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Sitaram · Site Admin Joined: 14 Sep 2005 Posts: 1079

http://sulekha.com/chpost.asp?for...ilosophy&show=0&cid=74655

Pursuing a Dream but Caught in a Nightmare

"I'm pursuing a dream," he said. "And I'm going to keep on trying to
reach that limit, when I can accomplish this dream. It's all worth it-
-even if it means having a crazy life." - MIGUEL NICOLELIS

================

Sitaram comments: In pursuing a dream, may we encounter a nightmare.?

How long is it before our cleverness backfires and we unleash a
monstrous genii which we can never put back into the bottle.

Imagine a time in the distant future, when a brain, human or animal,
controls miles of devices and mechanisms as an extended body.
Imagine a new race of genetically re-engineered humanoids,
with "designer genes". Perhaps they will be more perfect that we
could ever imagine. Perhaps they will be totally selfless, devoted
to the good of all. Perhaps they will be totally devoid of lust,
greed, sloth, envy. Or, perhaps they will evolve and take control
and spread as a dominant species. Is it our duty, through
technology, to eliminate all that we despise within ourselves?

==================

"One most provocative, and controversial, question is whether the
brain can actually incorporate a machine as part of its
representation of the body," he said. "I truly believe that it is
possible. The brain is continuously learning and adapting, and
previous studies have shown that the body representation in the brain
is dynamic. So, if you created a closed feedback loop in which the
brain controls a device and the device provides feedback to the
brain, I would predict that as people or animals learn to use the
device, their brains will basically dedicate neuronal space to
represent that device.

"If such incorporation of artificial devices works, it would quite
likely be possible to augment our bodies in virtual space in ways
that we never thought possible," Nicolelis said. "For example, in our
modest experiment at using brain wave patterns to control the robot
arm over the Internet, if we extended the capabilities of the arm by
engineering in feedback - such as visual, force or texture - such
closed-loop control might result in the remote arm being incorporated
into the body's representation in the brain. Once you establish a
closed loop, you're basically telling the brain that the external
device is part of the body representation. The major question in my
mind now is what is the limit of such incorporation."

Said co-author Mandayam Srinivasan, director of the MIT
laboratory, "When we initially conceived the idea of using monkey
brain signals to control a distant robot across the Internet, we were
not sure how variable delays in signal transmission would affect the
outcome. Even with a standard TCP/IP connection, it worked out
beautifully. It was an amazing sight to see the robot in my lab move,
knowing that it was being driven by signals from a monkey brain at
Duke. It was as if the monkey had a 600-mile-long virtual arm."

http://koti.mbnet.fi/anyara/sdesp1.htm

================================

Deeds of violence in our society are performed largely by those
trying to establish their self-esteem, to defend their self-image,
and to demonstrate that they, too, are significant. - Rollo May

He who despises himself esteems himself as a great self-despiser. -
Friedrich Nietzsche

Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise
himself. - George Santayana

There are many things we despise in order that we may not have to
despise ourselves. - Vauvenargues

Blessed are they who heal us of self-despising. Of all services which
can be done to man, I know of none more precious. - William Hale
White

===========================================

http://www.chronicle.duke.edu/vnews/display.v/ART/2003/09/30/3f7972517
20bf

MIGUEL NICOLELIS, M.D.
Professor of Neurobiology
Co-Director, Center for Neuroengineering, Duke University

Although Dr. Miguel Nicolelis still entertains the dream of one day
playing for the Brazilian national soccer team, he is making far
larger strides toward finding a way to restore motor function in
paralyzed patients.

Co-director of the Center for Neuroengineering, professor of
neurobiology and philanthropist, Nicolelis is realizing another dream
and in the process, turning heads in the international scientific
community.

"My dream is to understand how large brain sequences work to create
motor functions and use that information to clinically treat
paralysis," said Nicolelis.

Nicolelis and his research team were awarded an unprecedented $26
million grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in
2002 to design a brain-machine interface program that could test
whether neuroprosthetic devices can be used to restore motor-function
in paralysis victims.

Next week, he anticipates, the fledgling Public Library of Science
Journal, meant to compete "head to head" with the well-established
Science and Nature journals, will debut exciting preliminary clinical
data on neuroprosthetic devices that can be controlled simply by
thinking about it.

Last year, Nicolelis's research team found that monkeys can
incorporate a robot arm into their thoughts and control the robot.
This soon-to-be published article marks the beginning of clinical
trials attempting to confirm what Nicolelis already found to be the
case with monkey tests.

The implications of Nicolelis's research is far-reaching. There are
currently over 200,000 people who are paralyzed and each year, 10,000
more will become paralyzed. The possibility of regaining mobility is
revolutionary.

"This is about trying to create something that doesn't exist," said
Nicolelis. "I'm a physician by training and to me, the possibility of
restoring motor function by creating an exoskeleton robot--or even
bypassing the lesion in the spinal chord--is incredible."

Chair of Neurobiology Dr. James McNamara is enthusiastic about the
propitious results of Nicolelis's research.

"I think that Miguel's work is terrifically interesting," he
said. "In particular, the idea that neuronal recordings from one's
brain could drive a robot to perform a task one thinks about--that is
really interesting and promising."

Although the potential societal benefits from this research are huge,
his research has on multiple occasions fallen victim to the rumor
mill.

Hannah Hoag, an intern at Nature wrote a sensational feature article
in June, contriving DARPA's goals as going beyond trying to
rehabilitate paralyzed veterans and intending to create devices "to
enhance normal human function" and "allow images to be relayed direct
to the brains of military personnel" similar to The Matrix. Defending
his research, Nicolelis pointed to the fact that her "more sinister
interpretation would not be possible" to realize in the near future,
and that his contract with DARPA is not classified information.

Nicolelis has also had to defend the integrity of his research with
animal rights and research watchdog groups. In 2001, Stop Animal
Exploitation Now! named Nicolelis as "unnecessarily harming primates
and violating federal reporting standards." In response, Nicolelis
said the primates were treated with the highest of standards and that
there is no proof of any intention to harm the animals.

"The primates receive better medical care than most people in the
country," he said. "It was just a political act, trying to generate
attention."

In spite of such rumors and controversies surrounding Nicolelis, he
is more known for his boldness and relentless passion for science
research.

"Beside playing for the Brazilian national soccer team, I can't
imagine doing anything as exciting as discovering new break-throughs
and reaching milestones," he said. "Science has to be ambitious! You
have to dare."

Nicolelis's daring research straddles the cutting edge of both
neurobiology and biomedical research, and as co-director of the
Center for Neuroengineering together with Craig Henriquez, who is
also assistant professor of biomedical engineering and computer
science, the center is intended to become a world recognized research
program in brain-machine interfaces.

"The brain is the next great frontier for biomedical technology and
Duke should be at the forefront of this and bring together two world
recognized programs in biomedical engineering and neurobiology,"
Henriquez said.

The center was founded to establish a formal structure through which
enhanced interaction between engineering and neuroscience at Duke
could be fostered. Hardly three years old, the Center is growing in
leaps and bounds.

In conjunction with the departments of biomedical engineering and
neurobiology, the center is now beginning to hire engineering tenure
track and research faculty with expertise in other aspects of
neuroengineering, said Henriquez. Among managing the $26 million
DARPA research project, developing new courses and research projects
for students, preparing for the new Nicolelis Primate Laboratory and
hiring new faculty, the co-directors are constantly busy, he added.

"This has been a very busy time for the center.... There is enough
work for four directors--let alone two," Henriquez said.

Amid the hectic atmosphere at the center, Nicolelis manages to find
time to work on an ambitious and progressive project to build a
neuroscience research center in Natal, Brazil, within three years.
The institute will include a mental health clinic, a school for
underprivileged children and a museum, highlighting the achievements
of Brazilian scientists over the years. Five hundred poor Brazilian
children each year will be given a scholarship called the Fellowship
for Life, which will provide them with the opportunity to receive
their primary education at the institute.

"We want to create a new generation of kids to build the country," he
said.

Nicolelis, along with over 20 neuroscientists around the world, plan
on this institute in Brazil becoming the beginning of an
international network of institutes to collaborate on large
neuroscience projects.

Since Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Brazil's current president came to
power, he has pledged his support of scientific research initiatives
in the country. The Brazilian government already donated 300 square
acres to build the institute on and $1.2 million in seed money to
start the plans for the neuroscience center.

"There is a large community of Brazilians abroad at a very high level
of science," he said. "With the current political climate in Brazil,
this is the opportunity to build the country."

Nicolelis continues to the push the bar of excellence in medicine,
academia and science a notch higher.

"I'm pursuing a dream," he said. "And I'm going to keep on trying to
reach that limit, when I can accomplish this dream. It's all worth it-
-even if it means having a crazy life."

http://www.dukenews.duke.edu/research/NICONAT.HTM

MONKEYS CONTROL A ROBOT ARM VIA BRAIN SIGNALS

DURHAM, N.C. - Duke University Medical Center researchers and their
colleagues have tested a neural system on monkeys that enabled the
animals to use their brain signals, as detected by implanted
electrodes, to control a robot arm to reach for a piece of food. The
scientists even transmitted the brain signals over the Internet,
remotely controlling a robot arm 600 miles away.

According to the scientists, their recording and analysis system, in
which the electrodes remained implanted for two years in one animal,
could form the basis for a brain-machine interface that would allow
paralyzed patients to control the movement of prosthetic limbs. Their
finding also supports new thinking about how the brain encodes
information, by spreading it across large populations of neurons and
by rapidly adapting to new circumstances.

In an article in the Nov. 16, 2000, Nature, Miguel Nicolelis,
associate professor of neurobiology, and his colleagues described how
they tested their system on two owl monkeys - implanting arrays of as
many as 96 electrodes, each less than the diameter of a human hair,
into the monkeys' brains.

The technique they used, called "multi-neuron population recordings"
was developed by co-author John Chapin and Nicolelis. It allows large
numbers of single neurons to be recorded separately, and then
combines their information using a computer coding algorithm.

The scientists implanted the electrodes in multiple regions of the
brain's cortex, including the motor cortex from which movement is
controlled. The scientists then recorded the output of these
electrodes as the animals learned reaching tasks, including reaching
for small pieces of food.

The scientists fed the mass of neural signal data generated during
many repetitions of these tasks into a computer, which analyzed the
brain signals to determine whether it was possible to predict the
trajectory of the monkey's hand from the signals. In this analysis,
the scientists used simple mathematical methods to predict hand
trajectories in real-time as the monkeys learned to make different
types of hand movements.

Said Chapin, who is at the State University of New York Health
Science Center, "In a previous paper [published in the July 1, 1999,
Nature Neuroscience], we found that rats were able to use their
neuronal population activity to control a robot arm, which they used
to bring water to their mouths. At the beginning of the experiments,
the animals had to press down a lever to generate the brain activity
needed to move the robot arm. Over continued training, however, their
lever movements diminished while their brain activity remained the
same."

Said Nicolelis, "We found two amazing things, both in the earlier rat
studies and in our new studies on these primates. One is that the
brain signals denoting hand trajectory shows up simultaneously in all
the cortical areas we measured. This finding has important
implications for the theory of brain coding which holds that
information about trajectory is distributed really over large
territories in each of these areas - even though the information is
slightly different in each area.

"The second remarkable finding is that the functional unit in such
processing does not seem to be a single neuron," Nicolelis
said. "Even the best single-neuron predictor in our samples still
could not perform as well as an analysis of a population of neurons.
So, this provides further support to the idea that the brain very
likely relies on huge populations of neurons distributed across many
areas in a dynamic way to encode behavior."

Once the scientists demonstrated that the computer analysis could
reliably predict hand trajectory from brain signal patterns, they
then used the brain signals from the monkeys - as processed by the
computer - to allow the animals to control a robot arm moving in
three dimensions. They even tested whether the signals could be
transmitted over a standard Internet connection, controlling a
similar arm in MIT's Laboratory for Human and Machine Haptics -
informally known as the Touch Lab [<http://touchlab.mit.edu/>].

Said co-author Mandayam Srinivasan, director of the MIT
laboratory, "When we initially conceived the idea of using monkey
brain signals to control a distant robot across the Internet, we were
not sure how variable delays in signal transmission would affect the
outcome. Even with a standard TCP/IP connection, it worked out
beautifully. It was an amazing sight to see the robot in my lab move,
knowing that it was being driven by signals from a monkey brain at
Duke. It was as if the monkey had a 600-mile-long virtual arm."

Besides Nicolelis, Srinivasan and Chapin, other co-authors of the
paper were, from Duke, Johan Wessberg, Christopher Stambaugh, Jerald
Kralik, Pamela Beck and Mark Laubach; and from MIT, Jung Kim and
James Biggs. The scientists' work is supported by the National
Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency and the Office of Naval Research.

"The reliability of this system and the long-term viability of the
electrodes lead us to believe that this paradigm could eventually be
used to help paralyzed people restore some motor function," Nicolelis
said.

"This system also offers a new paradigm to study basic questions of
how the brain encodes information. For example, now that we've used
brain signals to control an artificial arm, we can progress to
experiments in which we change the properties of the arm or provide
visual or tactile feedback to the animal, and explore how the brain
adapts to it. Understanding such adaptation will allow us to make
inferences about how the brain normally encodes information."

Nicolelis and his colleagues will soon begin such "closed-loop"
experiments, in which movement of the robot arm generates tactile
feedback signals in the form of pressure on the animals' skin. Also,
they are providing visual feedback by allowing the animal to watch
the movement of the arm. The scientists' experiments with learning in
rats that were reported in Nature last July have already indicated
that the analysis system can detect adaptive brain changes associated
with learning.

Such feedback studies could also potentially improve the ability of
paralyzed people to use such a brain-machine interface to control
prosthetic appendages, said Nicolelis. In fact, he said, the brain
could prove extraordinarily adept at using feedback to adapt to such
an artificial appendage.

"One most provocative, and controversial, question is whether the
brain can actually incorporate a machine as part of its
representation of the body," he said. "I truly believe that it is
possible. The brain is continuously learning and adapting, and
previous studies have shown that the body representation in the brain
is dynamic. So, if you created a closed feedback loop in which the
brain controls a device and the device provides feedback to the
brain, I would predict that as people or animals learn to use the
device, their brains will basically dedicate neuronal space to
represent that device.

"If such incorporation of artificial devices works, it would quite
likely be possible to augment our bodies in virtual space in ways
that we never thought possible," Nicolelis said. "For example, in our
modest experiment at using brain wave patterns to control the robot
arm over the Internet, if we extended the capabilities of the arm by
engineering in feedback - such as visual, force or texture - such
closed-loop control might result in the remote arm being incorporated
into the body's representation in the brain. Once you establish a
closed loop, you're basically telling the brain that the external
device is part of the body representation. The major question in my
mind now is what is the limit of such incorporation."

Besides experimenting with such feedback systems, Nicolelis and his
colleagues are planning to increase the number of implanted
electrodes, with the aim of achieving 1,000-electrode arrays. They
are also developing a "neurochip" that will greatly reduce the size
of the circuitry required for sampling and analysis of brain signals.

"We envision that this neurochip can become an essential component of
the type of hybrid-brain-machine interfaces that may one day be used
to restore motor function in paralyzed patients," said
Nicolelis. "These activities will serve as the backbone of a new
Center for Neural Analysis and Engineering currently being created at
Duke."

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