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Brain implants allow paralysed monkeys to walk

nature.com

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Re: Brain implants allow paralysed monkeys to walk

#91

Post by pinkrooftop »

jobigoud wrote: post #15
FullMtlAlcoholc wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Logically, it should be more acceptable to have animals as test subjects that can benefit all mankind vs being a tasty treat for an individual. But we all have are cognitive dissonances, without exception. Thats just a quirk of being human

> we all have are cognitive dissonances To be honest I haven't found a bigger cognitive dissonance than the love animals / eat animals one.

I think the dissonance is more pronounced in love animals / eat mistreated animals. Empathy developed presumably along with the enjoyment for taste of animal fats and protein

Re: Brain implants allow paralysed monkeys to walk

#92

Post by lostlogin »

smhost wrote: post #47
Benjamin_Dobell wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Science starts with observation, not experimentation. Honestly, if this was software, I'd consider this sort of approach as nothing short of pathetic. When I first reverse engineered firmware flashing software for mobile phones, experimentation was the absolute last thing I did - and all that experimentation could do was damage my phone, not another living creature. Instead I recorded observations of software operati…

> We next exploited cortical signals to decode the temporal structure of extensor and flexor hotspot activation. The spiking activity recorded from the left motor cortex displayed cyclic modulations that were phase-locked with right leg movements (Extended Data Fig. 4a). We developed a decoder that calculated the probability of foot-strike and foot-off events from this modulation to anticipate the activation of exten…

"Intact monkeys" is this a nice way of saying that they hadn't paralysed them yet?

Re: Brain implants allow paralysed monkeys to walk

#93

Post by lostlogin »

adityab wrote: post #78
Benjamin_Dobell wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Science starts with observation, not experimentation. Honestly, if this was software, I'd consider this sort of approach as nothing short of pathetic. When I first reverse engineered firmware flashing software for mobile phones, experimentation was the absolute last thing I did - and all that experimentation could do was damage my phone, not another living creature. Instead I recorded observations of software operati…

How do you suggest one should observe neural activity?

EEG and MRI seem an obvious starting place, but use humans not monkeys, and this will give better data.

Re: Brain implants allow paralysed monkeys to walk

#94

Post by stinos »

nihonde wrote: post #80
citricsquid wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The intelligence argument is nonsense. Pigs are as intelligent as dogs. Describe the treatment of livestock (pigs, chickens, cows) but frame it as something that is happening to dogs and you'll drive hundreds of thousands of outraged meat eaters to signing a petition. The reason is cognitive dissonance, we're taught from the moment we can understand that it's okay to farm animals and very few people ever really think…

In that case, why not start with human subjects?

start is incorrect since human subjects are already being used from time to time. Way less than animals though, and often (e.g. electrical stimulation to fight epilepsy/tinitus) though not always (e.g. recording from electrodes in malicious brain tissue which is going to be removed anyway) they benefit so much it would be almost unhuman not to help them.

Re: Brain implants allow paralysed monkeys to walk

#95

Post by nojvek »

Balgair wrote: post #53
wehadfun wrote: post #40

Seems like a zombie scenario. Where dead bodies are controlled wirelessly through implants.

Haha, we are already there. Here's the instructions from 2014 via a 15 year old: http://www.instructables.com/id/Control-a-Cockroach-With-Ard...

Holy shit. That made me queer at the same time fascinated

Re: Brain implants allow paralysed monkeys to walk

#96

Post by lostlogin »

biofox wrote: post #39
Benjamin_Dobell wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would assume it's because monkeys are more intelligent than the animals we tend to eat; cows, chickens, sheep & pigs. Also, intentionally paralysing a creature, leaving it to live in that condition, and then performing experimental surgery/procedures on it is significantly different than slaughtering it. Whilst I appreciate the scientists mean well, and I do understand how this could benefit humanity; this sort of…

Scientists are not sadists, and welfare is taken extremely seriously. What people don't see are the efforts to enrich living environments, provide sedation and analgesia, or the reams of protocols on monitoring and rapidly terminating experiments if the animal is distressed. None of this exists in livestock farming. Also, for me intelligence is besides the point. If someone is suffering, I don't factor their IQ into…

You are making a generalisation here. There is plenty of poor treatment of animals in science. I'm sure things are better than they were but claiming that everything is good and everyone is too doesn't square with human behaviour at all.

Re: Brain implants allow paralysed monkeys to walk

#97

Post by lostlogin »

mtw wrote: post #77
biofox wrote: post #7

"For more than a decade, neuroscientist Grégoire Courtine has been flying every few months from his lab at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne to another lab in Beijing, China, where he conducts research on monkeys with the aim of treating spinal-cord injuries. The commute is exhausting — on occasion he has even flown to Beijing, done experiments, and returned the same night. But it is worth it, say…

"working with monkeys in China is less burdened by regulation than it is in Europe and the United States" It reminds of the skeptics about China achieving fusion for one minute, as well as China's new rocket capable of landing taikonauts on the moon. It seems to me China is doubling down on scientific research. Their methods or ethics might be frowned on the West, but it is clear from recent news that pace of scienti…

This doesn't bode well for political prisoners. There has been plenty of talk and evidence of forced organ harvesting in China, and experimentation could occur in this environment.

www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-carrying-out-millions-of-illegal-organ-transplants-annually-report-finds-a7107091.html

Re: Brain implants allow paralysed monkeys to walk

#98

Post by Benjamin_Dobell »

snowwrestler wrote: post #75
Benjamin_Dobell wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Science starts with observation, not experimentation. Honestly, if this was software, I'd consider this sort of approach as nothing short of pathetic. When I first reverse engineered firmware flashing software for mobile phones, experimentation was the absolute last thing I did - and all that experimentation could do was damage my phone, not another living creature. Instead I recorded observations of software operati…

This is going to seem personally harsh--that's not my intention. But you're flatly wrong. Fundamentally, collecting observations is an active pursuit. An example: We didn't start to learn about electricity until we started messing with it. That's because there was very little to observe passively. Touching electric fish, rubbing amber to make static electricity, flying a kite into a thunderstorm--these sorts of actio…

I do agree with you here. My point is paralysing the monkey didn't help them collect data about how a monkey walks, quite the opposite.

Reasonable observations would consist of using electrodes to monitor left leg movements vs right leg movements. Running vs walking, joint extension etc.

Build a waveform generator and compare the generated waveforms vs real waveforms and iterate.

(The scientists did actually do this.)

Once you've got a fair degree of confidence then you can try apply your work.

Paralysing a monkey just to replay captured data when we already know we can interface with the nervous system is totally unnecessary.

Edit: It should really go without saying that when it does come time to apply your work you do everything within your power to avoid harming a non-consenting creature. Does applying the work even require paralysing a monkey? Can it be temporary? What about sedation and then interfacing with the nervous system whilst sedated?

Re: Brain implants allow paralysed monkeys to walk

#99

Post by _audakel »

nostromo wrote: post #89
lostlogin wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why just them though? We don't treat humans that well a lot of the time, and if AI looked to us for an example, things are going to be rough.

I see it as a continuum not as a black and white situation. The higher an animal is on the Encephalization quotient, the more respect they deserve. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encephalization_quotient This is why I think it's ok to swat a mosquito that's being annoying, but not to euthanize a monkey that's being annoying.

From the wiki article. Never heard about a eq score before.

Mean EQ for mammals is around 1, with carnivorans, cetaceans and primates above 1, and insectivores and herbivores below. This reflects two major trends. One is that brain matter is extremely costly in terms of energy needed to sustain it.[19] Animals which live on relatively nutrient poor diets (plants, insects) have relatively little energy to spare for a large brain, while animals living from energy-rich food (meat, fish, fruit) can grow larger brains. The other factor is the brain power needed to catch food. Carnivores generally need to find and kill their prey, which presumably requires more cognitive power than browsing or grazing.[20][21] The brain size of a wolf is about 30% larger than a similarily sized domestic dog, again reflecting different needs in their respective way of life.[22]

Re: Brain implants allow paralysed monkeys to walk

#100

Post by adityab »

lostlogin wrote: post #93
adityab wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you suggest one should observe neural activity?

EEG and MRI seem an obvious starting place, but use humans not monkeys, and this will give better data.

Computational Neuroscience student here.

Research of this nature requires reading the electrical spike trains of small sets of neurons (often even individual cells).

EEG will give you a measurement of the combined electric field of every single neuron that is active in the entire brain. You can use multiple electrodes and run machine learning algorithms to get a qualitative measure of a macroscopic chunk of brain activity. So, terrible spatial precision.

MRI gives you anatomical information.

fMRI gives an idea of blood flow in the brain (about millimeter precision which is also not good enough) which is a time-lagged (a few seconds) _response_ to sustained neural spiking in a region.

Think of it like this: The brain is a computational organ where there is very little hardware-software separation. We're not going to be able to patch the software (say, to treat paralysis) without patching the hardware (say, with implants)

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