Future Now
The IFTF Blog
3 brain interface developments
Note that of these three developments in neural interfaces, indicators of the Extended Self, two are funded by military in hopes of augmenting and rebuilding soldiers.
At University of Utah, researchers are going to put up to $10.3 million into developing a bionic arm, which is part of $55 million that the Department of Defense is putting into replacement limb research. Signals from the brain coming down along nerves to the remainder of the amputated limb would be transmitted to a device worn on the belt and then wired to the robotic arm, and similarly from the arm back to the brain.
"Imagine an artificial arm that moves naturally in response to your thoughts, that allows you to feel both the outside world and your own movements, and that is as strong and graceful as an intact, biological limb," says bioengineer Greg Clark, the University of Utah's principal investigator on the project. "That's what our researchers, teaming with others around the world, are setting out to achieve. … People's arms and hands are not only tools, but also an important means by which they explore the world and interact with others. We hope to restore that capability."
At the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry, Peter Fromherz, a professor of biophysics, is experimenting with attaching rat nerve cells to semiconductor chips. So far, the chip has been able to recognize signals coming from the nerve cell and they can stimulate the nerve cell with the chip's capacitor. These are small steps, but foundational for further experiments in neural interfaces.
Eventually, the NaChip team plans to move beyond the single rat cell to rat brain. According to Fromherz, the scientists have all of the tools to couple hundreds of neurons to a semiconductor chip and conceivably perform simple computations.
Another interesting story is the work being done by Dr. Paul Bach-y-Rita at the University of Wisconsin. Proving what was once doubted, the plasticity of the adult brain, Dr. Rita has been working since the 1960s on using the tongue as a substitute port for visual information or even a 6th sense of sorts. Since the tongue conducts electricity fairly well thanks to saliva, and occupies a substantial part of the somatosensory cortex, blind and blindfolded testers have been able to interpret visual information from a video camera conveyed through a 12x12 array of electrodes on their tongue. Of course, 144 pixels is not much resolution and it's not restoring vision, but testers have been able to correctly identify letters on wall charts and report being able to 'see' a ball rolling off a table. The ultimate goal would be to have a camera embedded in glasses that would relay data wirelessly to a dental retainer and one of Rita's electrode arrays, but with higher resolution.
Rita's research is somewhat old news (this image is from 2001), but the tongue-brain-port is now being tested as a way to augment the sensory capabilities of soldiers:
Researchers at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition envision their work giving Army Rangers 360-degree unobstructed vision at night and allowing Navy SEALs to sense sonar in their heads while maintaining normal vision underwater...