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Science

Bionic Rats 68

Posted by Hemos from the transformers-more-than-meets-the-eye dept.
EmmaLouise99 pointed us over to an article in which scientists have gotten rats to control a simple robot arm through the activity of brain cells. The report comes in this month of Nature Neuroscience, and the obvious applications are for paralyzed people. I remember reading in Discover as well about a similar situation with little go-karts and insect brains-hooking up the sections that controlled wing movement, and letting them they think they were flying, but actually controlling the karts movement.
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Bionic Rats More

Bionic Rats

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  • I saw something similar in the news a week or so ago where Humans have been able to move a mouse pointer across the screen merely by thinking about it--and with a non-invasive procedure....

    -Berck
  • Imagine "The Secret of NIMH" with commando rats instead of the docile creatures it portrayed...
    "DIE Nicodemus!!" *rapid machine gun straffing fire*
    "Stick a needle in my neck will you, you B#@$#@rds! Feel my WRATH!"
    "Lee of the stone? Hell, we are taking the house!"
  • If I read the same article you did (more like a few months ago), I'm fairly certain it was invasive. Tiny cone-shaped sensors were placed in the (quadriplegic?) subjects' brains. They could move the cursor left and right by trying to move their left and right arms, respectively. Granted it's not a long-lastig invasiveness, but I'd think at least twice about having any sensors implanted in my head. (For now, at least)
  • You forgot the obligatory "Just imagine a Beowulf cluster of these things" -- or would it be a Beomouse?

  • An alternative (albeit, less effective and from a far older experiment) method is a set of EEG sensors placed around the head to monitor brain activity. After training for a few (3-6) months, most participants in the experiment could pretty easily control a cursor on a screen in vertical motion. Next step, as of last I heard, was to work on full screen motion for it. As it was, it was already being used to pick out letters by using a "wheel" of letters which could be rotated around to spell out words, or speak by using something between that and one of those chimpanzee boards of simple phrases. Regardless, a cap to be worn over the head (ala "Strange Days" recorder, maybe?) would be far less invasive than any sort of surgery. Ability to put signals back into the brain, however (ala "Matrix") still looks like it's a long way off.


    ~Anguirel (lit. Living Star-Iron)
    "Veni; Vidi; Vi C++"

  • BorgRat! (Score:1)

    by CAB ( 19473 )
    ... or perhaps RatBorg!

    I had to say it... I'm sorry... ;-)

    Besides... imagine what rats and other small animals equipped like RoboCop could do in ruins after an earthquake.

    Best regards,
    Steen Suder
  • I've tried 2 of the currently available voice input programs.. both took about an hour to train to my voice, and then the non-typing commands only worked about 1 time in 6.. the direct dication had a tendency to pic the wrong word if i didnt enunciate every letter, even if i said the word just the way i said it when training the thing.. so no, i'm going to have to go with that writing a paper just by talking isnt really an option. And if you read my post, you'd notice that i was wondering which would be possible first.. not which we can do now.
    As for the moving the pointer around, yes i knew that was available, but that's not what i meant. Even if you have to spend a year learning how to use it, it just seems really odd to me that the technology for input from the nervous system (from wires inserted into cockroach nervous systems to control little cars years ago to the rat thing and the mind-controlled mouse pointer without any invasive procedure) is advancing so much faster than speech input, which seems like it should be easier, considering the human voice can only deviate so far from a norm.. yet they had limited voice input back in the days of apple that wasnt much worse than what they have now.. just with less functions.
    I dont expect natural-language processing tomorrow, nor do i expect direct translation of internal language synaps functions tomorrow.. but the way technology seems to be headed, it looks like brainwave input may well catch up to or even surpass voice input. Yeah it's got a long way to go, but voice input seems to be really stagnating while this is moving right along.. and while voice processing may well be more complicated than field recognition, it just strikes me as really odd that it is that way.
    Dreamweaver
  • "squeak squeak squeak"
    (we have the technology, we can rebuild him)

    "Squeak!"
    (Oh, no! A bird that eats rats!)

    "Sqeak."
    (I'll handle this!)



    Bird flies away with a black eye and a busted-up beak.

    The Bionic Rat. Coming soon to UPN!
  • It's called a 'Mine Mouse'. I forget who puts them out, but you can buy one for.. i think it was like $3000. It's non-invasive, just a headband with eeg sensors in it. You have to learn how to control it, but afterward you can move the mouse pointer around with the thing by thinking about it. I got an email ad a few months back from the company that makes 'em, but i dont have the link anymore.
    Dreamweaver
  • DOH! Bad! :-)
    Goddess help me seek the truth, but spare me the company of those who've found it.
  • Or the equally obligatory "Can't wait to play Quake with this".
  • think of the applications as this gets refined.
    who needs a steering wheel?

    heck who needs a keyboard?




    -i know not that profound ...
  • hehe, I can just see it, they boost the rats brainpower, they get smart rats, they clone themselves, and come after us.

    with little tiny rat guns and other neat shit

    too bad we'll just be able to run up behind and stomp em :)

  • Pinky, are pondering what I'm pondering? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Yes, Brain, but if
    we fight Sasquatch,
    won't that mean that
    we'll have to squint
    like Lee Majors?

  • I wonder, which will come first? The ability to write a paper on your computer simply by thinking at the screen, or the ability to write a paper on your computer by speaking at the screen?
    Maybe it's just me, but doesnt it seem odd that we now have the capability to control prosthetics by monitoring brainwave patters, yet we STILL cant come up with a natural language processor? (or even a non-natural language processor that can respond to voice input by non-trained users?)


    Dreamweaver
  • Well, they have also made rats unafraid of cats
    and actually try to attack them! Of course, this results in the rats' death.

    I guess they get to try out all the cool new drugs.

    Warren A. Layton
  • Just look at Gates! ;)
  • If all this is true, where's my mind-controlled 150-foot tall Mecha complete with small futuristic arsenal capable of leveling Redmond?

    That is all.


    Christopher Kalos
  • well according to your definition people can already write a paper simply by thinking at the screen... they have to move a cursor around to select letters but they can do it.

    But I'd also say that it is possible for people to write a paper simply by talking at the screen of their PC using software such as ViaVoice. This approach appeals to me a great deal more than having my head drilled in order to get a very slow typewriter.

    The experiment is by no means the first experiment to manage to get its input directly from a brain - just remember that all of these programs are still at an early stage - usually they involve monitoring brain activity when trying to perform a task and then fitting electrodes over the active region and using this as a trigger to some device.

    Thats exactly what they did with these mice, they taught them to press a lever and then watched for similar activity and assumed that this was a sign that they where thinking about pushing the lever (as I understand it this is a perfectly reasonable assumption - but it is an assumption).

    All of this is a long way from being able to pull natural language commands directly from our synapses. Cool as that would be I don't expect to live to see it and I'm only 23.

    Tom
  • That's scary, though... You're driving past a rather sightly female jogger and all of the sudden your car's doing a 180 faster than the dukes of hazzard, cuz after all, it's responding at the speed of thought.... :)

  • Jacking In (Score:3)

    by Dunx ( 23729 ) on Tuesday June 22, 1999 @03:06AM (#1839835) Homepage
    I suppose the implications of Neuromancer/Matrix-style neural interfaces are almost too obvious to mention, but it goes to show that jacking in to the network is closer than expected.

    What I would like to know is whether the rats' normal cognitive functions were affected? That is, apart from the obvious hint of having a huge great wire sticking out of their heads, were the rats unaware of the probes and behaving in a pretty much normal way? I wouldn't fancy a neural interface if I'm not me after its installation.

    Apart from this small detail, I can see the following barriers to using this technology for general control of computers:

    • invasiveness - is this kind of technique ever likely to be implementable without massively invasive surgery? Keyhole techniques don't really apply when you have to drill a hole to get in.
    • training - in these experiments, great care was taken to learn what neural activity indicated thirst in the subjects. Is there any way this individual training could be genericised?
    Cool thing, though.
    --
  • Sounds like the Matrix in ShadowRun...
    If you can intercept and understand the signals from the brain and use that to control things, then mind-reading machine will be possilbe, too...
    Just a thought

  • Linux Driver for Rat? (Score:3)

    by Pablo! ( 49042 ) on Tuesday June 22, 1999 @03:09AM (#1839837)
    Catch-all comment: So when does the linux driver come out?
  • BioControl Systems [biocontrol.com] is one company I know of. I saw and played with their stuff back in '95 at a VR conference (MecklerMedia VRWorld '95)

    BioMuse [biocontrol.com] is one I played with.
  • Or was that the one with cats wired up to mini spaceships, and zapping the baddies that hung out in hyperspace ?

    C.

  • It was posted on Slashdot. Search for it...
  • Re: "reconnecting the severed 'wires'"

    This is already being done. Recent experiments have shown the following (no, I don't remember the citations, but this has all been within the past 3 months or so):
    --It is possible to reconnect damaged nerve tissues (experiment involved severing mouse spines and reattaching them).
    --Embryonic stem cells can be used to stimulate neural growth in the brain (done on an experimental basis with some Parkinson's patients. At least 1/3rd have shown significant improvement).

    As I recall, there was some work 10-15 years ago on using low-powered radio transmitters to bridge gaps in the spinal column, but there was some sort of problem with the procedure.

    This is an interesting time to live in.
  • heh, it was probably something i read a couple weeks ago that was published a couple months ago:) Yes, it DID involve an invasive procedurefor quadra---howeveryouspellit--, but said that another group was doing the same thing with non-invasive techniques.....

    Berck

  • Ability to put signals back into the brain, however (ala "Matrix") still looks like it's a long way off.

    I'm not looking for it next week, but the needed tech for that is coming along. Research being done now on chemical signals in neural regeneration may provide a key. Imagine getting rod cells from a clone's retina, and getting them to form connections in the brain. You now have an opto-isolater which can stimulate neural circuits without forming scar tissue.


  • Yeah. Think of all of the shit that we've done (and continue to do) to rats. ...Given them cancer, diseases, rewired their brains, etc, etc. It's time for a rat revolution!
    ----------------- ------------ ---- --- - - - -

  • > scientists have gotten rats to control a simple robot arm through the activity of brain cells. ... and the obvious applications are for paralyzed people.

    Jeez, I don't know, the last thing I'd want is to have to carry around my own rat to control my body. :)
  • So what happens when the Microsoft MindWindows interface in the base of your skull freezes with a General Protection Fault? Epeleptic seizures, convulsions, autisticism, coma? And after the reboot, are you still you, or merely an imperfect copy? Do you have to pay Bill Gate's heirs to stay you, lest they turn you off for license infringement? Who owns the rights to your creativity? You, or Microsoft? For that matter, who owns you? You, Microsoft, or Your Benign Government, via the Good Citizen(tm) module required in every federally licensed neural interface? If we think using Linux or *BSD gives us a competitive edge today, just imagine tommorow!
  • I believe that the term here would be cyberware, though I could be mistaken. To be bionic, I think that it would have to be actually bionetic in origin, (i.e. the arm would be a real arm, not a robotic one, though bionetic and bionic may be two seperate categories). Cyberware is an implanted electronic device controlled by, or providing input to, the neural impulses of the brain.

    The last part there is the important one. "controlled by, or providing input to, the neural impulses of the brain", which distinguishes things like this arm, and a pacemaker. Can we say Cyberpunk, Shad owrun [slashdot.org], or Wil liam Gibson [slashdot.org] anyone?
  • Actually, the laminated rat (or was it mouse?) brains was an earlier idea, not much developed afterwards; I personally prefer the Partners. "The Game of The Rat and of The Dragon" is one of my favorites to this day :) Wish I had one of those pinlit machines.

  • From the end of this snippet:

    Recently, scientists have reported that paralyzed people can learn to use their brain waves to control the movement of a cursor on a computer screen. The brain activity was picked up by electrodes that had been implanted or placed on the scalp.
    By moving the cursor, the paralyzed people were able to communicate.

    Anybody know anything more about this? URLs appreciated...

    bradley

  • Oh, yeah, there was another mouse brain in "Think Blue, Count Two"

  • ..to find ways of repairing/reconnecting the spinal cord/nerves?

    There's a lot of work being done on that as well. Some progress has been made.

    Only time will tell which method will work out the best and soonest. I'm sure most people would prefer that the nervs be re-connected, or in the case of an amputation, that the prostetic be connected to the peripheral motor nerves rather than into the brain, but it never hurts to have a plan B in the works.

  • Re:Jacking In (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    hmmm, hopefully by the time we have the medical/hardware tech to the point of jacking in, someone will have come up with a "NUI", Neural User Interface, that will allow us the consensual hallucination that Neuromancer describes. God forbid Micros~1 producing that....It's bad enough having my computer crash, but a brain crash would be a little harder to recover from. hmmm, I really would have Linux on my mind all the time.
  • ::stomp!, stomp:: Squish!
  • The site is www.mindmouse.com. It is non-evasive and trained through screen based feedback using small bars on the screen in which a user learns to move. Their website is being upgraded at the moment but I recall them saying it was developed by an ex biofeedback specialist or some similarly qualified person. Seems like a cool idea. I guess it depends how fast it is. If its a slow 'joystick' style interface it would suck (relative movement with a maximum speed). If it was more like a touchpad where you could basically position it anywhere on the screen from anywhere else at will within a second or less I wouldn't mind having one. :)
  • Wheres the source?

  • Jars (Score:1)

    by fornix ( 30268 )
    This will be an absolute boon to all of those brains sitting around in jars with absolutely no way to interact with their environment :^) Soon they will be able to control X-10 devices and send eathother email! Imaginative types in jars will take day jobs as part of a rendering farm or other computational clusters.
  • I was watching something on discovery a while back about a nerve replacement operation on some girls arm. Apparently it worked, but the show was more about the operation itself than how it worked.
    Cheers,

    Rick Kirkland
  • You kinda missed a point. A software natural language processor that response to any voice without training vs. a maybe six output feedback trained device with maybe months or years of training? Get real; you're comparing apples to oranges. If you think they don't spend months training the subjects in the use of the 'prosthetics limbs' you might want to re-read the rat article. The difference with human subjects is they don't use an invasive method to attach the electrodes. Musing about why we can can't do a terrible difficult task when we can do primary research tasks is like wondering why an adult can do all the things they do when a newborn baby can't even roll over. Sheesh!
  • All we need now is the nadda nadda nadda theme from the Bionic Man/Woman!
  • Okay, so there's a computer programmer walking down the street with a rat on his shoulder....an old lady sees this and says: "what are you doing with that filthy creature?"

    "Squeak, squeak" says the rat.

    :^)
  • ...to find ways of repairing/reconnecting the spinal cord/nerves?



    [/analogy]
    It seems to me that if I cut the wire to my telephone, it's better to reconnect that cut wire, rather than to find some expensively convoluted way of connecting my telephone to a radio transceiver, then connecting the other wire to a similar device to get the telephone working again.
    [end analogy]

    I can see the research justified if the aim is to find a thought interface to a computer etc. But I feel the money would be better spent inventing methods of reconnecting the severed "wires" from the brain to [whatever limb(s) etc.].

    Just my 2p worth.

    rgds.
  • It is possible to reconnect nerves, infact, if the nerve sheath isnt very damaged (a very clean cut) it can grow back itself. However, once cut (without an intact nerve sheath) a nerve begins to die back to the next link (probably in the spine somewhere) and we dont have the precision to be able to rebuild into such a densely packed system.

    Think of it like a huge bundle of wires, glued together, if one broke, would you be able to separate it?

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