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Brain implants allow paralysed monkeys to walk
- quantisan 10y ago"The problem I see with this is that they implant monkey before paralysis and can use machine learning to build a model of the monkey's unique representation for walking. Then they paralyze and show the monkey's can adapt to only using their interface in 5 days. There's no way the mapping from neural activity to stimulation is generalizable..." [1] [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/5c2ljz/brain_implant_device_enables_paralyzed_monkeys/d9trzrr/ https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/5c2ljz/brain_impla...
- TeeWEE 10y agoIndeed, the research is a bit unfair. Its not difficult to understand old signals and they reuse it to generate motor effects.
- stinos 10y agoThe other thing has been done as well though: Obama shook a robotic arm's hand, the arm was being controlled by a paralyzed man; he learned the proper 'thoughts' for generating movement himself and the researchers didn't have recordings of the man moving prior to his accident leading to paralysis
- noir_lord 10y agoI have a spinal condition called Syringomyelia, at the moment apart from neuropathic pain it doesn't effect my ability to walk but down the line it could (with complete paralysis been a possible outcome). They could record the way my brain sends walk signals and if I end up paralysed they have the data to train the model. There are multiple spinal conditions that result in paralysis after not be been paralysed, not everyone who ends up in a wheelchair gets their by an accident.
- neurophenom 10y agoI hadn't thought of that kind of application before. Thanks.
- raverbashing 10y agoYes But maybe it is. You can also put people on a VR environment and have them "walk" there (see experiments by Nicolelis et. al.) and try to capture signals like that
- jobigoud 10y agoOne of my fear is an extremely big generation gap in the future when we find a transhuman-level technology that can only work if done from an early age. Exocortex interface comes to mind. Then you would have an entire generation thinking millions of times deeper, broader, and faster than the previous one, and communication mostly broken. I sort of fear this scenario because I would be on the wrong side of it.
- Balgair 10y agoI'm in neuro, that scenario is centuries away. You'd peobably need a clear skull first with exotic glasses we can't even begin to understand physics-wise today. We don't even know what your brain cells mostly are. Is it 10% neurons and 90% glia, or 50% neurons and 50% glia? What are glia even doing? The only data we really get on them is via stroke studies. Neuro is exciting precisely because there is so little known about the brain still.
- jobigoud 10y agoBut we don't really need to understand something to create technology leveraging it. And we are just getting started with deep learning. And our computers are extremely slow and have tiny storage compared to what they will be.
- Balgair 10y agoOk, I have this pill/wire-probe/exercise-machine, I don't really know what it does, but in some folks it seems to make them happier/healthier, that is all the info you are going to get about said thingy. Do you use it? Bio is like that. We really don't know what is going on with a body most of the time. When we try to leverage it, it gives totally nutto results. Like, yeah, water is good for you! Like, maybe we should make it inhale-able! Or yeah, caffeine is alright, makes you wake-up! You should just take NoDoz and never sleep again! Those are absurd examples, but I hope they illustrate that in bio, 'leveraging' something typically means you are gonna die either real soon or you are gonna get cancer. Fen-phen is a great example of 'leveraging' something in bio [0]. Yeah, you loose weight, but then you blow your heart valves out and end up as worm food. So when you say that we can just throw computers at the problem, you make a huge mistake with that idea. Your input data is everything. You have to run a LOT of experiments in the real world to get the right data, not just noise you think is data. Living things are really good at staying alive until they aren't. They are not just noisy, they are also altering the experiment along with the experimenter. Homeostasis is a real thing and bodies and living things try to stay happy, healthy, and alive. Like, here is the thing, your experimental test-bed is alive and thinking and is, in some cases, trying to experiment-on/kill-you right back. Try feeding that into a computer! You have 300k+ dependent variables (that you know of) and 10 equations (if you trust those other authors). You are trying to find the mean of N interacting Poisson/Gaussian data sets (you hope they are normal) in N dimensional space and you know that you don't know all the variables and you can only do this on 5 rats. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenfluramine/phentermine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenfluramine/phentermine
- gpderetta 10y agoThat's why you should backup early and often your neuronal imprint. Cyberpunk is one step closer.
- snowwrestler 10y agoThis might still be useful medically. Let's guess that each person's unique representation for walking does not change, or changes slowly. That seems reasonable since it is at least partially based on the physical arrangement of neurons. We could bank it on a regular basis--recording via a device we wear around for a month every 5 years, for example. Then if we are paralyzed, the most recent recording is used to map an implant. Personally, I will not surprised if we find that each person's nervous system is so different from the next that nothing significant is generalizable. Rather than each person running an "OS on standard hardware" we might find that a more accurate analogy is that each person has constructed their own custom logic circuit and then wrote custom software on top of that.
- eyko 10y agoAs a person who knows next to nothing about the inner workings of the brain, the few books I read hinted of this. Apparently, learning changes the brain's physiology? anybody knows about good books on understanding how the brain works - as far as we know today?
- return0 10y agoThere 's plasticity involved, and the problem that brain circuits continuously remap. They can be retrained though. I think they had similar problems with the BrainGate BMI many years ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrainGate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrainGate).
- TeeWEE 10y agoI cant help to feel sad for the monkey. I'm not sure this is the way research should be done. Why not try this on a smaller scale animal first before doing it on a monkey? Also you don"t need to cut the spinal cord todo data analysis.
- fdej 10y ago"The experiments are more of a progression than a sudden breakthrough: they are based on a decade of work in rats, Courtine says, and the monkeys reacted in very similar ways."
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- kayoone 10y agoDo you also feel sad for the millions of animals that live in miserable conditions for months/years just to be eaten by us afterwards? This is arguably less of a torture to a much smaller number of animals, yet it is heavily regulated in most countries.
- popol12 10y agoMonkeys are so close to us genetically speaking. You can't compare a monkey with a cow.
- TeeWEE 10y agoI have a lot of friends who are farmers. Those animals dont live in miserable conditions. And when they are killed, its in an instant. Heck i even feeded cows and pigs. Its something different to experiment on a living animal. However I do understand its important for research. However its a difficult subject.
- Chris2048 10y agoYes.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- biofox 10y ago"For more than a decade, neuroscientist Grégoire Courtine has been flying every few months from his lab at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne to another lab in Beijing, China, where he conducts research on monkeys with the aim of treating spinal-cord injuries. The commute is exhausting — on occasion he has even flown to Beijing, done experiments, and returned the same night. But it is worth it, says Courtine, because working with monkeys in China is less burdened by regulation than it is in Europe and the United States" I personally know researchers who have to take similar measures to be able to do their research. When we are happy as a society to slaughter billions of animals every year for food (usually keeping them in appalling conditions beforehand) I don't understand how we can justify the restrictions we put on scientists.
- tn13 10y agoA lot of people feel a moral distinction between a quick death to more primitive traditional needs of food v/s slower death for uncertain gains. It is some kind of cognitive dissonance I feel. A lot of Americans who are perfectly happy eating a cow make fun of Indians for referring to cow as holy and outrage at Chinese killing dogs for food. I personally think eastern world and more paganic religions like that of native Indians are perhaps more right to not see these issues as black and white based on fixed line but instead see our relationship with nature as much more flexible co-dependence. Like a mother who uses her own metabolism to feed her little child and the child who eventually tries to get rid of that dependence.
- drumttocs8 10y agoMany people would consider torture worse than murder, basically.
- Waterluvian 10y agoBecause it's creepy and weird so we will consider a quick slaughter more ethical than experimentation because bacon and steak is so delicious. That's my guess.
- d0lph 10y ago
- adam12 10y agoAnother reason why we need strong, unbreakable encryption. Can you imagine something like this getting hacked/cracked?
- kayoone 10y agoSecurity experts have shown dangers in current medical devices like pace makes, where they literally could have killed a patient wirelessly because many of these devices have no security at all.
- IpV8 10y agoStop kicking yourself. Stop kicking yourself. Stop kicking yourself...
- pvaldes 10y agoor murdering someone...
- o_____________o 10y agoIs this guerrilla marketing for Ghost in the Shell?
- return0 10y agoWe need to talk about animal experimentation regulation and protests here in europe. It has gone so far that scientists have literally given up their science: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/05/embattled-max-planck-neuroscientist-quits-primate-research http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/05/embattled-max-planck-...
- millerjs 10y agoSee also the 1994 novel, Interface, by Neal Stephenson and George Jewsbury.
- bognition 10y agoThis is absolutely fantastic and its a great step in the right direction but we are still years if not decades away from being able to circumvent spinal lesions in humans. One of the major problems with human spinal lesions is the loss of control of the trunk of the body (ie the core). Humans have dozens of muscle groups that control balance and posture through minute movements. Without fine grain control over these muscles balance is going to be extremely difficult.
- tim333 10y ago>we are still years if not decades away from being able to circumvent spinal lesions in humans. On the other hand it's quite possible that if you implanted the same equipment into humans right now that it could work with a bit of tweaking. It's kind of hard to say till someone tries it.
- middleman90 10y agoThis is not going to work if you break your back more than once...
- intrasight 10y agoI struggled with this while in graduate school studying neuroscience. Fortunately, I was studying crustaceans so there were not too many ethical issues. But there was rodent and monkey research happening in the school. I choose to return to my first profession - software. I assume that I'll be long dead before there are ethical issues with experimenting on AI. Animal research is something that we as a society are going to struggle with for many years into the future. I would like to be able to argue that it is for the greater good of the planet, but I don't think that I could put up a good argument that we are being proper stewards of the planet.
- sandworm101 10y agoWe have seen many such interfaces in recent years, but as I understand these techniques they all suffer the same problem. The body eventually coats the electrodes in a non-conductive layer, essentially scar tissue, and the whole thing grinds to a halt in a matter of weeks. Until that practical limitation is surmounted, it seems very wrong to treat animals in such a manner. Watching the paralyzed monkey (also the rat) struggle in obvious agony as the commentators cheered was not fun. This was not the sort of thing I had expected to see on a program clearly aimed at a general audience. This was the very dark side of animal testing. I saw this story on a canadian news show a couple days ago, a show that regularly does spots on human exploration of Mars. The stories are similar. The headline feel-good story is about the shiny new mars habitat or spacesuit someone is testing, but they haven;t figured out how to actually get it to mars. The result is the false impression that the dreamed future, colonizing Mars and curing paralysis, is closer than is true.
- Balgair 10y agoGliosis is a big problem for sure, and the central nervous system's scarring is not well understood at this time. Typically with recording electrodes you can either 'jiggle' them to shake off the scarring cells or pass a small amount of current between the combined electrodes to kill off the cells. These recording electrodes are typically only a few microns apart, so long range damage is a non-issue if the subject is not connected to ground in another way. You can go for ~6 months like this before the gliosis really builds up, and honestly, by that time the recording electrode has probably broken anyway or the subject has bonked the implant and it broke that way too, or as is typically the case with monkey subjects, it tore out the implant and ate it, stabbed another monkey with it, or tried to have sex with it. Monkey studies are rare and hard, not just because of ethical issues, but because monkeys are clever little assholes.
- sandworm101 10y agoThe process of refreshing an electrode sounds tortuous for the subject. And your information re monkeys clawing out devices Jurassic Park-style is equally disturbing. This points to the conclusion that the efforts spent internalizing the system has less to do with benefit and more to do with preventing the animal from ending the agony. But speaking of the electrodes, how long do they last in human subjects? Docs have been implanting various electrodes in human nerves/brains for decades and I assume a paralyzed person in a research study isn't going to rip them out. With enough current can the gliosis be overcome perpetually? (lol, spellcheck went with 'parallelized' and 'gigolos'. That might say something about my normal writing subjects.)
- wehadfun 10y agoSeems like a zombie scenario. Where dead bodies are controlled wirelessly through implants.
- Balgair 10y agoHaha, we are already there. Here's the instructions from 2014 via a 15 year old: http://www.instructables.com/id/Control-a-Cockroach-With-Arduino-for-Under-30/ http://www.instructables.com/id/Control-a-Cockroach-With-Ard...
- nojvek 10y agoHoly shit. That made me queer at the same time fascinated
- Balgair 10y agoWait, that made you homosexual? I'm going to assume that was a spellcheck or non-native speaking error...
- hood_syntax 10y agoQueer can also mean strange, and indeed that was a historical meaning for quite some time.
- truth_sentinell 10y agoI'm eager for the day to come when we can map an entire animal to a computer model -or even human-, so animals won't be necessary anymore for this kind of procedure. How many years away do you guys think we are from that dream?
- anbende 10y agoThe current trend-line puts computing power at the level of the human brain in 10 years or so. However, processing power increases has been slowing down lately both in terms of time and the amount of money required for each new advance. In addition, actually modeling a brain is not the same thing as having the computing power to do so. Our current chips have billions of transistors. However, our most sophisticated neural networks have a million nodes or so, I believe. So we're a ways away from simulating a brain, human or otherwise. It's definitely more than 10 years. Probably 20 or more. And since we can't really predict computing power that far out, it's really hard to predict meaningfully.
- gallerdude 10y agoWhen that happens, we'll have fully emulated human brains and basically everything will be solved (or destroyed).
- duaneb 10y agoComputation will never be cheap enough to get accuracy. Biology is too dynamic.
- meesles 10y agoI think saying 'computation will never be __________' is usually just wrong. We have a decent understanding now of the complexity of a human body, and there's no technical limitation on putting a ton of supercomputers together to do what OP suggested. It's more of a matter of waiting until it's economically worth it.
- duaneb 10y ago> We have a decent understanding now of the complexity of a human body I fundamentally disagree. We have models, sure, but they're approximative, not predictive, and I don't see any indication we'd be able to get prediction ever. It's very difficult to understand how biological approximation layered over chemical and physical approximation could give any benefit we get now from experimentation. Among other things, there is no such thing as model verification.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]