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Engineered material can reconnect severed nerves

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Re: Engineered material can reconnect severed nerves

#111

Post by Geee »

mindstorms6 wrote: post #107
Geee wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Helping disabled people is probably the most important near-term application of this. I just like to ponder about long-term "sci-fi" implications, in terms of how and when these kinds of ideas will become actually plausible. Some applications, like digital eyes, which connect directly to the optic nerve, would be first used to cure blindness, but soon people would start replacing their functioning eyes too, if it all…

I've interviewed with / been to the facility of this place: https://science.xyz/products/vision/ They're exploring the "digital eye" concept you mentioned. Really cool stuff. Probably less than 50 years for the fixing some types of blindness.

Really cool. Glad to see someone is already working on this.

Re: Engineered material can reconnect severed nerves

#112

Post by skykooler »

soco wrote: post #88
skykooler wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if you could multiplex the signals from a bunch of nerves and send them over an Ethernet link.

Next level: link together a group of humans. I can't really imagine the implications of that, but I think of Vernor Vinge's "A fire upon the deep" and the group minds of the wolves there...

Hmm, you could have a skilled pianist play piano through your hands.

Re: Engineered material can reconnect severed nerves

#113

Post by PawgerZ »

gumby wrote: post #76
BurningFrog wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A radio link would simplify this enormously. You could link nerves "wirelessly"from a leg to near the brain without any surgery in between. I don't see why it's fundamentally impossible?

After pressing the button on the microwave you'd be frozen until the machine beeped. Unless you had a tinfoil hat (well, suit).

Typically, you close the microwave door before starting it.

Re: Engineered material can reconnect severed nerves

#114

Post by BurningFrog »

PawgerZ wrote: post #113
gumby wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After pressing the button on the microwave you'd be frozen until the machine beeped. Unless you had a tinfoil hat (well, suit).

Typically, you close the microwave door before starting it.

Just remember to close it from the outside!

Re: Engineered material can reconnect severed nerves

#115

Post by rbanffy »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #59
rbanffy wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh boy wait till this guy finds out about copper

I think bio-compatibility is nasty.

Re: Engineered material can reconnect severed nerves

#116

Post by rbanffy »

ethbr1 wrote: post #64
rbanffy wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That as well. Why be human when you can be an airplane?

Re: Engineered material can reconnect severed nerves

#117

Post by rbanffy »

BurningFrog wrote: post #74
skykooler wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if you could multiplex the signals from a bunch of nerves and send them over an Ethernet link.

A radio link would simplify this enormously. You could link nerves "wirelessly"from a leg to near the brain without any surgery in between. I don't see why it's fundamentally impossible?

I'm not sure it'd be a brilliant idea from an infosec point-of-view - the links themselves would need to be hardened in such way interfering with them would be impossible, or someone would be able to just blast the proper messages to the receivers to take over someone's body.

In fact, the conductor was half-joking. I'd probably go for fiber, even if it adds latency at the endpoints.

Re: Engineered material can reconnect severed nerves

#118

Post by rbanffy »

skykooler wrote: post #112
soco wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Next level: link together a group of humans. I can't really imagine the implications of that, but I think of Vernor Vinge's "A fire upon the deep" and the group minds of the wolves there...

Hmm, you could have a skilled pianist play piano through your hands.

There's more than that to playing - a musician masters their own body in order to play the instrument with the required dexterity. There would need to be a translation layer between the commands that work on their body and the ones that'd work in yours (different finger lengths and muscular strength is the first thing that came to my mind).

Re: Engineered material can reconnect severed nerves

#119

Post by rbanffy »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #87
gumby wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’ll give you almost instantaneous reflexes. This is almost probably not what you want. Your nerves respond pretty quickly already and you can do things faster than you can think about them (e.g. catching a ball) so there's more to the computation than the "CPU". I have read that the myelin sheath on your nerves is thicker at birth then as an adult. The theory (not mine!) is that as it thins the capacitance goes do…

So if as a child I learn to send a signal to my hand to move out to catch the ball, the signal takes X microseconds to travel from brain down my arm to my and and "clasp" But as an adult / teen my arm is now a foot or more longer. So the signal would take x+y microseconds to get to my hand - but if the resistance of the nerves reduces it's signal is faster and back to x microseconds That's brilliant

> But as an adult / teen my arm is now a foot or more longer.

It was a lifetime of tiny adjustments. We'd be lost in our adult bodies if it were a sudden transition.

As a teen, I was observably clumsier than I was as a small kid.

Re: Engineered material can reconnect severed nerves

#120

Post by Shorel »

Geee wrote: post #96
lordnacho wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Find a way to distil whatever process the brain does, emulate it on a computer.

You can do this with atom level simulation and growing the brain all the way from DNA, but it needs a lot of compute (> 50 years). However, and in the end you'd be bored, because you could get rid of all of your human flaws, which is what makes life interesting. It'd be really depressing and boring to be a superintelligent computer.

There's absolutely no basis for the affirmations made in your last paragraph. None at all. And if we think about it, it is very scary.
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