Mind-Machine Merger
From: Technology Review - May 2003 - page 38
By: Gregory T. Huang

Devices that connect the brain with computers could lead to mind-controlled
robots, repair neurological disorders, and even improve memory.  

Ted Berger is a mind reader. The minds of rats, that is.  In his lab at the
University of Southern California, the neurobiologist places a tiny array of
electrodes onto a slice of a rat's brain in a petri dish. With the flip of a
switch, graduate student Walid Soussou starts the flow of electrical signals
into the tissue. The brain cells respond by generating their own electrical
impulses. This swirling pattern of neural signals is picked up by the
electrodes and appears on a nearby computer screen as a wash of colors
ranging from brilliant red to dark blue.  

For the next few hours, Berger and his team will map out the circuitry behind
one of the brain's most complex functions: memory. It's basic research, but
they are doing it with a big technological goal in mind. Berger's group aims
to use the information to build an advanced "brain-machine interface" - a
device that links the biological circuits of a brain to the silicon circuits
of a computer - that will change how the mind thinks.  

In recent years, research groups around the country have implanted electrodes
in the brains of animals - and even a few humans - and have used signals
detected by those electrodes to move robot arms, levers, and cursors on
computer screens. The aim of the work has been to give paralyzed patients the
ability to control prosthetic limbs and simple communication tools. But
Berger's objective is even more far-reaching: to build a computer chip that
will restore the cognitive abilities of the brain itself, aiding memory in
patients who suffer from such neurological disorders as Alzheimer's disease
and stroke and perhaps eventually enhancing the abilities of healthy minds.
To do so, the researchers have to understand neural processes that may be
more complicated than those that govern, say, the control of a prosthetic
arm. "It's one of the most ambitious projects in the whole field," says
Christof Koch, an expert on computation and neural systems at Caltech.  

http://www-hbp.usc.edu/people/berger.htm
http://www.usc.edu/dept/biomed/faculty/berger.html


Mind-Machine Merger
From: Technology Review - May 2003
By: Gregory T. Huang

The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is funding a half-dozen
brain-machine interface projects for $24 million over two years, and program
manager Alan Rudolph says these technologies could both restore and enhance
cognitive functions, and have "transformational consequences for defense and
society." A Duke University team led by Miguel Nicolelis is attempting to
develop real-time, two-way mind-machine communication so that animals and
later humans can perform sophisticated operations, while University of
Michigan researchers guided by Daryl Kipke are implanting electrodes into
rodent and primate brains and teaching the test animals to control six-legged
robots via the interface. Such research could one day yield interfaces that
allow people to control machines by thought while simultaneously receiving
multisensory feedback. Meanwhile, Ted Berger of the University of Southern
California is trying to build a computer chip that could be used to bring a
damaged hippocampus back to full functionality, as well as augment memory in
a healthy brain. Wake Forest University's Sam Deadwyler, a collaborator on
Berger's project, believes that such technology could enable people to retain
memories longer or remember more and more information. Tomaso Poggio and
James DiCarlo of MIT are testing ways to tweak the sending, receiving, and
processing of sensory input to enhance a person's communicative and
perceptive faculties, perhaps to the point where one brain will be able to
wirelessly communicate with another. A key challenge in brain-machine
interface research is physically integrating electronics and brain cells in a
sustainable way, according to John Chapin of the State University of New York
Downstate Medical Center. Wide acceptance of such breakthroughs will depend
on whether researchers can find a noninvasive technique to connect brain to
machine. 

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