Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Mind-Machine
I know I at least can't wait for a day when I can control certain bits of technology with thoughts rather than having to, say, give myself repetitive stress injuries with a mouse. With bluetooth prosthetics and monkey-thought-driven robots in the news so much lately, you'd think we're almost there. Well, another study may help us get even closer.
Primates and a few other animals are unique in their consistent use of tools, and how they are able do so has been a perplexing question. A really elegant study by Italian neuroscientists has come to a fascinating conclusion, which makes the dreams above seem more plausible than ever. They found that monkeys' brains essentially 'trick' themselves into treating a tool as part of their own body, as opposed to some intermediary between self and world. The implications of this for cybernetics is, I would think, that the brain is already primed to 'assimilate' new parts or functional groups into itself: we don't need to retrain the brain, or find new regions - we could just use the ones we use anyways without tools.
Primates and a few other animals are unique in their consistent use of tools, and how they are able do so has been a perplexing question. A really elegant study by Italian neuroscientists has come to a fascinating conclusion, which makes the dreams above seem more plausible than ever. They found that monkeys' brains essentially 'trick' themselves into treating a tool as part of their own body, as opposed to some intermediary between self and world. The implications of this for cybernetics is, I would think, that the brain is already primed to 'assimilate' new parts or functional groups into itself: we don't need to retrain the brain, or find new regions - we could just use the ones we use anyways without tools.
Labels: cybernetics, cyberpunk, monkeys, neuroscience, prosthetics, robotics, technology
