Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Engineered material can reconnect severed nerves

news.rice.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 132 posts

Re: Engineered material can reconnect severed nerves

#61

Post by Terr_ »

viraptor wrote: post #42
ElFitz wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering how hard it is to actually fix any accidental damage to brain cells and nerves, and the far-reaching consequences of such damage, I am always amazed to see how many are eager to just plug something into it and let some arbitrary code send electric shocks through their brain. I get the unfathomable potential of the thing, and the appeal of said potential. But that’s a product I won’t be an early-adopter of…

Yeah, every time something like that is mentioned, I just think of small issues that could cause noise on the output. Basically if you wear some device that helps you, either passive like glasses or active like a hearing aid, you can immediately disconnect then if needed. But imagine an implant bugs out and you start receiving a maximum signal for something without being able to stop. Like a blinding bright light whi…

I wonder if it's possible to make a much simpler passive-only "mental stress detection" system, and use that as a kind of emergency stop (let's not call it a "kill switch" in this context) for any more-complicated augmentation.

That creates the opposite risk that your enhancements stop working when you _want_ them in some kind of real/external emergency situation.

I suppose it also wouldn't work in the case that the main augmentation caused, say, unending waves of paralyzing calm, although there could be another detection-gate for physiological signals to keep such people from starving/dehydration.

Re: Engineered material can reconnect severed nerves

#62

Post by duckmastery »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #6

I've always found it incongruous that we can move a person's body around the globe at 900 kilometers per hour for 25 hours for under $1500 but for 1000x that price and even with 1000x that time we can't bridge the distance between a brain and a foot.

Well if you think about it. The microscopic scale inverted in the other direction is more like getting to mars and the complexity is the same as creating a self sustaining colony there.

Re: Engineered material can reconnect severed nerves

#64

Post by ethbr1 »

rbanffy wrote: post #52
rpmisms wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, as far as I understand, it can act like a bridge between two ends of a severed nerve.

Give me a pair of bridges and a conductor to make the nerve signals travel at electric current speeds and I’ll give you almost instantaneous reflexes.

Give me one bridge and a mechanical arm...

... or just make it a plane's control surface.

Re: Engineered material can reconnect severed nerves

#65

Post by ethbr1 »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #55
m463 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

speaking of scifi I wonder... especially after reading about people developing limbs or fingers they don't have: "Some of CTRL-Labs’ goals are mind-bendingly exotic, like training a model for controlling extra fingers. https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/6/17433516/ctrl-labs-brain-c... I wonder if we could augment/cross our nerves to control things we normally can't control? what if we could release hormones on demand, l…

Reminds me of a few hilarious plot points in a few Ian Banks novels. One of them, the Hydrogen Sonata had this passage: “Is it true your body was covered in over a hundred penises?” “No. I think the most I ever had was about sixty, but that was slightly too many. I settled on fifty-three as the maximum. Even then it was very difficult maintaining an erection in all of them at the same time, even with four hearts.” Si…

Banks' most apt futurism was that give the ability to do anything, only a few people would use it to do something interesting.

Re: Engineered material can reconnect severed nerves

#66

Post by maxerickson »

ElFitz wrote: post #32
gpderetta wrote: post #5

Neural lace when?

Considering how hard it is to actually fix any accidental damage to brain cells and nerves, and the far-reaching consequences of such damage, I am always amazed to see how many are eager to just plug something into it and let some arbitrary code send electric shocks through their brain. I get the unfathomable potential of the thing, and the appeal of said potential. But that’s a product I won’t be an early-adopter of…

As of yet, most people with brain implants have them to try to improve profound problems.

Cochlear implants are controversial in the deaf community, but they also have a relatively clear purpose and effect (vs being "arbitrary").

Re: Engineered material can reconnect severed nerves

#67

Post by ethbr1 »

azalemeth wrote: post #49
tsavo wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can speak from personal experience. Traumatic incident which severed the nerves to my leg in multiple places. Nerves eventually regrew and reconnected within the leg, and then again where they were severed in the foot. Motor and senory nerves reacted differently. When motor nerves reconnected, I still couldn't contract the muscles and went through a series of steps to relearn how to use the limb. First I was trying t…

I've had exactly these experiences following a spinal injury -- fracture of a vertebra but with minimal cord damage and quite a lot of disruption to the dorsal root ganglia. You can't put into words how weird it is to fall over because your brain thinks your foot is somewhere it isn't. Or how suddenly you become incredibly aware of how the front of your calf feels. Or how overjoyed you are to be able to move your toe…

Amazed congratulations to you and parent. I can't imagine going through that, but then I imagine you wouldn't have chosen to either. Hope things continue improving.

Your description also made me reflect on infants, and whether we effectively "feel more" in that stage, as our nervous systems are self-calibrating and adjusting gain.

Re: Engineered material can reconnect severed nerves

#68

Post by ethbr1 »

finite_depth wrote: post #11
unsupp0rted wrote: post #6

I've always found it incongruous that we can move a person's body around the globe at 900 kilometers per hour for 25 hours for under $1500 but for 1000x that price and even with 1000x that time we can't bridge the distance between a brain and a foot.

It might help to remember that a human body has more cells than there are people on Earth by around three orders of magnitude, and that you're engineering things on the scale of nano- or micrometers. A typical human cell is on the order of 10 micrometers. If you need to bridge even 1 cm of that, you're bridging ~a thousand cell-widths. If you think of a cell as the somatic equivalent of a house in a city, that's the…

Some neurons can be extremely long though (up to 1m).

https://www.khanacademy.org/science/biology/human-biology/ne...

Re: Engineered material can reconnect severed nerves

#69

Post by avg_dev »

kmeisthax wrote: post #10
unsupp0rted wrote: post #6

I've always found it incongruous that we can move a person's body around the globe at 900 kilometers per hour for 25 hours for under $1500 but for 1000x that price and even with 1000x that time we can't bridge the distance between a brain and a foot.

So, I'll put this into terms that a sysadmin can understand: imagine if all the Ethernet or fiber going to a datacenter rack was bundled up, and I cut that bundle up. Now you have to splice them back together so that every port is still connected to the same port it was before I cut the cables. Oh, and also, the cables are microscopic, incredibly fragile, and we don't know how to actually repair them. We sort of just…

Very clear mental image there. Thanks for phrasing it that way.

Re: Engineered material can reconnect severed nerves

#70

Post by avg_dev »

azalemeth wrote: post #49
tsavo wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can speak from personal experience. Traumatic incident which severed the nerves to my leg in multiple places. Nerves eventually regrew and reconnected within the leg, and then again where they were severed in the foot. Motor and senory nerves reacted differently. When motor nerves reconnected, I still couldn't contract the muscles and went through a series of steps to relearn how to use the limb. First I was trying t…

I've had exactly these experiences following a spinal injury -- fracture of a vertebra but with minimal cord damage and quite a lot of disruption to the dorsal root ganglia. You can't put into words how weird it is to fall over because your brain thinks your foot is somewhere it isn't. Or how suddenly you become incredibly aware of how the front of your calf feels. Or how overjoyed you are to be able to move your toe…

Thanks to both of you for the amazing descriptions. And continued good luck.
Post reply on HN