OT: Hardware-to-Organism Interfaces (h2oi)

[Kamog]

What a terrible thing to do to a cat...

[JurijD]

MY THOUGHTS ON THIS SUBJECT:

1. Hmm in my experiance the biggest problem in getting any cyber-implant to work for a long time is the human immune system. Even the simplest artificial heart valve causes MAJOR problems because its pLastic negatively charged surface triggers the complement system and activates Neutrofiles and a whole bunch of other immune cells to attack it. These people have to eat huge ammounts of immuno-suppressors just to prevent their own body killing itself.

2. The neural-machine interface is not as easy as it is portrayed in some popular pseudo scientifical articles. Controlling a cats muscles with electrical impulses and trying to hook up a nerve and an electrical wire are two very different things. Our nerves don�t conduct electrical currents in a manner even remotely simmilar to an electrical conductor. Triggering a nerve impuls by hitting a nerve with an electrical charge is one thing... but being able to induce controlled impulses in a nerve and/or read the output of a nerve is very difficult and for the most part impossible for now.

3. Apart from that just trying to for example reconnect say your Nervus Radialis (a nerve that controls some muscles in the hand) after a 1cm gap in it occured after an injury is not even remotelly possible because of the simple fact that a nerve is composed of millions upon millions if neural axons that twist and spiral inside of it and trying to get the right ends to meet for the greater part of these is science fiction for now. Not to mention that even if you could figure out which axon connects where we just don�t have the nano technology to reconnect them in a manner that would be preceise enough.

4. Any kind of limb re-attachment sugery is very difficult and almost always leads to rejection by the host. And even if it does not the host never gets any kind of good motor control back in that limb (even if it is his/her own limb that is being reattached). Some struggle for years to even get a reattached hand just to close under their own will.

5. Although the prospect of attaching electrodes to the visual cortex in the brain and having them input impulses into it for vision might seem simple it is far from that. You see our brain doesn�t process images like a computer. We have several regions that perform different "calculations" like: shape, color, movement, seeing edges etc. And we are a loooooooong way from being able to input the right impulses into the right areas of our brain to restore vision. The people that got these implants for the most part weren�t able to see anything. SOME saw vague flashes of light... naturally as someone was sending electrical impulses into their visual cortex But for them to be able to really SEE and COMPREHEND color, movement, shapes etc. hehe, well that is PURE science fiction for now and will remain that for a long time.

6. Recently advances were made and as far as I know the US airforce was trying to figure out a way for their pilots to control aircraft by thought only. Perhpas you saw these experiments: a guy sits in front of a computer with a whole bunch of wires comming out of his head and then he "thinks" about the mouse moving in RIGHT and the mouse moves right.... These results are based on our brain generating area-specific electrical charges when we are thinging of the thing over and over again. And using this technique they were never able to get any fine control... if the subject trained for months he was able for example to move the mouse up, down, left and right; nothing more.

In conclusion:
Scifi makes it look easy but hehe, its really very difficut and we won�t be able to produce any meaningful H2Oi-s any time soon... say in the next 2 or 3 decades. For us to be able to do useful H2Oi we need:
- vastly superior computers... think 100-1000x faster than today
- improved knowledge of the human immune system
- a huge leap in neurology & neurochemistry
- at lest basic nano-robots to complete the fine machine-organism connections for us

I�d sure like to get to know the borg queen I�m sure she�d have some interesting info to get us started in the right direction

[ February 06, 2004, 13:28: Message edited by: JurijD ]

[Puke]

while all those things are obsticales, your list of required technology for surmounting them is just way off.

the computers we use for existing implants, including the ones that can restore partial vision, are quite rudimentary. the computers used to design them are advanced, but what we have seems sufficient.

we already have some level of advanced nanotech, but certainly dont require any 'nanobots' to work with small items. as i said, we are already incaseing little clumps of microscopic cells in little microscopic cages, and I have seen photos of individual neurons grown onto tiny little circuit Boards with itty-bitty little electrode pegs to hold it in place and stop it from growing away from (rejecting) the electronics.

its not as far fetched as you'd like to think.


one 'art' project i read about recently, involved hooking up a slice of goldfish neurons to input and output electrodes. the input sent in impulses based on a very low resolution web cam. the output sent a data stream that controlled a multi-armed plotter that would draw pictures in a handfull of colors. one of the kickers was that the brain cells and the plotter were on different sides of the planet - but thats not as impressive as having goldfish brains drawing pictures in response to stimuli.

[dmm]

Originally posted by geoschmo:
Ummm, no, not total fantasy. Well, maybe "mind reading" as in, hook someone up and see what they are thinking, like in that Natalie Wood movie. [/QB]

Yeah, that's what I meant. You're not going to be able to think your thoughts into Office 2010. (Good thing, too. Imagine doing a report that way with your boss looking over your shoulder!) But speech-to-text should work by then, and maybe the grammar checker will be worth using.

I did read the article, and it was helpful, just the kind of thing I was asking for. Thanks.

[dmm]

JurijD:
Thanks, lots of good points.

The immune system certainly is a nuisance! (Not one I want to do without, though.) I think that you are right to be pessimistic about replacement parts that are anywhere close to the original equipment. But I think that some primitive stuff is not quite as far off as you imply. For instance, one expt on replacement retinas worked well enough for the patients to distinguish between circles and rectangles. They couldn't leave it in -- it was too big, and the immune system would have rejected it anyway. But it did show that interfacing to the optic nerve was sufficient -- you don't have to interface to the brain directly.

Repairing severed hands....always makes me think of the ST episode where McCoy suddenly loses his alien-machine-induced knowledge right in the middle of the operation to re-attach Spock's brain. "My God, Jim, there are millions of connections! Nobody can re-attach a brain!" But they are making progress with "scaffolding" that encourages various kinds of cells to grow.

Certainly you are right that the problem is not so simple as we often think.

dmm

[narf poit chez BOOM]

- vastly superior computers... think 100-1000x faster than today

someone posted a link a while ago about a company that's developed an 8000GHZ optical computer. the article said about ten years to get it into mass production.

and I have seen photos of individual neurons grown onto tiny little circuit Boards with itty-bitty little electrode pegs to hold it in place and stop it from growing away from (rejecting) the electronics.

ugh. borg is bad.

They couldn't leave it in -- it was too big, and the immune system would have rejected it anyway. But it did show that interfacing to the optic nerve was sufficient -- you don't have to interface to the brain directly.

wonder if they could use electromagnets and not interface directly to get around that.

[ February 06, 2004, 19:45: Message edited by: narf poit chez BOOM ]

[geoschmo]

I think that what will be a big help to the problem with the body rejecting the implants will be to not use implants. Right now we have to use implants because we don't have transmitter/receptors sensitive enough to get the signals though the skin. A little bit more advancment in that area and you will be able to have a device on the surface, or maybe just below the surface of the skin, that can do the job. Less intrusive then sticking little wires in the brain tissue right next to the neurons.

The popsci article mentions some research in small scale devices that work like an MRI using some of the new fangled superconducting materials that are being developed.

Geoschmo

[dmm]

Geez, everyone always brings up the Borg. The main problem with the Borg wasn't their bioelectronic interfacing, rather it was forced integration into a collective with loss of individuality. (Ed: Sort-of like high school.) Mutilating healthy bodies to allow for implants just emphasized their lack of feeling (not to mention aesthetics).

But if I had NO eyes, then I'd gladly take an implant (e.g., Jordi LaForge). Same with no arm -- prefer to have my own arm sewn back on, even with some loss of function, thanks anyway -- but if that's not possible then I'd take a Borgish arm over nothing. Well, OK, maybe not that drill thing! But how about one of those android bodies that Harry Mudd was going to get? (OK, now I'm drifting off into total fantasy.)

The point is: prosthetics =/ borg

[ February 06, 2004, 21:49: Message edited by: dmm ]

[geoschmo]

Originally posted by dmm:
Thanks for the feedback so far. For the record, "mind-reading" interfaces are total fantasy (at least at this point). I'm looking for ideas that might reasonably be implemented in 10 years or so.

Ummm, no, not total fantasy. Well, maybe "mind reading" as in, hook someone up and see what they are thinking, like in that Natalie Wood movie. But they already have had some success with interfacing the mind with simple machines and getting them to respond to direct mental impulses. Don't know if we are talking practical applications in less then ten years, but it seems entirely possible given the progress they have already made. Did you read the article I linked to? Here it is in case you missed it in my first post. http://www.popsci.com/popsci/medicin...576464,00.html

[ February 06, 2004, 12:25: Message edited by: geoschmo ]

[Nocturnal]

Originally posted by Puke:
in unrelated news, there is also some fierce competition between companies developing ocular implants to restore sight to the blind. some of them tap directly into the occular nerve, and the one that has gotten the most press coverage is able to deliver a 100 pixel (10x10 field of dots) display, enough to enable the subject to destinguish shapes, or read very large block lettering.

Drat, foiled again!

I thought about making artificial eyes for the blind. Those would need to be wired to intact ocular nerves, and in theory at least should be possible. I had considered making a higher density of photoreceptors to give the recipient eagle-vision (since the smallest CCD cells can now be made the size of a human cone cell,) but realized that human brains probably weren't even "wired" for any more cones and rods than were already in place. So an additional circuit to handle the additional information from the photoreceptors might be needed before interfacing with the brain. I say might because the hypothesized "vision area" of the human brain is huge. It might be capable of more than I think. What such a pre-brain vision circuit could do for example would be to filter and focus a part of the picture and in effect allow the recipient to zoom in and out on a part of the image that his or her brain is able to handle at once (I would think this could be wired to the nerves that now control the lenses in functioning human eyes, with actual focusing done automatically in the prosthetic eye.) The circuit could also quite easily be made to record the full video information in such a way that it could be read out into a computer or video system. Spy of the future?