Looking at the brain... seeing the mind [Archive]

Ordinary_Guy

09-19-2006, 07:49 AM

A great staple of SF is the brain-machine interface. It's a technology with amazing potential – both good and bad. A few examples of such technology in SF leap to mind:
Neuromancer, by William Gibson: one of the granddaddies of the cyberpunk movement, this SF sub-genre redefined the brain-machine interface. Other stories of his that tread on this ground: Burning Chrome, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Johnny Mnemonic: The Screenplay.
Hardwired, by Walter Jon Williams: a similar take on brain-machine interfaces (and generally a cool read).
We Can Remember It for You Wholesale, by Philip K. Dick: The basis for the 1990 film Total Recall, this had to do with implanting memories and questioning the nature of what's real. The Minority Report had machines able to read the visions of certain "gifted" folk, while Paycheck had memory themes as well...
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, by Charlie Kaufman: another adventure in memory manipulation, perception and questioning reality...
Brainstorm, by Philip Frank Messina, Robert Stitzel and Bruce Joel Rubin (story): A fantastic flick about the recording of sensation directly from the brain and playing it back. It also shows the progression of technology from clunky prototype to streamlined final version. It gives a fair shake to the possibilities of the tech, both good and bad.
Strange Days, by James Cameron: On a similar note as Brainstorm, Strange Days looks at the use and abuse of recorded sensation.
Feel free to add to the list – the more sources we can reference to see what's been done, the better we can build on those to explore new ground...

Ordinary_Guy

09-19-2006, 08:01 AM

There's an old saying: before criticizing, you should walk a mile in the other man's shoes. It's wise advice – then, when you actually do criticize the guy, you'll be a mile away and have his shoes.

But seriously...

Here's a little modern science that to help nudge the imagination for brain-machine interfaces. In this case, the headline, if a little technical, says it best: (http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn10108)...
'Spectrum of empathy' found in the brain
17:00 18 September 2006
NewScientist.com news service
Rowan Hooper

Ever wondered how some people can “put themselves into another person's shoes” and some people cannot? Our ability to empathise with others seems to depend on the action of "mirror neurons" in the brain, according to a new study.

Mirror neurons, known to exist in humans and in macaque monkeys, activate when an action is observed, and also when it is performed. Now new research reveals that there are mirror neurons in humans that fire when sounds are heard. In other words, if you hear the noise of someone eating an apple, some of the same neurons fire as when you eat the apple yourself.

So-called auditory mirror neurons were known only in macaques. To determine if they exist in humans Valeria Gazzola, at the school of behavioural and cognitive neurosciences neuroimaging centre at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, and colleagues, put 16 volunteers into functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanners and observed their brains as they were played different noises.

The volunteers heard noises such as a sheet of paper being torn, or of someone crunching potato chips. Then the same subjects were scanned again, this time whilst tearing a piece of paper, or eating potato chips.

Vicarious crunching

“We combined the data from listening and execution and looked to see if the activity in the brain overlaps,” says Gazzola’s colleague Christian Keysers, also at the University of Groningen. Sure enough, it did overlap. Motor neurons associated with mouth actions (crunching) and hand actions (ripping) were activated in both cases...
The article goes on and it's definitely worth a read. Also worth noticing are the "Related Articles" listed to the right (interesting, if not a little disturbing).

Ordinary_Guy

09-20-2006, 12:26 AM

Because I believe in recycling (I have small green altar and I occasionally light a candle and hope nothing catches on fire...), here is a post that's 86% previously viewed material. It seemed to fit here, though, so I'm centralizing posts for your edjamacational pleasure.

In further evidence of the march of machines not only into our brains but our thoughts, here's a little food for thought (http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-09/uosc-bac091506.php):
Brain's action center is all talk

Collaboration between USC, UCLA, UC Berkeley and Italian University finds strong mental link between actions and words

Neuroscience is tackling a problem that obsessed Hamlet: What is the difference in our minds between talk and action?

Less than you would expect, an international research group reports in the Sept. 19 issue of Current Biology.

The brain's premotor cortex shows the same activity pattern when subjects observe an action as when they hear words describing the same action, the study's authors said.

"If you hear the word 'grasp,' it's actually the premotor cortex that's active, not just a separate, abstract semantic area in the brain," said lead investigator Lisa Aziz-Zadeh, assistant professor of occupational sciences with a joint appointment in the Brain and Creativity Institute of the USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

The premotor cortex has long been identified as a center of activity for actions. The notion that it could also process verbal descriptions of those actions has met some resistance.

"Neuroscience is coming around to this idea, but there hasn't been much data supporting it," Aziz-Zadeh said.

To change that, Aziz-Zadeh recruited 12 volunteers and used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to compare the same areas of the premotor cortex in the same subject as the person observed an action and heard language describing the action.

The premotor area involved during observation of a specific action, such as kicking, also lit up when the subject heard the corresponding word. This was the first study to make such a direct comparison, Aziz-Zadeh said.

Other studies found activity in the same areas during execution of an action, Aziz-Zadeh added, offering indirect evidence for the existence of "mirror neuron" systems that activate both when a person performs a task and when the person watches someone else perform the task.

"The study does demonstrate the intimate linkage between the way we talk about actions and the neural machinery that supports those actions. That's very intriguing," said USC University Professor Michael Arbib...
The article goes on and it's definitely worth a read.

For that machine-brain interface, this takes it away from the sensory realm and into the cognitive realm. I still think we'll see sensory interface first, but this brings machine-based mind reading a step closer...

TheIT

09-20-2006, 12:41 AM

:: cue Twilight Zone music ::

I think this goes under the "great minds think alike" category (pun intended ;) ). My fantasy WIP is exploring similiar ideas, though I'm using magic rather than science. My MC is an out of control touch empath and doesn't know it. She can "share" what other people are feeling through touch. I'm also exploring an idea where two people who can wield magic can "share minds" to learn from each other via magic. It's not telepathy, more of a way to feel how the other person moves or wields the power. The first article with the "mirror-neurons" is very much what I had in mind.

The second article brings up a good point about action language affecting listeners. As writers, it certainly lends support to using active language to provoke a response in readers.

Ordinary_Guy

09-20-2006, 01:01 AM

...My fantasy WIP is exploring similiar ideas, though I'm using magic rather than science. My MC is an out of control touch empath and doesn't know it. She can "share" what other people are feeling through touch. I'm also exploring an idea where two people who can wield magic can "share minds" to learn from each other via magic. It's not telepathy, more of a way to feel how the other person moves or wields the power. The first article with the "mirror-neurons" is very much what I had in mind.
Happy to help!

I'm more of an SF-oriented guy, but I've always wondered what kind of function magic would use to determine "truth" (ie: after someone had taken a potion thereof). A lot of magic-neurology interaction going on there...
The second article brings up a good point about action language affecting listeners. As writers, it certainly lends support to using active language to provoke a response in readers.
I hadn't thought of that. Very cool!

Ordinary_Guy

09-21-2006, 12:02 PM

Two more examples of tech-mind interface in SF...
Demolition Man, by Peter M. Lenkov (story), Robert Reneau (story), Daniel Waters (screenplay), Robert Reneau (screenplay) and Peter M. Lenkov(screenplay): A bit of B-movie fluff, it was still good for a laugh and some colorful characters. For our purposes, while prisoners were incarcerated in a type of semi-suspended animation, skills and behavioral traits were implanted. It had Sly Stallone impulsively knitting (while the inside-job badguys woke with all kinds of nefarious skills). In this respect, an interesting bit of SF snuck into an action movie...
The Matrix, by Larry and Andy Wachowski: This one takes the machine-brain interface to a whole new level, with the general population living a simulation virtually indistinguishable from real life. Not sure if it's original, but the execution of the idea was awesome. On a slightly lower level (though closer to practicality) is instant skill/knowledge downloading to a brain. Neo, the main character, is trained to fight at expert levels in a dozen different styles in about two minutes. Finding himself needing to pilot a helicopter, he learns with a quick call to home base. Man, that would make school so much quicker...

yanallefish

09-22-2006, 09:12 AM

*g*I have one of my own, actually: several years back I did a series concerning brain-computer interfaces... PariahOnline got it, "Cherryn Rainbow" was the name. Basically people "plugged in", some for life, some for various stretches of time. I liked playing with the sociology of "hookups" vs "other people"... every so often I come up with something else in that "world".

...on the topic of Actual Big-Time Authors, there's The Terminal Man by Michael Crichton, and Total Recall I guess fits too... Accellerando also.

Not to mention the Borg from Star Trek.

Shweta

09-22-2006, 12:16 PM

The mirror neuron story is a great one, and I'm jealous that OG beat me to it :D

There's fun stuff like... oh... there's some doctor somewhere who got to do single-neuron studies on humans. (You can if you already have their brain open for surgery, and you have to prod at some neurons to make sure you're not cutting through important stuff.)

He found that his patients had the same neurons activated when he poked their fingers with a pin, and when he let them watch him poke his own finger with a pin.

Wish I could remember who this was.

Anyway, one problem with scanning studies is that you can only ever get correlation. You can show that those two things make the same area light up; but you can't show that that has any functional effect. So there have also been some reaction-time studies on this, which can't show which bit of the brain is active, but can show if one thing affects the processing of another.

So one I know about prety well... uh... because I did it... was (with colleagues: Bergen (http://www2.hawaii.edu/~bergen/), Feldman (http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~feldman/), Weinberg) looking at simple motor-action verbs.

We gave people a matching task (do these two mean the same thing). In the first study they got pictures of stick-men performing actions, followed by words like KICK. In the second, they got words like KICK followed by near-synonyms.

So, what we were interested in was the mismatch case, where the correct answer was "No". In both studies what we found was that the "no" came significantly more slowly when the mismatched actions involved the same body part.

--Which suggests shared activation, probably of motor areas.

EDIT: In case you want them, here are the papers:
http://www2.hawaii.edu/~bergen/papers/bergenetal.pdf
http://www2.hawaii.edu/~bergen/papers/Narayanetal.pdf

TheIT

09-25-2006, 04:18 AM

Two examples from television:

Blake's 7 had a character named Gan who was a convicted murderer. Part of his punishment was a chip implanted in his brain to prevent violent behavior. Whenever he attempted to attack someone, the chip caused painful migraines.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The character Spike, a vampire, was implanted with a chip in his head to prevent him from attacking humans. Whenever he tried attacking a human, the chip floored him with painful migraine headaches. From a writer's perspective, it was a plot device to allow Spike to work with the good guys without trying to eat them. OK, fine, I can handle that. But then the writers kept going. Turns out the chip only caused pain whenever he attacked a human. If he attacked anything non-human, no pain. They started using Spike's chip as a human detection device. If Spike could punch someone without screaming in agony, the other person was obviously not human.

So, my question (as an engineer) is how the %&*@ was Spike's chip able to tell? I could see the chip responding to Spike's aggression (like Gan's). I could even handle the chip reacting to Spike's belief (Spike believes the other person is human, he tries to hurt the other person which he knows is a wrong thing to do, therefore pain). But how could a piece of electronics stuck in Spike's brain detect non-humans?

I'm a fan of both shows, but the logical inconsistencies of Spike's chip taxed my willingness to disbelieve.

Shweta

09-25-2006, 06:13 AM

yyyeah, IT.

In fact, it would probably have gone off if he'd seen any similarities to humans at all, given the mirror neuron research. The same way, say, playing a first-person shooter can make some people (including me) feel uneasy even though we know it's not real.

Also, if it was reacting to aggression, it might well overreact and get them if they even start getting angry. Or possibly even if they imagine hitting someone...

Argh, scary tech. There might be a story in that, I dunno. A prisoner implanted with such a chip, finding that anything that upsets 'em sets off the migraines...
I don't see much plot resolution though. What are they going to do, turn Buddhist?

Edit: That last was a reference to the current discussion on Diana's magick thread about lack of attachment.

Ordinary_Guy

09-25-2006, 12:02 PM

Cool points, folks...

***
Here's another example (http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa003&articleID=00045791-AF72-1511-AF7283414B7F0000) of technology decoding how the brain works.
Brain Area Foils Fear

The human brain must constantly screen incoming stimuli for relevance. Without such screening, the brain would quickly be overwhelmed by the sheer number of stimuli we experience every day. Some of the most profound stimuli--such as other people's faces--trigger an emotional response, but there are times when fear or even happiness must be kept at bay as the brain works to solve a problem. New research has shown how the brain goes about accomplishing this task.

The brain structure known as the amygdala plays a key role in generating and perpetuating emotions such as fear by sending signals into the hypothalamus, which controls the sympathetic nervous system. The amygdala's neighbors in the brain include the anterior cingulate cortex, which neuroscientists think controls various so-called executive processes, such as deciding where attention should be focused. The rostral region of this portion of the cortex (the area on the bottom toward the front) connects directly with the amygdala, and some had speculated that the former might play a role in monitoring emotional states, allowing them to flourish when appropriate but suppressing them when not.

Designing a test of this hypothesis, however, had proved challenging. Amit Etkin of Stanford University and his colleagues turned to a classic study of conflict in the brain--the Stroop task--in which the name of a color and the color of the letters in that name either match or not. They tweaked it to create an emotional conflict: pairing faces displaying particular emotional states with words written across them that either identified that state or not, such as “fear” displayed on a smiling face. While being scanned by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), 19 subjects stared at 148 versions of these pairings, clicking a button to indicate whether that person was happy or afraid.

The researchers found that subjects were able to resolve conflicting images more quickly if they were preceded by other conflicting images, indicating that the brain was preparing itself for such conflict resolution. And the fMRI revealed that the emotional pictures did, in fact, activate the amygdala, but that when the face and word were discordant, the rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC) also lit up and inhibited the activation of this emotion-controlling structure. "For example, if someone is walking on an empty street at night and hears a loud banging sound in the near distance, the amygdala would immediately light up," explains Joy Hirsch of Columbia University, senior author of the paper presenting the result in the September 21 issue of Neuron. "Once the source is determined, the rACC determines if action is needed or not. For example, if it was a car door slamming, the rACC would shut down the amygdala."

It is possible, however, that those roles are reversed: the amygdala habitually dampening the rACC and then letting it loose when emotional activity is reduced. But the rACC always seems to activate when assessing these stimuli, and tests of skin conductance on 10 different subjects exposed to the same test showed that the sympathetic nervous system was indeed less active when the rACC was inhibiting. The finding suggests a two-stage response to perceived threats as well as what might be malfunctioning in patients suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. It may simply be that one of the executive portions of the brain is failing to calm its emotional colleague.
-David Biello
There's a list of related links at the bottom of the article and they're definitely worth browsing.

...Off the top of my head, I could see this angle in a story as plot device, especially if they learned to manipulate the rACC (file under: military applications).

TheIT

09-26-2006, 06:22 AM

I think the TV show Firefly used the amygdala concept with the character River Tam. I think they said the scientists who experimented on her severed her amygdala so that she felt everything and could not tone down the emotion. In the show, she bounced between insanity and occasional lucidity. In later episodes and in the movie Serenity we find out they did a whole lot more than that to her.

Ordinary_Guy

10-08-2006, 01:23 AM

Now that my dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is more developed, I feel like sharing a post from Physorg (http://www.physorg.com/news79414946.html):
Control of selfish behavior turned on, off

Selfish, egotistical behavior really is a turn-off, Swiss and U.S. researchers said, triggered by activating a region of the brain.

Researchers studied how activating the area of the brain called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex would trigger self-control, researchers from the University of Zurich and Harvard University said Friday in The (London) Telegraph. A weak magnetic field was used to disable this area during the experiment. Researchers said participants gave their permission before undergoing the experiment, the Telegraph said.

Study participants with the right DLPFC suppressed was less able to keep their self-control in check, the Telegraph said, but they still understood the concept of fairness.

Earlier studies had suggested self-control was dependent on the DLPFC, among the last areas of the brain to mature. The latest study, published Friday in "Science," noted this part of the brain is not fully developed in young people, the Telegraph said.

Copyright 2006 by United Press International
Next step: altruism in a pill... better living through chemistry... Life in Happy Land (take your meds or else...:guns: ).

The mind is losing its mystery.
Good or bad?

Shweta

10-08-2006, 06:37 AM

ARGH.
Wrote a big long response to this. And then it went pouf.

The quick version is, speaking as a researcher in some of this stuff, we don't know sh*t yet.

We more about the visual system than anything else in the brain, and at least one respected vision scientist has said that that means we maybe know 1% of the story.

We have a few, really cool, tantalizing pieces of a huuuuge puzzle. And I think they speak for an "embodied" view of cognition, that is, thinking being grounded in the brain in its body interacting with the environment. But we might be thinking about it all wrong, as we have been doing for thousands of years.

And even if we figure out what every pathways is doing, we still won't know what's going on subjectively, or why it is that way. Why red looks red, for example. Why pain feels like *that* and hurts, and not like the taste of sugar.

As a writer, I think this is Good. It's new, it's exciting, there are advances, but there are many many unanswered questions.

As a reader I think it's good and bad. I cannot read "mind-transplant" stories of any sort, and I have trouble with chips being inserted into human brains, too; the neuroscience research suggests that the first is impossible, and people get the second wrong.

As a researcher, I think it's daunting. Argh.

Ordinary_Guy

10-08-2006, 10:10 AM

...The quick version is, speaking as a researcher in some of this stuff, we don't know sh*t yet...
Somehow, I knew you were gonna say that.

Honestly, while I agree we're still at the tip of the iceberg, I see research uncovering secrets at a phenomenal rate. Just scrolling back through the headlines in this thread, it's clear that a lot of cognitive/neurological black boxes are revealing themselves – and the rate seems to be accelerating.

There's still plenty of unknowns left (I'm sure there will be for another half century or so)... but the mind really is losing its mystery.

...Which leaves me wondering: is that good or bad? Go with me here. What if we learn exactly what percentage of manifest behavior is conscious vs. unconscious? What if we know the average probability range for genetic vs. environmental influence? What if somebody invented a pill that caused revulsion at violence? What if we knew neurobiology so well that there was no room left for magic...?

Shweta

10-08-2006, 08:22 PM

Arright, I'll stay with my pessimism and leave you to your optimism :D
The answer is probably somewhere in between our positions. I think it'll take more like a hundred years before we run up against the Really Hard Problems and then I don't know.

...Which leaves me wondering: is that good or bad?

As I think I was saying, I think it's both. Depends on which hat I'm wearing.

Go with me here. What if we learn exactly what percentage of manifest behavior is conscious vs. unconscious? What if we know the average probability range for genetic vs. environmental influence? What if somebody invented a pill that caused revulsion at violence? What if we knew neurobiology so well that there was no room left for magic...?

But we do know some of that, at least vaguely. The normal number thrown at intro students is 1% of cognitive processing is conscious. That's probably generous.

And at every level, genetics and environment interact. It's not about percentages, it's about types of interaction. There is no either/or; it's both.

Revulsion at violence is... well, most people can be trained to that, and so we might be able to infer from that what'd happen if we could dump it on everyone.
Though, I think the most interesting question there is a level down. Would it work unintentionally on emotional violence? Would we all end up passive and conflict-avoidant and utterly risk-avoidant?

And you know at least part of what my position is on no room left for magic.
But beyond my personal beliefs -- let us assume that al the weird experiences everywhere are just psychosis, and there is no magic.
Doesn't matter.
People will still talk and think in terms of it. People are inherently storytellers, and we understand a great deal metaphorically, and especially anthropomorphically.

It's like the way we know the earth revolves around the sun but we'll still talk and think about sunrise.

Look at computer programmers. Very rational people? Cutting edge of technology? They talk about gremlins and black magic. We think in magical terms, for good or ill, and it'll creep in no matter what is proven.

Ordinary_Guy

10-25-2006, 12:56 AM

More brain-computer interface food for thought (http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-10/uow-eci102406.php)...
Electronic chip, interacting with the brain, modifies pathways for controlling movement

Mechanism may have potential in stroke and brain injury rehabilitation

Researchers at the University of Washington (UW) are working on an implantable electronic chip that may help establish new nerve connections in the part of the brain that controls movement. Their most recent study, to be published in the Nov. 2, 2006, edition of Nature, showed such a device can induce brain changes in monkeys lasting more than a week. Strengthening of weak connections through this mechanism may have potential in the rehabilitation of patients with brain injuries, stroke, or paralysis.

The authors of study, titled "Long-Term Motor Cortex Plasticity Induced by an Electronic Neural Implant," were Dr. Andrew Jackson, senior research fellow in physiology and biophysics, Dr. Jaideep Mavoori, who recently earned a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the UW, and Dr. Eberhard Fetz, professor of physiology and biophysics. For many years Fetz and his colleagues have studied how the brains of monkeys control their limb muscles.

When awake, the brain continuously governs the body's voluntary movements. This is largely done through the activity of nerve cells in the part of the brain called the motor cortex. These nerve cells, or neurons, send signals down to the spinal cord to control the contraction of certain muscles, like those in the arms and legs.

The possibility that these neural signals can be recorded directly and used to operate a computer or to control mechanical devices outside of the body has been driving the rapidly expanding field of brain-computer interfaces, often abbreviated BCI. The recent Nature study suggests that the brain's nerve signals can be harnessed to create changes within itself.

The researchers tested a miniature, self-contained device with a tiny computer chip. The devices were placed on top of the heads of monkeys who were free to carry out their usual behaviors, including sleep. Called a Neurochip, the brain-computer interface was developed by Mavoori for his doctoral thesis.

"The Neurochip records the activity of motor cortex cells," Fetz explained, "It can convert this activity into a stimulus that can be sent back to the brain, spinal cord, or muscle, and thereby set up an artificial connection that operates continuously during normal behavior. This recurrent brain-computer interface creates an artificial motor pathway that the brain may learn to use to compensate for impaired pathways."

Jackson found that, when the brain-computer interface continuously connects neighboring sites in the motor cortex, it produces long-lasting changes. Namely, the movements evoked from the recording site changed to resemble those evoked from the stimulation site.

The researchers said that a likely explanation for these changes is the strengthening of pathways within the cortex from the recording to the stimulation site. This strengthening may have been produced by the continuous synchronization of activity at the two sites, generated by the recurrent brain-computer interface.

Timing is critical for creating these connections, the researchers said. The conditioning effect occurs only if the delay between the recorded activity and the stimulation is brief enough. The changes are produced in a day of continuous conditioning with the recurrent brain-computer interface, but last for many days after the circuit is turned off.

"This unusually long-lasting plasticity may be related to the fact that the conditioning is associated with normal behavior," Fetz said.
Just something to get your motor [cortex] runnin'...

ChunkyC

10-25-2006, 03:38 AM

Now we know why Zombies prefer grey matter above all other snacks. ;)

Seriously, my brain hurts. Excellent stuff, you guys.

LeeFlower

10-25-2006, 04:06 AM

John Scalzi's Old Man Trilogy (or at least the first two) feature a brain/computer interface called BrainPal. Characters can use it to communicate with each other, leading to a sort of cybernetic telepathy.

Shweta

10-25-2006, 04:10 AM

Now a nice possible extension to the motor cortex thing for humans...

Broca's area is pretty much in a premotor area (premotor areas seem to be responsible for high-level motor co-ordination, and they're where some of the mirror neuron system is). And it's an extremely important bit of the brain for language. Broca's Aphasia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broca%27s_aphasia) is pretty nasty*

So what if a chip could replace that part of the brain? *can* a chip be designed to replace mirror neurons, as opposed to normal motor neurons? It sounds like this chip is doing is Hebbian Learning (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebbian_learning), which is pretty limited, but if it can do that it could be extended to other learning algorithms...

* Though there's recent evidence that Broca's Aphasia isn't associated with Broca's Area, but with areas around it. Still premotor, I think.

Ordinary_Guy

10-25-2006, 09:17 AM

...So what if a chip could replace that part of the brain? *can* a chip be designed to replace mirror neurons, as opposed to normal motor neurons? It sounds like this chip is doing is Hebbian Learning (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebbian_learning), which is pretty limited, but if it can do that it could be extended to other learning algorithms...
Probably could replace it – though I couldn't guess at a timetable. Movement seems like fairly easy cause/effect that can be replicated. Higher functions seem tied larger algorithms which probably can be replicated to a degree – but we run into hardware limitations.

...When we see these interface going in, I often wonder what kind of chips they're using. If it's anything like what they use for satellites, the chips are usually "hardened" against severe environmental effects (extreme heat, cold, radiation), not to mention power supplies and support structure, etc. After a couple of hundred million dollars are put into a project, before the satellite/probe/whatever even gets off the ground, its processors are several generations behind the cutting edge because the engineers need to work with a exact known quantity. I would imagine that biological environments aren't much friendlier. Maybe not the extreme heat/cold/radiation but still limited access once it's in place and potentially caustic environment (white blood cells can't be good for circuit boards).

I'd bet that as electronic engineering starts catering to the growing bio-interface field, we'll see faster progress on what's possible – what can be "replaced" or at least supplemented.

Thought on what will really open up bioelectronics: self-contained power systems that do away with batteries and use blood sugar to power the chip/device/apparatus. Once you've got something that's integrated with systems-in-place (ie: you), that'll open a new door on electronic integration. The hip style will bring us a little closer to the Borg (though hopefully leave us with more personality).

Kentuk

10-25-2006, 09:37 AM

Great thread although a little over my head.

Perhaps Ordinary_Guy can help me out. In my book I have the Ringwood tree that supposedly stores information in an extended DNA and links to other trees via roots. The book is supposedly science fiction as opposed to magical fantasy stuff so I'm supposed to supply a plausible technical explanation. My problem is that I have humans interfacing with the Wood through touch and speaking into and hearing it much like speach. Can you cook me up an explanation that doesn't smack too much of fantasy?

Kentuk

Shweta

10-25-2006, 10:12 AM

What do people hear, Kentuk?

DNA is just a chemical that interacts with other chemicals to create effects. If the effects aren't visual or auditory, you're going to need enhanced humans somehow. Might be that the tree releases chemicals that make humans more sensitive to certain signals, but if it's SF then you want the human brains to be receiving some kind of input.

So that's the first important question. What kind of input does the tree provide?

What kind of information does it store, and what's the evolutionary reason? (Or was the tree engineered?)

Kentuk

10-25-2006, 10:22 AM

Engineered by the Ancients as a minor technology and then developed.
Right my problem is the interface. Elephants can hear through their feet right?
Don't know open to suggestion.
The business of having trees replace the internet allows for a very dispersed, unstructured society.
The idea of talking trees came from sitting in a ring of giant ancient Redwood and wondering what they had witnessed and heard.
The extended DNA bit seems a plausible way to store information but as you point out I lack a way of transmitting it to the human brain. Don't really want to go the paranormal route, want to make it seem like technology.

Shweta

10-25-2006, 11:27 AM

right, so.

Storing information in DNA only works if there's a way to decode it. And you'd have to decide whether the whole tree changed its molecular structure, or if it had special nodes where the DNA had changed.

Could people have devices that grabbed cell samples and decoded them?

-- And then you'd have to decide how the information got encoded, of course. And what mutation would do.

Ordinary_Guy

10-25-2006, 04:20 PM

...The extended DNA bit seems a plausible way to store information but as you point out I lack a way of transmitting it to the human brain. Don't really want to go the paranormal route, want to make it seem like technology.
Okay, bearing in mind that I'm posting way past a sensible bed time...

The DNA is an awesome way to store information. Under the proper conditions, it's long lived – extraordinarily long (if amber encased), it can have autonomous error correction and it can speak in base-4 (so it can pack a lot of information).

The great thing here is that solution lies within the problem. Information is stored in DNA. Fortunately, we've got plenty of that (and RNA, etc). All you'd need is a good rub of the tree – not enough to draw blood, just get a few microscopic particles to break the surface and get under our skin.

Body recognizes foreign DNA but initial coding tells person "message within – stand down defenses." It activates, say, tRNA – which gets it in contact with mRNA – which allows it to interface with some midlevel part of the brain. Mine has shutdown already so I can't make any suggestions at the moment – but figure it's the part of the brain associated with actualizing genetically encoded instinctual behavior. So... incoming tree DNA is read by that part of the brain, lucid message follows, presto. The only challenge will be getting the information in the right sequence if you have more than one set of DNA-based messages. Maybe some type of time code (sequence number) in the DNA? Who knows... Probably you do.

Shweta

10-26-2006, 04:05 AM

Hrm. Time code would work.

And I really like the idea of a triggered lucid message. In fact, I think everything you got is awesome, OG, up till the mRNA bit. Then you kind of have a "then a miracle occurs" point.

So let me ponder the miracle point :)

The problem would be getting from mRNA-synthesized proteins ("messenger" RNA only carries messages within a cell) to neural impulses.

Instinctual behavior is pretty limited, which is why it can be triggered by, say, hormonal changes -- there are relatively few chemicals, so our neural response to them can be coded. This wouldn't immediately translate to a way to get new messages.

It's not like biological receptors are sensitive to every amino acid in a protein. They bind to particular active zones, and very often will respond to a hundred proteins in exactly the same way. So details of a code aren't going to be understood with the chemicals currently present in a body, or any extension that I see right now.

If the people can be technologically altered, though, there could be a little box in the brain (or in the hand with a wire to the brain) that took in these proteins, reverse engineered the code, read it, and (in a system like the monkey motor cortex thing above) could wire it to the bits of our brains that handled memory recall and language and such. Assuming a technology quite a bit more advanced than our current one, I think this is theoretically possible, at least.

Under the tongue might be a great place for such a sensor. If so, people would take a few grains of bark, put them under their tongues, and pouf, message. That would stop you from accidentally getting information overload every time you leaned against a tree, too.

A lower-tech route would be a device embedded in... oh, gloves, or amulets, or something, that read the DNA, figured out the message, and presented it in audio format.

I'm not sure how one would make the messages at all current, though. I think the bark you can get at without cutting a tree is the oldest layer, and the new stuff is a third of the way in or more, in the inner part of the sapwood.
Maybe if the information-carrying DNA went into the leaves? You can tell how old a leaf is up to a certain point, just by looking at it, and you can access eaves if they're not too high. Or it could be in fruit, or flowers...

Kentuk

10-26-2006, 06:07 AM

<simlie for exploding brain>

Could the transmission be electrical? This tree was engineered so I imagine the problem would aside from transmission be a matter of sending the right signals for the nervous system to transmit to the brain.
I'm not sure it is necessary for humans to be able decode the DNA information directly.
I know this is a terrible perversion of scientific thinking but perhaps can be justified as 'exploring the possibilities'.

Thanks Terry

Shweta

10-26-2006, 08:49 AM

Hm. I don't see how an electrical transmission would work, because apart from large-scale generic stuff, everyone's going to get different thoughts from the same electrical signal.

Kentuk

10-26-2006, 10:46 AM

Oh I see that my last post that wouldn't post, didn't. Guess that's better then thirteen duplicates.

I was thinking the wood would do all the work. Convert the data to electrical impulses tuned to the human nervous system.

The Ringwood has two sets of DNA, one that governs its physical characteristics and an extended set that stored different information in each cell.

Ordinary_Guy

10-27-2006, 11:02 AM

Could the transmission be electrical? This tree was engineered so I imagine the problem would aside from transmission be a matter of sending the right signals for the nervous system to transmit to the brain.
I'm not sure it is necessary for humans to be able decode the DNA information directly.
Having the tree do the work would indeed work better – and the double DNA idea is pretty good. We've got so many different forms of DNA, RNA, etc., that the tree carrying, coding and transmitting a second dedicated set would be believable.

As for electrical, I could see it. At present level technologies, Shweta has it nailed – simple waveforms through, say, dermal conductance, probably aren't going to be shaped well enough to transmit individual thoughts (if they could, EEGs would be a lot more useful). However, there's plenty of science at least behind individual conductance and personal EMG fields (Apple just got a patent for activating a touch screen when a finger is [IIRC] a full centimeter away). If you can encode on genetic levels, it wouldn't be that much a stretch to assume your info-tree could adapt frequency, modulation and intensity to get the message across.

Shweta

10-27-2006, 01:55 PM

Ordinary_Guy

10-28-2006, 12:22 AM

The problem is that "the human nervous system" doesn't exist, especially for higher level thought. Every human nervous system is different, saliently so. Something that anyone who does actual neuroscience can tell you is that the amount of individual difference is huge. You'd have to have a transmitter that was trained up on a given individual human to give it any chance of working.
Careful now - those kind of generalizations could be taken out of context. There are, afterall, certain universal aspects about said system that work the same no matter what sex/age/ethnicity you happen to be, the "machine language" if you will - such as sodium pathways in the nerves themselves, not to mention the myriad of neurotransmitters that are the foundation of higher thought (that operate the same across the spectrum).
So humans having transmitters would be plausible, but the tree doing all the work? If it worked on person A it would not work on person B.
Sure it could, for the same reason that EEGs work (and show the same physiological conditions no matter the person). You just bump it up a few orders of magnitude - which is par for SF course.

Kentuk

10-28-2006, 12:31 AM

Shweta
You'd have to have a transmitter that was trained up on a given individual human to give it any chance of working.

Cool that would fit as I have it that not everyone can talk to the Wood and it's very difficult for beginners. Yes the system conforms to the individual. In the story line it takes a thousand years for the people to realize the Wood isn't inherently alive and intelligent but simply full of the human echoes.
This brainstorming is helping me to see the limitations of the system and motivating me to examine it again in a story. Shweta from what you point out I see the mechanism wouldn't work. I know the theme of internet conductivity has been worked to death in the last twenty years but I'm still fascinated by the possibilites of an organic connectivity.
Terry

Shweta

10-28-2006, 01:17 AM

Careful now - those kind of generalizations could be taken out of context. There are, afterall, certain universal aspects about said system that work the same no matter what sex/age/ethnicity you happen to be, the "machine language" if you will - such as sodium pathways in the nerves themselves, not to mention the myriad of neurotransmitters that are the foundation of higher thought (that operate the same across the spectrum).

Sure, but the kinds of things that are the same across individuals are not the kind of thing that'll make for a good message, and Kentuk's story is about communication from these trees, as I understand it.

You could probably communicate things like "pleasure" or "fear" to everyone. You could probably even communicate "something to do with hand actions" to almost everyone (though the physical areas of the brain that map to particular functional areas aren't always exactly the same).

You might manage to cause particular neurotransmitter release, but all that would mean is that pathways get excited or inhibited -- you can't control which ones.

Sure it could, for the same reason that EEGs work (and show the same physiological conditions no matter the person). You just bump it up a few orders of magnitude - which is par for SF course.

No, because you're talking about two qualitatively different things. EEGs "work" insofar as you can tell overall brain state by them. The difference between major states of mind, like waking and sleeping.

Not so useful when it comes to anything as specific as "Piotr walked into a rock yesterday; the rock is being treated for minor injuries". It is a known fact in the neuroscience literature (one that they often skim over for papers because it is a known inconvenient fact*) that the particular neural patterns of any two people reading that sentence are just plain different. Some similar areas will be evoked, like perhaps the premotor leg areas and the pain areas, but those areas are not sufficient to understand a message.

However, while each neural pathway for comprehension is different, they're all neural pathways. So, while any given electrical field will not work to induce the same thought in you and me, it is quite possible that two different electrical fields generated by clever little computers can be trained to induce the same thought in you and me.

SF is not just about scaling up. It is, ideally, about knowing what you're talking about before you scale up, and not contradicting the known science where possible.

* Taught in every class, fudged over in almost every lab, left out of almost every paper. I'm afraid that really does happen in neuroscience.

Shweta

10-28-2006, 01:22 AM

Cool that would fit as I have it that not everyone can talk to the Wood and it's very difficult for beginners. Yes the system conforms to the individual.

Oh well, if you don't want it to be easy for everyone then I see other possibilities. Do people start training as children? Because to some extent, then, the individual can conform to the system.

Especially if the system has some kind of training center, though I'm not entirely sure how that would work.

Shweta from what you point out I see the mechanism wouldn't work. I know the theme of internet conductivity has been worked to death in the last twenty years but I'm still fascinated by the possibilites of an organic connectivity.
Terry

Well! I am not saying it couldn't work. I am just saying "this particular specific mechanism wouldn't work".

I think OG's suggestions are very much on the right track; it's just that you're gonna have to cope with individual differences if you want communication. The more you head into higher-level thought, the more it's true that the whole brain lights up and it works differently for different people.

I don't know if any of this will help at all, but there are a couple hundred thousand scholary articles referencing individual differences on google scholar:

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=individual%20differences%20brain%20physi ology&hl=en&hs=fYC&lr=&c2coff=1&safe=off&client=firefox&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:unofficial&oi=scholart

Ordinary_Guy

10-28-2006, 09:04 AM

No, because you're talking about two qualitatively different things. EEGs "work" insofar as you can tell overall brain state by them. The difference between major states of mind, like waking and sleeping.
Or if someone is telling the truth.

Complex, yes, foolproof, no – obviously – and a controversial example. But the point is that it's more sensitive than just a brain-death detector.
...It is a known fact in the neuroscience literature (one that they often skim over for papers because it is a known inconvenient fact*) that the particular neural patterns of any two people reading that sentence are just plain different...
Sure. You close your eyes and picture a "TV" – it's going to be different than when I close my eyes and picture a "TV." However, if you're feeding a complex stream of information that has it's own images, the desired picture of the TV will be provided.

I know there's plenty of cognitive mystery left... but it's destined to go away. I mean... Good God – check post #13: external control of a complex social behavior by application of a weak magnetic field. That isn't SF – that's now. A machine worked on more than one person. Face it – brain operation has some interesting mysteries, but parts of it just ain't that unique.
SF is not just about scaling up. It is, ideally, about knowing what you're talking about before you scale up, and not contradicting the known science where possible.
Never said it was the only thing, Shweta...

Let me rephrase it in a way that's harder to twist: part of writing SF involves taking known science and extrapolating it.

...Though while I'm here, it's also worth pointing out that good SF also involves accepting that current science may require revision and that some sciences are better suited to certain questions than others (I get the feeling that CogLing isn't going to make any BCI (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain-computer_interface) breakthroughs...).

Shweta

10-28-2006, 11:26 AM

Or if someone is telling the truth.

Complex, yes, foolproof, no – obviously – and a controversial example. But the point is that it's more sensitive than just a brain-death detector.
Sure, but that's reacting to overall arousal -- whether the person is nervous, not whether their words contradict their beliefs.

I'm not at all disagreeing that there are massive similarities between brains. What I'm saying is that while the functional similarities are close enough that it should be possible to train up transmitters for each person using the same principles, the physiological similarities are not close enough that the same specific electrical field will induce the same thought in two different people.

Sure. You close your eyes and picture a "TV" – it's going to be different than when I close my eyes and picture a "TV." However, if you're feeding a complex stream of information that has it's own images, the desired picture of the TV will be provided.
How would a stream have its own images? Are you thinking of a bitmap? That's not how the visual system works.

Never mind imagination -- when I see the same TV you do, we have different brain activations. Some of the same general areas are activated, but the similarity is not gonna be any more specific than visual areas, and certain orientation-sensitive cells, and possibly some kind of inanimate-object-recognition area.

These similarities are not specific enough for communications. We'd need some kind of neural net trained up on each person -- or some way for people's brains to be trained to be more similar. Can happen. It's about which neurons link up, at that point.

I know there's plenty of cognitive mystery left... but it's destined to go away. I mean... Good God – check post #13: external control of a complex social behavior by application of a weak magnetic field. That isn't SF – that's now. A machine worked on more than one person. Face it – brain operation has some interesting mysteries, but parts of it just ain't that unique.
I think you're confusing two things.
There's mystery, which there's plenty of, and I agree that most of it will go away. (The parts I think will not relate to subjective experience, which you can't really get at fully with an objective science).

Then there's the plain, well-known fact of individual variation. Because of the way brains develop, they're functionally very similar, but the actual specific pathways are just plain different between people.

If you look at two people's individual fMRI scans, for example, when they're shown the same data, there's a whole lot of activity going on and it's mostly different. What's different is cancelled out in the averaging, so that it never shows up in published studies; but it's there if you look at the raw data.

Very often that data is first projected onto a "standardized brain", and then the cancellation happens. There's a lot of fudging involved.

Let me rephrase it in a way that's harder to twist: part of writing SF involves taking known science and extrapolating it.
Sure, but that does not involve ignoring known science, and individual variation is a known part of neurobiology.

Yes, we use the same neurotransmitters, and we have more or less the same gross physiology. But at the level of word representations, for example, or category representations, we have different sets of neurons forming that representation. It's because the processes of cell growth, connection formation, and cell death are not entirely determined.

...Though while I'm here, it's also worth pointing out that good SF also involves accepting that current science may require revision and that some sciences are better suited to certain questions than others (I get the feeling that CogLing isn't going to make any BCI (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain-computer_interface) breakthroughs...).
Um, well, probably not. But I'm not talking about cog ling here. I'm talking about cog neuroscience. Which is not my field, I grant, but it's certainly something I've taken classes in, been in research labs for, and so forth.

I am pretty sure the neuroscience will be revised as we figure out more about what's going on; our current models are pretty simple, though they're getting better at an extraordinary rate. But I doubt certain things will change.

We're not going to find out that patterns of neuron activation are irrelevant. And we're not going to find out that those are exactly the same from one person to the other, for anything.

Ordinary_Guy

03-27-2007, 07:15 AM

Speaking the brain's language...
Invention: Brain decoder
13:09 26 March 2007
NewScientist.com news service

One of the great challenges for neuroscientists is to understand the code the brain uses to send information along neurons. Researchers at Brown University on Rhode Island have now come up with a device that may help to tackle the mystery.

The machine works by measuring the signals produced by primary motor cortex – the part of the brain responsible for hand-eye co-ordination. A computer then attempts to reproduce this signal, which is used to stimulate the movement in a primate limb.

By minimising the difference between the original signal and the artificial one and by comparing the difference in the effects these two signals have on limb movement, the researchers hope to decrypt the neuronal code used by the brain to control muscle movement. The researchers say same signal-processing techniques could eventually be used to control artificial limbs, wheelchairs and even speech synthesisers.

Read the full brain decoder patent application (http://tinyurl.com/222hqj).
The brain is complex. Yeah, we know that. Is it impossibly complex? I don't think so... and apparently, neither do these guys.

Will this "decoder" work? Who knows, but the fact they're trying (and being taken seriously) is encouraging. Complex BMIs may be closer than we think.

Shweta

03-27-2007, 03:32 PM

OOoooOOooh.
This is cool. Primary motor cortex is definitely an area that ought to be decipherable, too! :cross fingers for these guys:
Be awesome if it works.

Be interesting for SF either way; how would that tech being available change our world?
Cool link, OG!

Pthom

03-31-2007, 04:41 AM

Moved to Science Fact, at the request of the original poster, Ordinary_Guy, and because very little of this thread is fiction :)

PeeDee

03-31-2007, 04:55 AM

Moved to Science Fact, at the request of the original poster, Ordinary_Guy, and because very little of this thread is fiction :)

Alarmingly not fiction. I'm reading the thread over. This is fascinating, and worrying, stuff.

ChunkyC

03-31-2007, 05:17 AM

brainsssss.... (http://www.cruisegazing.com/RPG_Motivational/zombies.jpg)

Sorry, don' mind me, end of a long week. :D

Shweta

03-31-2007, 06:47 AM

brainsssss.... (http://www.cruisegazing.com/RPG_Motivational/zombies.jpg)

"Looking at the brain, seeing dinner"?

OG, you're reminding me that I should pick up my old thread and actually talk about the stuff I said I'd talk about. Also maybe look up the interesting work on brain imaging and language and mention it here.

So what have I been wasting my time on, you ask, instead of posting here? Well... uh... writing fiction :D

TsukiRyoko

03-31-2007, 07:10 AM

The numberous leaps that science has made through the years will always amaze me....

Ordinary_Guy

05-14-2007, 09:33 AM

Kidding.

Here's another interesting bit (http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-05/bu-nbr050307.php) on mind/brain stuff – this one leaning more towards our understanding of memory.
New Brandeis research sheds light on memory by erasing it

Waltham, MA — For years, scientists have studied the molecular basis of memory storage, trying to find the molecules that store memory, just as DNA stores genetic memory. In an important study published this week in the Journal of Neuroscience, Brandeis University researchers report for the first time that memory storage can be induced and then biochemically erased in slices of rat hippocampus by manipulating a so-called "memory molecule," a protein kinase known as CaMKII.

"The core problem in memory research has been understanding what the storage molecule actually is. Identifying this molecule is essential to understanding memory itself as well as any disease of memory, " explained lead author John Lisman. "With this study, we have confirmed CaMKII as a memory molecule."

The research involved electrically stimulating neuronal synapses to strengthen them, a process known as long-term potentiation (LTP). This process has served as a model system for studying memory. CaMKII has been a leading candidate as a memory molecule because it is persistently activated after LTP induction and can enhance synaptic transmission, properties that are necessary for a memory molecule.

Like a computer whose electronics change with the addition of new information, molecular activity in the hippocampus, where memory is stored in the brain, changes as memory is being stored. In this study, Lisman and his colleagues showed that they could saturate the memory stores. However, when CaMKII was chemically attacked and previous memory erased, it then became possible to insert new memories in the synapses.

Alzheimer's and other diseases in which memory loss plays a major role will benefit from this new understanding. Of particular importance may be conditions like epilepsy, which involves synapses that have become overly strengthened. The new research shows how synapses can be weakened by attacking memory molecules.

Lisman's lab plans further research to better understand what happens to the CaMKII after it is attacked. By using fluorescent forms of CaMKII, it will be possible to determine whether the kinase leaves the synapse after inhibitor is applied. This provides a way to directly visualize the forgetting process and complements previous work done in Lisman's laboratory showing that when LTP is induced (as during learning), CaMKII moves into the synapse.

###
The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health.
Interesting bit. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, here we come.

If we take it the other way, I see some interesting possibilities. I don't remember who, but somebody in the forums was trying to figure out a way that memory could be passed on. I think there was a tree involved. It seems we're one baby-step closer to understanding the chemical basis for the formation of memory... and that means one step closer to being able to pop a pill and remember something we never knew.

SF writers, get to work!

AnnieColleen

05-14-2007, 10:03 AM

(just saw this; coming in late)

There might be a story in that, I dunno. A prisoner implanted with such a chip, finding that anything that upsets 'em sets off the migraines...
I don't see much plot resolution though. What are they going to do, turn Buddhist?

Orson Scott Card used something like this in one of the Ender/Shadow sequels. A person who knew some piece of classified information was conditioned so that thinking about that subject caused anxiety, and anxiety or any negative emotion triggered a panic attack. The character managed to partly get around it (to give someone else the information) by talking in allusions and metaphors, but couldn't fool his own mind completely enough to avoid triggering it. There was a little discussion about what other implications that treatment might have for the individual, but he was a minor character who wasn't involved in any particular plot conflict or resolution.

Of course I know nothing about the technical aspects so I don't know how realistic that portrayal was!