BrainGate Neural Interface, from Cyberkinetics. The company currently doing the clinical trial, hoping to get FDA approval. Demo (video) and in-depth information on their site. They were founded by John Donoghue, who is also at Brown University. The key test i the ability to draw a circle - since that requires continual control and adjustment of direction (as opposed to a square; draw line. turn. draw line)
"Messages are passed back and forth as fine and complex spatio-temporal patterns between the 1010 neurons that make up the highly interconnected neocortex." - How Do We Crack the Neural Code? [1] - mind boggeling... to many bad puns in this subject...
Miguel Nicolelis is working on the same general field at Duke - brain plasticity - monkey with(out) joystick (linked image from his site)
He also has his own lab with related website and there is more info from Duke on the monkey controlAnthony Tether, director of Darpa gave a boost in 2002 (according to Wired), and some 25 million dollars are finding their way into the field. Human Assisted Neural Devices being the uniformed way of discussing it, got to love the military machine and their way with words. On another note, the automated car race is still going strong - the 2005 is all set. Good job!
[filling my head with the beats of: Superburst Mixtape 09 - History Of Guns ]
your brain: 3 pound. 100 billion neurons. Uses 20% of the energy use in the body.
BCI or "direct interface" [29 - goes right to the core of cyberpunk and fables like the Matrix. Jack in and everything you think is what "happens". Is it real or a program running somewhere giving you the impulses? And they concept that we can think of (and belive in) both God and the Matrix is either a major glitch or safety valve in the underlying system - to keep us from rejecting singnals and control mechanisms that would otherwise be to unplausible to escape attention? In depth tech articles are online from Brown on their subjects, such as cursor control issues.
neuroscience - learn a bit more about how we learn? Try to avoid going to meta on the subjects. Or just narrow it down wiki-style; "field of study which deals with the structure, function, development, genetics, biochemistry, physiology, pharmacology and pathology of the nervous system. The study of behavior and learning is also a division of neuroscience." (Oh yes, the subject I touched on earlier - dopamines - is also a subset of neuroscience)
Current (as of 2003) work MIT gives a quick run-down of the scope and bredth of neuroscience. Huge link list in the "Related", among them the Society for N. - "Advancing the Understanding of the Brain and Nervous System". Bring out the good stories - as pdf
Work going on in Berlin - they even run an "open" competition on the subject, third verison going on - two more months if you want to contribute and help move the field forward (or just get a new problem to grapple with for a short time)
Bayes
Is it true or is it chance? "the use of Bayes factors has been put forward as justifications for Occam's Razor." And it works pretty well for many spam filters as well....
More on Bayesian? Get a intro text - i'm planning to... always good fun to skim a related subject to get another view of the world (and the tools we use to simulate and estimate it)
