Monkey Fitted With Hi-Tech Chip Moves Robot Using Mind Control, Thomas Moore Reports | UK News | Sky News

 

A monkey fitted with a hi-tech brain chip has learned to move a complex robotic arm using mind control.

The chip implant allows the monkey to manipulate the arm by thought

The animal can operate the robot with such dexterity that it can reach out to grab, and turn a handle.

The mechanical arm has an arm, elbow, wrist and simple hand, which the monkey controls with the power of thought.
Sky News was given exclusive access to the laboratory at Pittsburgh University in the United States.

The research is progressing so rapidly that scientists hope to start trials on paralysed patients within a year.

Neurobiologist Dr Andy Schwartz said: "What we're trying to do is go to a very dextrous hand - where the functionality is very similar to the human hand. If we could help stroke patients there would be a huge market for this kind of device."

They also hope to help patients who have been paralysed by spinal chord injuries or degenerative diseases of the nervous system.

Electrodes implanted in the monkey's motor cortex, the brain's movement control centre, pick up pulses within individual neurones.

The signals are relayed to a computer which analyses their pattern and strength to gauge what the monkey is trying to do. It then translates the signals to alter the speed and direction of the robotic arm.

The system is so quick that if the arm overshoots the monkey's intended target, it can rapidly correct the movement.

Dr Schwartz told Sky News: "It's pretty amazing because monkeys aren't used to moving tools.

Monkeys known for their intelligence

"We use them all the time. Imagine you're moving your arm to get that piece of food. Conveying that to a monkey is pretty difficult, yet the monkey learns it fairly rapidly.

"As the days go by, you see the monkeys start using it as if it is part of their own body."

The monkey cannot feel the electrodes in its brain, and did not appear to be distressed by the wires leading from a socket on its head.

At Brown University in New England, scientists have just started the first clinical trials of a similar device. Braingate allows tetraplegic patients to control a computer cursor by thinking about moving their paralysed hand.

Matthew Nagel took part in the first tests of a prototype. Before he died of an unrelated infection, he described how the Braingate device gave him back some freedom.

"I can't put it into words. I just use my brain. I said: 'cursor go up to the top right' and it did. And now I can control it all over the screen. It's wild," he said.

The new trial will be on 15 patients. Scientists hope to prove that the technology is safe and effective enough to use on a wider scale.

Head of the research, Professor John Donoghue, said the ultimate aim is for patients to regain control of their own limbs, which are more sophisticated than any robotic arm.

He told Sky News: "Our goal with Braingate is to have a physical replacement for a broken biological nervous system.

"So we'd like to have a physical system that senses what's going on in the brain, takes those signals inside your body and routes them off to the muscles, so when you think, you move.

"That's just what you or I do, so one day you could be sitting here with a person and you wouldn't know if they had the system or not.

NO ILLNESS!NO AGEING!NO BILLS! And we wouldn't have to die to live in this Utopia.

Welcome to More Fact than Fiction! Here I hope you will find yourself thinking outside the box, questioning everything, and comfortable with that.

Let's get right to the topic of discussion. Today at the beginning of the 21st Century we humans are still making all the same mistakes as our ancestors. You'd think we'd have learnt by now - how to create and sustain a better world for ALL people.

Obviously what we've done since the beginning of civilization hasn't been a great success. Unless our goal was to procreate and fill up the planet; sure we're well on the way. If we wanted those billions of people, in the main, to live a hard life, full of pain, both physical and emotional; suffer disease and poverty; sure we've managed that! But I hardly think that's satisfactory - we need to totally rethink everything.

Here's a question for you.

Would you give up your religion, racism and politics to have a perfect world? Where one equal humanity presides. Where that equal humanity would see us evolve to enjoy a body that would stop the ageing process at age 20, and maintain that forever. Where we'd become smarter by the nano-second. Where we would never get sick or feel physical pain.

Not enough?

What if that one equal humanity was freed from physical work and needed only to think and play - liberated by a nano-technologically and quantum computerized robotic work-force, not requiring human labour to produce our day-to-day needs - leaving us to do science, to explore our universe and to live and love. And most importantly where harming or murdering a fellow human would not even cross the mind of a human.

That is the world I dream of. In my minds-eye I've pictured that beautiful world, where there is no war, no starvation, and no crime. Where we all get along and work together to progress our species. It's that which moved me to write my first novel - 'Infinity 48' - it holds all the secretes and new thinking that could give us such a world.

Utopia can be defined as; a dreamland, bliss, or a paradise; to mention a few. I found that people scoff at the possibility of a Utopia for humans. That's sad.

It's time to lift our expectations, visualise the possibilities and put a progressive plan into action. It will be up to us to make a start! Politicians only think along party lines - a year or two ahead of their next election. Countries, Religions, and Races only think about what's best for their group first; as has been the way of our ancestors and primitives before them - and that is the problem. If we humans were to think about humans as one single united group - as the only grouping that matters; we will have a chance at Utopia.

For me 'a human is a human is a human' That's it! I absolutely believe that if we are to progress and evolve into the remarkable humans I know we can be, the first steps are for us all to be on the same page. If we all believe in each other, and as ONE, we'll need nothing else.

Some of the solutions and some of the medical and scientific breakthroughs I envisage and write about in 'Infinity 48' happening, seem only possible way in the future and no help to us today. I say that what we discover and how soon we discover it will depend largely on how soon we all come together as humans first and only.

Consider if you will, a perfect world in your minds-eye and work back from there - it's not nearly as scary or seemingly impossible that way. You might also be surprised at how many solutions you'll come up with.

Let me leave you with that for today. I look forward to reading your comments.

Bye for now, and good think.
This is K.E.Perrott at More Fact Than Fiction! signing of till next time.
NO ILLNESS! NO AGEING! NO BILLS! The future could be amazing. But will it?
'INFINITY 48' by K.E.Perrott. http://www.infinity48.com/