick buck, or 100 billion, whichever is larger.)

    This post is serious. Don't laugh.

  • Different portions of 'you" (Score:5, Interesting)

    by silvaran ( 214334 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @05:34PM (#5497745)
    I wonder what portions of 'you' would be noticeably different to your family & friends?

    I don't think the word should be "different", but "better". Things like Alzheimer's can be disastrous to your family. You disappear, and a completely different, and usually unwanted, person is the replacement. It's a horrible disease.

  • ethical questions... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by wwest4 ( 183559 )
    consider:

    - the hippocampus is a black box (they can't even see the "object code," if you will

    - complex systems are notoriously difficult to debug

    I find the claim that the scientists have considered every possible behavior and simulated it in firmware to be suspect.

    How can they be sure they have considered every possible input/output? How can they be sure that what they observed was "correct" behavior?

    Any biologists or neuroscientists care to elucidate? Also, how similar is the human hippocampus to the rat's? Couldn't the behavior differences require complete regression testing? It seems like this increase in precision in medicine demands a commensurate increase in the precision of testing.
  • The rise in quality brought about by modern hydroponics has really put a hurting on my hippocampus. I hope the testing goes well. I will surely become a customer as I descend through middle age.

    Who was I trying to call on this phone I picked up? What did I walk down to the basement for? Who put this pizza crust in my mouth? Why is the mouse pointer hovering over the submit button? Screw it. Just chew and click the damn button.

  • Why would you want a new hippocampus? (Score:5, Funny)

    by NerveGas ( 168686 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @05:39PM (#5497835)

    The hippocampus integrates short-term memory into long-term. People who have had their hippocampus damaged (or removed) are unable to form any new long-term memories. They live incredibly interesting lives, because everyone they meet is a new person - every time they meet them. Why would you want to actually have yours replaced?

    I told my wife that if I had my hippocampus removed, I'd get to sleep with a new woman every night, and not even be cheating on her! She didn't appreciate the comment so much, though....

    steve
  • The difference between the brain and the heart is that we understand
    how the heart works in detail. Treating the hippocampus like a "black
    box" will probably not work. This just begs the question of how the
    brain works, which we still don't know. I would never let someone
    open up my skull and implant something if they couldn't explain how
    and why it works. Sorry but this is not news, just some promising
    research combined with wishful thinking.

  • Once and for all (Score:3, Informative)

    by PD ( 9577 ) <slashdotlinux@pdrap.org> on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @05:42PM (#5497885) Homepage Journal
    Hippocampii is not the plural of hippocampus.

    and

    Hippopotamii is not the plural of hippopotamus.

    Just want to head that one off at the pass.
  • "I wonder what portions of 'you' would be noticeably different to your family & friends?"

    what all goes into the hippocampus? is your personality in there or just the bits that make it possible to remember where your keys are? if you have alzheimer's you're already a different person than your kids or spouse remember from a few years prior.

  • High hopes (Score:5, Interesting)

    by cgenman ( 325138 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @05:47PM (#5497946) Homepage
    Don't get your hopes too high for this invention. The process overall is very, very cool, but the fact that they don't understand how the hippocampus works, they just worked out a neural net model of imputs and outputs in rats, leads one to believe there will be a lot of bumps down this road. In that way the model they worked out isn't nearly as interesting as how they interface the chip with living tissue, and how they mapped the pathways of the hippocampus in the first place (or, for that matter, if there is variability within hippocampuses or if it is predetermined by genes).

    Of course, I want one, and I want to mod it. Record an encoding of a lecture, and play it back on the train ride home. Or do a 2 second loop of someone while they say their name, in order to remember those bloody things (why can't people just e-mail their names to my phone?). Or, as in the case of Daredevil, put an encoding on hold until the end of a film in order to know if it is worth wasting space on.

    I can't wait until I get Alzheimers just to try this out! Fortuitously, that will be about the same time this chip comes out of beta.

    • Re:High hopes (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Thavius ( 640045 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @06:15PM (#5498292)
      You raise a very interesting point. Recording. With the chip designed to be external, there is definitely the ability to have your memories recorded onto chips. Or even more interesting, have people upload their memories to a computer, to where you can download them and store them in your head.

      This could be a boon for training. Imagine being able to pull down a file from the net, jacking into a usb port, and after a while, being able to speak chinese. Or have an intimate knowlege of physics. Wow.

      On the other hand, it would make the term "knowledge transfer" more insidious. Law enforcement would love this. Suspicious spouses too. Having an interface like this would end the last private place in your existence: your own head.

      But this is only just come out of it's conceptual stage. It'll be interesting to see where the technology takes it.

  • Greg Egan... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by alwayslurking ( 555708 ) <<jason.boissiere> <at> <gmail.com>> on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @05:56PM (#5498075)

    Yet again, the real world imitates one of his stories. He has a couple of stories based in a world where everyone's brain is swapped out for a crystal computer. Mindfuck stuff about the true seat of consciousness, mortality and the meaning of "human". Just remembered "Reasons to be cheerful", specifically about brain prosthesics and personality.

    Home page with free stories [netspace.net.au]

    This is my third Greg Egan post in the last few months and they've all been ontopic. He thinks big thoughts about our near future and is a much better writer than Cory Doctorow, imho.

  • Already got one. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Upright Joe ( 658035 ) <<moc.liamg> <ta> <eojthgirpu>> on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @06:16PM (#5498299) Homepage
    These things are great. I just had one installed yesterday.
    These things are great. I just had one installed yesterday.
    These things are great. I just had one installed yesterday.
    These things are great. I just had one installed yesterday.
    These things are great. I just had one installed yesterday.

  • I can see the spam now (Score:3, Funny)

    by sielwolf ( 246764 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @08:05PM (#5499211) Homepage Journal
    To:someguy@somewhere.com
    Subject: Brain Enlargement!?!

    Yes with our patented technique you can increase your I.Q. by at least 40 points!?! I myself didn't believe it when I first heard of this technique! But it works!!! (ad nauseum)...

    Maybe they can somehow bootleg this into those Nigerian money scams.

  • Familiar method (Score:5, Interesting)

    by CaptainCarrot ( 84625 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @08:19PM (#5499280)
    Am I the only one who noticed they reverse engineered the hippocampus using almost the exact same method Compaq used to reverse engineer the IBM PC BIOS? From the article:

    No one understands how the hippocampus encodes information. So the team simply copied its behaviour. Slices of rat hippocampus were stimulated with electrical signals, millions of times over, until they could be sure which electrical input produces a corresponding output. Putting the information from various slices together gave the team a mathematical model of the entire hippocampus.

    I suppose it's nice they were careful to avoid infringing on the brain's IP. (Or should that be The Brain's IP; I imagine he has a number of patents under his evil little belt.)

  • I just want (Score:5, Funny)

    by Hershmire ( 41460 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @08:19PM (#5499282) Homepage
    ...a math co-processor installed.

    2+2? 5, of course. Dammit, I got an Intel.

  • DRM (Score:5, Funny)

    by Xarin ( 320264 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @08:45PM (#5499424)
    So how long before Hollywood forces them to add digital rights management so you can't steal the movie you just watched? I can see it now, you are only allowed to remember the movie for 3 days and then you have to go to the theatre again.

  • it's not a black box to me... (Score:5, Informative)

    by kennorman ( 658700 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @09:01PM (#5499507)
    I do research on hippocampal functioning --- more specifically, I build neural network models of how the hippocampus supports memory for specific events. I was surprised by the statement in the new scientist article that "we know nothing about how the hippocampus encodes memories". There is actually quite a lot of consensus among researchers as to how the different subregions of the hippocampus support its overall function of storing and retrieving memories. If you want more information, a good place to start might be this paper that I wrote with my colleague Randy O'Reilly. Go to:

    http://www.princeton.edu/~psych/PsychSite/compme mo ry/

    then click on the first article under "Review Papers". You can follow the references to find other, relevant papers. Also, I should say that I am extremely skeptical that the prosthesis described in the New Scientist article will be able to substitue for an actual hippocampus. One of the key properties of the hippocampus (and the brain more generally) is that it *changes* as a function of experience --- every time you store a new memory in the hippocampus, it changes the strengths of synapses, which in turn changes the input-output function. So I can't see how it would be possible to replace the hippocampus using a simple, static lookup table. I may be missing something, but I think we are still a very long way from building an artificial hippocampus, and I think that we won't be successful in this endeavor unless we build in some knowledge about how the structure actually works...
    • Not being a neurologist myself, take with salt, but I think the NS article glosses over (surprise!) the important aspects. A better, general-public article is here [usc.edu]. There's also a fair amount of peer-reviewed literature on the project; see, for example, Chian, M., V.Z. Marmarelis & T.W. Berger. "Decomposition of neural systems with nonlinear feedback using stimulus-response data." Neurocomputing, 26-27:641-654, 1999.

      You'd be far, far better equipped than I to review their work (having just read the N

      • Statistical analysis only works on linear systems. You have to know that every unique input will yield the same output.

        What gets the average Joe into trouble is the fact the very few systems in this world are linear, and those that are assume that its working in a very specific environment. The feed us all of these contrived examples in school, and people graduate expecting the world to behave according to the rules of algebra. Well, it doesn't.

        As it turns out, what we learn in physics really only appli

  • Brain upgrade (Score:5, Funny)

    by jd_esguerra ( 582336 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2003 @10:02PM (#5499852)

    I wonder what portions of 'you' would be noticeably different to your family & friends?


    Probably your hippocampus. Do they offer an optional skull-window or perhaps some neon or colored cables?

Slashdot Top Deals

So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of money? -- Ayn Rand

Close