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Science

Give That Monkey Brain A Robotic Arm! 148

Posted by timothy from the was-it-bubbles'-brain? dept.
jeffsenter writes: "The NYTimes (free reg. req.) has a short story about the craziest science since the story on decoding a cat's vision. A monkey at Duke has had its brain wired up to control a robot. However, the robot is at MIT and the signal goes over the Internet. The research offers some hope to paralyzed people."
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Give That Monkey Brain A Robotic Arm! More

Give That Monkey Brain A Robotic Arm!

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  • Re:Free registration crap (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    story at cnn which requires no sign-in... http://www.cnn.com/2000/HEALTH/11/15/monkey.brain/ index.html
  • Link [whitaker.org] to an interesting story about how humans are actually using thoughts to manipulate objects, and in the case of quadripalegics (sp?) regain the use of their hands and arms.


    54% Slashdot Pure


  • I guess that all depends on the source of human imprecision. If it's in the muscles of the hands, then yeah, this would make brain-controlled robotic arms ideal for surgery (perhaps brain surgery to implant more robotic arm controllers?). If the imprecision is caused by vision or faulty processing by the brain, then no. I guess you could get around the vision imperfections with those other technologies people are discussing here, but if you can lick that problem, might as well have a CPU running the whole she-bang!



    Seth
  • Wonder if it`s possible to spank a monkey with a robotic arm ?

  • Step 1: New, Improved E-Monkey(tm) patent pending
    Step 2: Monkey Linux [8m.com]
    Step 3: Fle et of unmanned aircraft [boeing.com]
    Step 4:Pick Target
  • This might have some medical value and indeed scientific value. As long as the brain controlling the arm doesn't belong to a female monkey, I predict a good chance of success. Thanks, Graham Thomas
  • The NYTimes is response to the massive demand from slashdot readers for more stories about circuts and monkeys has written a better story [nytimes.com].
  • The poster above has a point:

    Does there really something to be gained by torturing monkeys like this? Is there something to be gained by having your mind "downloaded" out of your body and into a computer?

    For more interesting thoughts read: In the Absence of the Sacred, by Jerry Mander

  • Why does this look, sound and smell exactly like a recent item titled "Monkey Think, Robot Do" ?

    http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/11/15/161236 &mode=nested [slashdot.org]
  • The original poster nowhere seriously advocated experimenting on humans, but used the idea to try and get it through people's skulls that to do such experiments on animals who have hearts, lungs, brains, pain receptors and so many things that we have (why bother otherwise?) is as immoral as doing it to people. At least you realise that the latter is wrong.

    Some prices are too high to pay for research. The Nazi's "experiments" on humans were one. Our "experiments" on animals are no better.

  • cool (Score:1)

    by snyrt ( 151824 )
    this is totally cool. i can see cool prosthetics coming into play. i don't understand why they have it over the internet? what's the purpose of that variable? It would be a whole lot easier to experiment if you didn't have as many variables involved. i love the experiment though. another question is....how do they know that the monkey's making it do what it wants it to do? hmmmmm.

  • If this was being done to a dog

    I'm sure this kind of stuff is done to cats and dogs all the time, but that wouldnt be reported on because it would leave a bad taste in the readers mouth.

    I'm conflicted. I do see how a lot of good could be accomplished by animal experiments but I do suspect that a lot of frivilous experiments are conducted on animals too. I feel really bad for these suffering creatures, both the animals and the researchers who have become desensitized.

    I wonder how eager scientists are to go right to the lab animal rather than putting it off until the last minute. It would be nice if there was something like a animal experiments ethics department where you had to apply to get a higher animal like a cat or monkey. They would review you experiment for readiness for an animal subject, the suffering you will inflict, and the justification you have for using a live subject. Of course this department would probably end up being corrupt.

  • Re:Remote admin body parts? (Score:3)

    by /dev/kev ( 9760 ) on Thursday November 16, 2000 @12:32AM (#620911) Homepage
    hell, why not the Moon or Mars?

    I'll tell you exactly why. Latency. Noone ever seems to stop and think about the latency in these kinds of systems.

    It takes radio waves travelling at the speed of light (the speed limit of the univese) several minutes (can't remember exactly) to get from Earth to Mars and back. Now every time you do any action, your poor brain has to wait several minutes for feedback on that. You try putting your foot down to take a step, but don't feel the pressure of the ground on the sole of your foot until a few minutes later. I'm sorry, but that's just not going to work, no matter how much you want it to.

    You know those fun things they have at science expos, where you speak into the microphone and it plays it back to you with a 1 second or so delay? Those things are really hard to use, because your brain is used to near-instantaneous feedback. With practice, you can train it to ignore the feedback and just speak.

    But this is just speech, you don't really need that feedback (eg. deaf people can speak, particularly if they weren't born deaf). For anything requiring a vague level of dexterity, such as walking, looking, playing sport, music, and doing just about anything with your hands and fingers, I suspect that even 500ms of latency is too much for your brain to handle. Thus it might just work for halfway-round-the-world comms (landline only, no satellites)... maybe.

    Telepresence is a nice idea, but should be thought of more as an extension to videoconferencing than as the elaborate setup you're envisaging.

    Since you are 'here', communicating with 'there' takes some unavoidable time... The only way to beat that is to go there.
  • I remember an article a couple of years ago that did a similar think with mice. They recorded the brain activity of a mouse pushing a lever to get food. Then they removed the lever and apparently the mice could still get the food just by "thinking" about pushing the lever. This kind of research has cool future VR potential...of course the whole sticking things in your brain will have to go.
  • I'm all for technology but NOT at the expense of suffering of animanls. This is a really sad post and now I know why some people think /.'rs are morons. Some of your replies supports that the monkey has more brains than some of the readers of this site.

    most unhappy

    Steve
  • If only they'd rigged it up in your polling booths.
    Monkeys would have decided Florida's vote instead of lawyers. Oh, sorry, what am I saying?
  • There's one at CNN [cnn.com] now, and Nature.com [nature.com] is scheduled to run one tomorrow.

    Also, the login/password "slashdot2000" / "slashdot200" works fine at the NY times.

    --

  • Of course, there are a lot of complications involved as well--as soon as you begin to manipulate the nervous system you can begin to
    manipulate reality. When we (or the state) can change what people see and hear directly, things begin to get real sticky, real fast.

    Isn't that what people are worried about AOL/Time Warner
  • This certainly explains a lot.

    ICANN

    Pets.com

    slashdot moderation

    presidential auction on Ebay

    Well time to give /. a rest, banana break.

    --

  • Remote admin body parts? (Score:5)

    by DanThe1Man ( 46872 ) on Wednesday November 15, 2000 @08:33PM (#620918)
    A monkey at Duke has had its brain wired up to control a robot. However, the robot is at MIT and the signal goes over the internet. The research offers some hope to paralysed people."

    Whats so importaint about the distance? Do they hope to allow amputies the ablity to control their removed arms thosands of miles away? Sounds like a scary movie idea to me.
    --

  • I think I'll light a chipmunk for Bobo.

    --------
  • I agree 100%, I am most disgusted with the replies I have seen. Just goes to show so called "enlightened" computer people are just as selfish and warped as the execs from major money making corps. They are happy to fuck-up anything if it suits them. Man, animal, environment...

    This is so, so sad
  • You killed me with that one. Nice. Too bad I'm not moderating today!
  • Okay this seems like a troll to me but I will respond anyway (not because of the position espoused but because of the anonymous assertive and unreasoned way it was presented).

    I think you would have great difficulty establishing rights for people much less rights for animals. While some dedicated souls might truly believe a rights based approach to morality most people who espouse such an approach don'treally believe it.

    The concept of a right is something which is inherintly inalienable not merely a desired state which can be overrideen in a pressing case or when it "conflicts" with other supposed rights (moreover the concept of rights carries with it that these are local moral necessities so one cannot say you have a right for the government to act in a way which maximizes total utility because this would be a non-local concept). Therefore one who truly believes in a rights based system must adhere to these rights in the most pressing of circumstances. For instance if I actually had a right to property and I owned the cure to a worldwide deadly disease a rights based approach would deem it inproper for that cure to be taken from me despite the billions of lives I might save. In this way very few people actually belive in rights (in an extreme enough example they would in actuality favor a more utilitarian approach. Their supposed rights are really just concepts which, because of human psychology, make the world a better place because of there enforcement.

    Under this methodology the only reason we don't do this testing on humans is not because the actual testing would be immoral but that the backlashinduced by angry individuals and the inability of people to determine appropriate and inappropriate testing would reduce total utility
  • Hack the monkey, hack the monkey!! :)
  • I reckon we should hack the connection and feed it into Dr Kevin Warwick's emotion chip. We could then watch him go wild as we offer him a banana. :-)) Marie
  • (AP) - Geneva
    The Vatican filed a blanket lawsuit
    in the World Court today against all bio-
    engineers attempting to reverse-engineer
    the brain. Vatican counsel are claiming God
    holds a Universal Patent, number
    234,597,045,714,510,947,109,571,095,
    571,094, on any biological organ that can
    cause a living being to think.

    The Pope refused comment on advice of
    counsel, but sources within the Vatican,
    who wished to remain anonymous, said
    that the church has no complaints about
    the science behind reverse-engineering
    the brain, they are "simply trying to make
    sure God's duly appointed representatives
    on Earth recieve just payment for His hard
    work and obvious innovation."

    The US Patent and Trade Office only com-
    mented that it does not recognize any
    Universal Patent Office. Nor is there
    any record the USPTO has granted such
    a patent, therefore they cannot see how
    the Vatican has "a legal leg to stand on."

    -Rob
  • I'm so glad you had the courage to sign your name under that braindead reply.
  • I don't think that this is a troll, that's a bit unfair. It actually made me think for a bit about the ramifications of this technology, quite an insightful comment really. Probably wasn't meant to be though.

    Then again, what do I know, I'm a simpleton...
  • If I was paralized or missing a limb, I would sign up for experementation like this in an instant, and so would lots of other people out there.

    Unfortunatly, scientists like to make sure things like this have some sort of a basis in reality before they start cutting open the heads of humans (or injecting weird drugs, or any other type of medical experimentation out there).
    I'm a vegan, and I won't use cosmetics or soaps that were tested on animals. I won't wear leather from animals if there is anything else to wear, but if I'm dying, and the medicine they give me was perfected on chimps, I'll say a little prayer in my heart for all the animals who died to allow me to live, but I wont refuse that medicine.

    Moderation for the sake of morals is good, exclusion of something that could save a life or allow a child to walk again is acceptance of ignorance and refusal to believe that life can be better.

    I don't choose to believe that.

  • Vice versa (Score:3)

    by Fervent ( 178271 ) on Wednesday November 15, 2000 @08:06PM (#620929)
    Could a computer be wired to pilot a monkey's limbs? No joke.

    Similar to the whole "brain surgeon touches part of a patient's brain, his leg moves" kind of thing.

  • Sure beats the hell out of Aibo, I guess.


    54% Slashdot Pure
  • I don't remember if I learned of this on the news, net or radio, but...

    There was a professor at some university like MIT who embedded a chip into his arm. The chip relayed the nervous signals in his arm back to a computer which recorded them. He was later able to play thos signals back to his arm to reproduce the movements he had made earlier in the day.

    Similar idea, slightly different application.

  • Not so! monkey is an instance of Newbie:

    monkey = new Newbie;

  • over the web?

  • And now, we can have a room full of monkey brains teleoperate arms typing on typewriters on the exterior of the soon-to-be abandoned space station Mir, working on reproducing the entire works of Shakespeare!

    Only this time, in the absence of atmosphere (less drag) and in microgravity! Woooo!

    But seriously though, with the advances in neural-interfaces such as this, we might approach Implant technology as in Niven & Pournelle's Oath of Fealty - the ultimate PDA! Palm is doomed when compared with Implants.

  • ILFM (Score:1)

    by Bob9113 ( 14996 )
    Could this lead to the development of an ILFM (Inter-Labratory Fecal Missile)? This could be a huge step in the monkey / lab assistant arms race.
  • http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/11/15/161236 &mode=thread
  • You mean the one that doesn't work?
    treke
  • hmmmm...interesting. my roommate works for barrett. i'll have to ask him
  • This article [mv.com] details a tragic incident involving monkeys and vaxen. Here's an excerpt to help you decide if its worth reading:

    'Well, diagnostics for disk drives are designed to shake up the equipment. But monkey brains are not designed to handle the electrical signals they received. You can imagine the convulsions that resulted. Two of the monkeys were stunned, and three died. The Digital engineer needed to be calmed down; he was going to call the Humane Society. This became known as the Great Dead Monkey Project, and it leads of course to the aphorism I use as my motto: You should not conduct tests while valuable monkeys are connected, so "Always mount a scratch monkey."'

    On a nearly related note, (Now that I think about it), this year's presedential election could be described as a race between "Curious George and The Man With The Big Yellow Hat."

  • The logical next step is to take an animal that has limited motor function at birth (are there such animals, besides humans?) and also put electrodes into an appropriate sensory area of the brain, preferably tactile. Then the animal can get force-feedback signals from the robot. If the arm is within sight of the animal, it should learn to use the robot just like another limb. A monkey with a bionic third arm, how cool is that?

    &lt humor style=bad&gt
    And if we gave the robot a human-like hand, and taught the monkey to type... (Insert favorite reference to 10,000 monkeys typing randomly for 10,000 years.)(Absolutely do not use the B word).
    &lt/humor&gt

    Karl

    I'm a slacker? You're the one who waited until now to just sit arround.

  • I guess it probably beats lying on your own arm till it goes numb.
  • Guess this gives a whole new meaning to the phrase web monkey [lycos.com].
  • ahahaha cool
    I think the doctor didn't like it and punished you with an Offtopic 8(
  • To Hikahi, I am so extremely sorry that my rude reply appeared underneath yours. I was in fact replying to the "annonymous coward" who was insulting animal rights activists without any real reason. Anyway, as a vegan myself, I think that I would have a hard time accepting the medicine that you have mentioned, but I'm sure that when push would come to shove, I would end up accepting it. I would feel pretty bad about it though. my apologies once more. XsaBBathX
  • Clearly this is just another evil plot by Mojo Jojo to control us all with remote control cybernetic robots.
  • Researchers at Duke University are also working on giving /. editors robotic eyes, so they can better spot and prevent duplicate stories [slashdot.org]...

    10 PRINT "This is a"
    20 PRINT "Haiku program."

  • "The research offers some hope to paralyzed people" It unfortunately doesn't offer much hope for monkeys.
  • ...they could telerobotically control a mobile robot to perform functions in the world for them...

    And while we're at it, how about eliminating space walks? Safe as an EVA suit is, staying inside the shuttle is safer. A good set of VR goggles and a robot running off brain-waves would make a space-walk a lot less dangerous. For that matter, with a high enough bandwidth we could eliminate manned spaceflight altogether, although that's not necessarily such a good idea...

  • Re:Vice versa (Score:3)

    by LHOOQtius_ov_Borg ( 73817 ) on Thursday November 16, 2000 @04:24AM (#620949)
    Of course it could - in theory. This is the idea behind the area of biocybernetics which would utilize computers to replace damaged motor neuron clusters (or, some people hope for augmentation...) There has not been much success, yet, in having a computer and a brain working together to share control of a living organism (the pacemaker may be the closest, but it's not ideal).

    Already, in bionics, machines have been used to replace damaged limbs, joints, and organs (with varying degress of success). But all of these systems I know of involve control of the machine parts by both the brain and a machine, not control of the organic parts by both.

    The Duke stuff is particularly interesting because it claims to have success in mapping primate brain signals directly into control signals. This is a big deal. Previous commercial "brainwave" systems such as IBVA, which some may bring up as "been there done that" were not so accurate, they basically were partially successful attempts to match magnetic and electrical patterns in the brain (received through the skull, using sensors attached to the head) into signals. The coolest use for this was making music or trippy graphics based on "thought patterns," for most other things it was not so good. Other systems, such as the Biomuse (which actually is very useful for people with some forms of paralysis, allowing them to control computers with their eyes, or arms - and also used for music, by Atau Tanaka), also used electromagnetic sensors, but on muscle groups.

    Lots of interesting work is being done in organism-machine interconnection. Ferdinando A. Mussa-Ivaldi of Northwestern University has a robot controlled by the brain of a lamprey eel (I think that may have been on /. before) William H. Dobelle's group in NY (www.artificialvision.com) has a blind patient which is receiving artificial vision through computer processing of the optical input from cameras being relayed into his brain (giving him currently at least edge detection - enough to navigate through normal rooms, etc.)

    Now, the twist on the Duke/MIT research is that the Internet was used as the communications medium between the brain and the robot. While this is not most useful for giving quadropalegics back some motion of themselves (they would be best served through a robotic exoskeleton for this purpose), they could telerobotically control a mobile robot to perform functions in the world for them. For someone who has great difficulties moving (and also for top-secret military experiments, I'm sure...) direct brain control of a telerobotic operator could certainly help in terms of giving them back some autonomy in grocery shopping, buying their medicines, etc. However, I think, psychologically people may have an easier time dealing with someone whose robot stays close to them - or that they wear, or that is attached to their wheelchair - at least in the short-term.

    For some interesting philosophical discussions of Cyborgs and human-computer direct interfacing, see, among others, Hans Moravec, Donna Haraway, and the late Alexander Chislenko (http://www.lucifer.com/~sasha/home.html) - all of whom I don't necessarily agree with 100%, but have some interesting things to say...

    Here are Dr. Nicolelis' web sites, if you want to read more than just NYT about his work:
    http://nicolelis.neuro.duke.edu/
    http://www.neuro.duke.edu/faculty/Nicoleli/Nicol eli.htm
    ...And Dr. Srinivasan at MIT:
    http://webrle.mit.edu/rlestaff/p-srin.htm

  • Yes! (Score:2)

    by Greyfox ( 87712 )
    Now Furious George can go on that robot-arm assisted killing spree he's always wanted! The Man in the Yellow Hat is going to regret calling HIM a BAD MONKEY!
  • Ya man, that's no joke [bbspot.com].

    Rami
    --
  • I just thought of this: Levitation. In the future (ha!) we're almost sure to have some sort of workable, cheap anti-grav. Imagine if it was controlled by someone's mind.

    Effective artificial telekenisis.

    Excellent!

    Rami
    --
  • Wonder if this thing would be sophisticated enough for defusing a bomb? Or scale it down to work on objects too small for human fingers to handle. Gem cutting and surgery spring to mind. Sure robotics already allow this to a degree, but think of the versatility and control.

    Then again, I have enough trouble keeping my joystick calibrated... ;)

  • Need Input (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    If you don't have any feedback from the system, the brain does not realize it is controling the movements. No input= equivalent to dream state. I will be interested sensory input is pipelined directly to the brain . Until then, control depends on correlating brain activity with sensation.

    They could have had the monkey in a room with a banana and just monitored its brain signals as it manipulated its arm. That would have correlation.

    I'm all for someone electricuting the pleasure center of my brain, where is the sign up sheet?
  • I was thinking something more along the lines a remote X session. Do monkeys prefer KDE or GNOME?
  • We'll we really only have two choices for testing medical devices. Florida and monkeys. But Florida can be taken out by a big hurricane and then we'd be left with nothing. So, I chose the monkeys.

    We test things on animals so we DONT HURT HUMANS.
    If Bobo having wires in his brain puts us closer to helping disabled people then HOOK HIM UP.

    Or you can tell the quadraplegics that the reason they still cant do anything, even with all our technology, is because giving them a semi-normal life would hurt an animal.
    FunOne
  • They should have sent you to the project homepage, where you can assist in the distributed training effort by sending stimulation to the pain centers of the monkey's brain when it screws up.

    This is the more important part of the project. While only a few people are paralysed, most end up having disobedient children.

    Unfortunately, they've been having little success in meeting their first objective: teaching the monkey not to curl up in a little ball and scream every time it's hooked up to the arm.

    --------

  • Probability (Score:3)

    by the dweeb ( 169796 ) on Wednesday November 15, 2000 @08:57PM (#620958)
    Given an infinite number of monkey brains and an infinite number of robotic arms, could GM finally build a decent automobile?
  • I had the pleasure of working recently at Duke University's Dept. of Neuroscience and can give all of you an idea of exactly what went on in the Nicolelis lab. For any action that we make, whether it be an arm curl or a leg extension, our brain neurons fire in a specific pattern--specific neurons in our motor cortex fire for specific actions. Using an electrode touching a neural cell, a research is able to check for whether neuron has fired. In the recent field of multielectrode physiology, large numbers of electrodes are surgically implanted into points throughout the motor cortex. From this, a mathematical model can be created to map the pattern of neuron firings when a movement is carried out. Thus, one can train a computer to essentially read brain activity. In the lab's first significant multielectrode experiment, they put a rat in a specially designed cage. The rat was only presented with water when it hit a lever on the side of the cage. To do this, the rat must first extend its arm. Researchers at Duke modelled the arm movement the rat made using implanted electrodes. After a time of "learning," the researcheres were eventually able to disconnect the lever from the water supply entirely, and instead connect the "thought pattern" to the water supply. The rat would get water only when its neurons fired to tell it to extend its arm to press the lever (which at first was essentially the same thing as extending its arm since the rat can't move its arm without thinking about it). Unexpectedly, though after some time the rat began to learn that it was not the lever press that was controlling the water at all. The rat began to learn to control water release by thinking instead of moving. The rat, in effect, learned the thought pattern it needed to produce to get water. From here, Miguel Nicolelis et al. achieved the much more complicated task of modelling movement in both space and time. Instead of just checking for a certain neural firing pattern, a model was needed for three dimensional arm movement. By restraining the monkey to movement in one direction, the researchers were able to model the deconsructed arm movement (i.e. what patterns are created to move the arm up, which patterns to move the arm left). Finally, the neuronal firing models could be reconstructed, and the entire movement modelled. To make the experiment *extra* interesting, the Duke researchers collaborated with MIT researchers to create a robotic arm in Boston, connected to Duke via the internet, which followed the directions that the computer model described. Thus the monkey moved his arm left in real time, and the robotic arm moved its arm left in real time. The implications of these experiments are unreal. Imagine driving a car without using your hands or feet, or giving an amputee a new arm. Heck, one can even imagine that a super-brain could conceivably control an entire zombie body. Some argue that it is likely that humans do not have the brain capacity to control an independent appendage--we may need to give up a part of our brain used for something else. But, who knows! One of us could be the next octopus man, or a candidate for the next cyborg. Robert McGehee

  • Re:Vice versa (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Hmm, headlines in NY Times, Nov. 15 edition, 2002 "Cyborg Monkeys Storm Microsoft Compound". According to the article the "monkeys made strange laughter like sounds and threw 'debris' at the Marketing department". Oddly enough, the monkey's brains were all running a "customized linux kernel"....
  • Thanks for the vote of confidence. I seem to lose karma almost every time I make a single-line comment these days. Ah well. It was not meant as a troll.

  • point me at the animal bill of rights, written by the animal(s). could you?

    Severely mentally disabled people can't write bills of rights either, nor understand them. Yet they have rights. According to your argument, they would have no rights. Does this sound like a good system?

  • Sorry mate, no offence, but that's bull. Nature didn't give *anyone* a right to live. THose rights you think of is artificial, cuddly, nice rights that sure would be nice if they were enforced, but natures is f***ing cruel, hyenas eat their prey while it's still alive, where's the rights and wrongs?

    Sureyou might believe that animals have a right to live, etc, but that's your opinion, other people and predators might not give a toss about what you think.

    I don't like animal testing just in order to develop some bloody schampoo or something, but this testing got a very valid medical point. and in the end if it's between me and the monkey, I think I'd prefer the monkey to die... Not a nice thought, but if I got to be honest...

  • I don't see any benefit to allowing a monkey to control the limbs of a paralysis victim. Thoughts? Anyone?
  • Err, no it doesn't. It still requires registration, but WILL take you to the article if you're registered.
  • Then we'll come up with really interesting next step applications for this technology...

    E.
  • Why not hook up this monkey into Quake and see what he's made of!!

    NO! We don't want to be teaching cyborg monkeys how to kill humans! Talk about irresponsible research...
    ___

  • Yeah, but can it play soccer?

    (Whistle) Handball!

    Oh well, I guess it would be awesome at throw-ins...

  • Jock: wassamaddawishshoe? You dinna catch the ball!!

    Geek: Are you kidding me? Check this out, I just pinged my arm - what do you expect me to do with a latency like that?

  • Why haven't we trained monkeys to defuse bombs already?



  • Well, you don't need to have anything to do with the brain to get the monkey's limbs to move. Remember the old frog-legs-on-the-electric-line? Well, it's easy enough to implant such lines in muscles in such a way that you can coerce them into jerking taught to a quantified extent, without being hurtful to the host of the muscle.

    So how do I have the misfortune of knowing this? Well, let's just allude vaguely to some bet that didn't exist anyway, so hush, and fifty monkeys that wouldn't quite sit and type Shakespeare of their own accord.

  • I mean, wired monkeys have been controlling things over the net for ages. Ok, sure, we call them AOLers and First Posters (or "Management", if you want to be really brutal), but that's an issue of semantics which shouldn't be discussed. I wonder though, how that would compare w/ those new internet enabled sex suits (ugh, wheres the Yahoo! Magazine w/ the link when you need it) I'll avoid the obvious word puns though.

  • Is how a geek news website can be operated by thousands of monkey brains every day.

  • Aw, this is nothing. Scientists back in the 80's hooked up a gorilla brain to a voice synthesizer and various sensory apparatus and created MOFO the Psychic Gorilla [sincity.com]. People have been discussing the amazing psychic powers of MOFO the Psychic Gorilla for years on the IRC channel #Mofo (and before that on the Mofo BBS).

    Stupid monkey-brain-controlled robotic arm. I've seen a gorilla-brain-controlled voice synthesizer with amazing psychic powers, and a dry, sarcastic wit.
  • I would like to see monkey brains controlling BattleBots. What could be moer entertaining than strapping a monkey brain with some electrodes to a 500lb death machine?
    ---
    seumas.com
  • At Northwestern University Medical School they have removed lamprey eel brains, stuck them in oxygen rich saline solution, wired them to a little robot with complete with light sensors, and let it drive around the lab either seeking or avoiding light.

    This has just got B movie science fiction coolness all over it. I wonder if they can make the saline solution bubble like it did in all the movies of the brains in jars?

    (They are mostly studying how to make connections to the brain and how the brain adapts to those connections. The little robot is probably just for media pizzaz or the grad students got drunk and made a bet.)

    Whole article is at sciencenews.org [sciencenews.org].
  • Search further down the page for "lamprey eel". Its a brain-in-jar project.
  • The point of this kind of work would be to allow
    direct brain control of a telerobotic operator that could certainly help in terms of giving them back some autonomy in grocery shopping, buying their medicines, etc.

    The distance work allows for the possibility of decoupling the human from the device that is performing the actions they no longer can. So, a paralyzed person could send out their remote-brain-controlled Waldo to do their shopping, clean their house, whatever. It will help them regain some sense of self-sufficiency - at least they control the robot themselves.

    Also, in this experiement they are controlling a robot arm, not an amputated human arm... doing THAT at a great distance certainly is pretty suspect...

  • Re:Vice versa (Score:3)

    by PD ( 9577 ) <slashdotlinux@pdrap.org> on Thursday November 16, 2000 @06:58AM (#620984) Homepage Journal
    Just make damn sure that when you debug you mount a scratch monkey [tuxedo.org]
  • This story reminded me of the good old Rhesus monkey head transplant [sciam.com]. Dr. White did it 30 years ago and now he wants to do it for a human head. The monkey lived for 8 days.

    Most relevant and most interesting of the linked article is the section on Longer Life for the Paralyzed.
  • User settings for slashdot allow me to ignore a whole range of topics, authors, subjects, etc. There isn't an option to allow me to ignore/not-see articles that require me to register/login to see the link?

    I'd like the option to exclude stories that refer to articles on the NY Times in my slashdot config please.

  • replace "www" with "channel" in any NYT link, and you don't have to spend the 20 secs...

  • Re:Disgusting... (Score:3)

    by TKarrde98 ( 239805 ) on Wednesday November 15, 2000 @10:16PM (#620997)
    People find it acceptable to cut the helpless animal open, attach wires to it, study it, and then likely euthanised it.

    Actually, they probably will monitor it for a long time to monitor the long-term effects of the electrodes on the monkey's brain.

    As for using monkeys instead of humans, there are laws against using humans for high-risk experiments such as this which imply manslaughter to Murder-1. Monkeys, no matter how unfortunate it seems, are not proteced by laws regarding manslaughter. Since primate physiology is the most similar to humans, it makes sence to use a monkey to test the system first. This way they can prove it's relative safety to the Feds before practicing on a human and avoid being attacked for murder by the AMA and FBI.

    * * *

    If this was being done to a dog, or a *gasp* human...

    Are you volunteering? Step up to the plate. If you're going to condemn the scientific community for not being willing to use human subjects, then you had better be willing to be a subject!

    This happened once, by the way. There was a doctor by the name of Erich Hippke in the early 1940's, working in a little Bavarian village by the name of Dachau-- perhaps you've heard of it? Jews and political prisoners became the unwilling human subjects of a curious surgeon who wanted to know just how much strain the human body could take before dying.

    He exposed his "lab animals" (to use your term) to extreme cold, vacuums, severe impacts, etc., all in the name of science, and for the benefit of the Third Reich. Twins were of special usefulness, because if one died, he would have a second subject who was nearly identical for a control group.

    And the most convenient part was, there was no need to euthanize the subjects, because his experiments killed every one sooner or later....

    There's a lot to think about before you begin advocating human test subjects!

    ---------------------
  • I think he was just commenting on the general coolness of that fact. You could, after all, ask "what's so special" about the distances involved in everything we do on the Internet. Well, the distance is one of the things that makes it special.
  • > Whats so important about the distance?

    Simple. They were just trying to justify having OC3 lines to their desks.
  • Why, just the other day, I was thinking of having MY brain wired up to a monkey in Las Vegas, via my cell phone. Then I thought instead to have my brain wired up to a stock broker's, just to see how truly fucked up their version of reality really is. But, then again, I thought why not just have my brain wired up to some porn starlet? And I'll tall you why not... because that would be somewhat fucked up, that's why.

    Hey, next, let's wire up a monkey's ass to a minefield... that could prove amusing for at least 5 minutes... or better yet, lets fuckin' wire up a whole bunch of monkeys to Brad Pitt for no good reason at all other than to say that we've done it.

    OR... we could wire up some scientists to a high voltage / high amperage source and watch all the fun. And when we're done, we can blame it on PETA as we hit some lame-o corp. CEO in the face with a shit pie!

  • What does this research offer paralyzed people? The ability to have a monkey control their limbs from thousands of miles away??


    :|

  • Re:Vice versa (Score:3)

    by Lazarus Short ( 248042 ) on Wednesday November 15, 2000 @08:16PM (#621009) Homepage
    Yes! This has actually been done as part of treatment programs for paralized people. (Here's [techreview.com] one example.)

    The computer in question was taking it's cues from the patient's brain waves, though. The armies of monkeys with robotic brains are still a long ways off, mainly due to the difficulties in getting AI systems to do image recognition [uni-koblenz.de], which is quite possibly the most challenging problem in AI research today.

    --

  • The paralysed people are ecstatic! (Score:5)

    by TheDullBlade ( 28998 ) on Wednesday November 15, 2000 @08:17PM (#621010)
    Finally, instead of having their filthy trained monkeys get their grubby hands all over the food the eat and throwing their feces all over the place, they can get nice, hygenic trained monkey brains-in-jars with clean robotic arms to do their chores.

    In the immortal words of Abe Simpson, "Oh son! This monkey's gonna to change my life! ... Mmm, I can't wait to eat that monkey!"

    --------
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  • Comment removed (Score:3)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday November 15, 2000 @08:22PM (#621026)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Yes, but it's not that simple. We can all agree that humans have a right not to be killed by each other, and yet there are all sorts of exceptions to that right as it is understood in contemporary American legal jurisprudence: self-defense, sovereign immunity, military action, etc.

    Property is not an absolute right. The 5th and 14th amendments allow eminent domain and takings as long as there is just compensation. In your disease example, the government would "purchase" the cure at its fair market value. It happens all the time with less melodramatic examples (like Nixon's papers from his presidency, which were recently bought in a legal settlement with the Federal government).

    Even if you think animals merely have a "qualified" prima-facie right to their lives, you still have a burden to show that normal human practices in the absence of great catastrophe or necessity can override those rights. By relegating it to the status of "mere psychological pleasantry, not a right", you're just begging the question as to what sort of rights animals have in the first place.
  • Funny you quoted the Simpsons.

    I was searching the web for more info on this story last nite, and entering the keywords "monkey brain robot" into the Duke and MIT search engines. I felt like Homer Simpson let loose on Google.

    Oooh, monkey brain robots! Doh!

  • I wonder if the monkey brain knows it is controling some limb. Can he see this limb move? Is there some sort of web cam for the monkey-bot arm?

    I guess what I am asking is:

    Can monkey see what monkey do?

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • This is great, it's the kind of stuff they should be doing--reverse-engineering the brain can lead to innumerable advances, everything from artificial limbs that can feel and work just like real ones to artificial eyes, to even completely interfering with the spinal cord protocol to produce a truly immersive virtual reality.

    The thing I don't understand about it is, why is it taking so long? I know that the brain and the nervous system are extraordinarily complex, and that they are analog rather than digital to further complicate things, but we are able to reverse-engineer things like Soviet submarines and other-companies'-microchips relatively quickly and fairly often. These are pretty complex and they don't come with design documents. Why isn't there a larger effort to actually document things like "the optic nerve protocol" or "the spinal cord protocol"? The benefits to having such specifications for the human nervous system would be unimaginable.

    Of course, there are a lot of complications involved as well--as soon as you begin to manipulate the nervous system you can begin to manipulate reality. When we (or the state) can change what people see and hear directly, things begin to get real sticky, real fast.

    The thing that scares me is that it is inevitable--the nervous system is bound to be cracked someday. What happens when it does? What is going to protect us from sinister uses of the technology? Will the benefits outweigh the risks?

  • Re:Not the first time (Score:3)

    by Daemosthenes ( 199490 ) on Wednesday November 15, 2000 @08:26PM (#621044)
    Here [whitaker.org] is a link talking about the keyboard and the thought controlled cursor, but I don't know if it is exactly the case you're talking about. The stuff about the thought controlled cursor is about a third of the way down the page.


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