Thislink is one of those gems if you're interested in far out
technology. Mental augmentation. Biochips that make us smarter.
http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/general.articles/1992/WildPalms.html
"
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IEEE Transactions on Medical Electronics v15 n3 July-September 1971, pp.
1175:1195
An Invasive Approach to High-Bandwidth
Neural-Electronic Interfaces
Dexter Wyckoff
principal scientist, Mimecom Seldon Research Center, Sebastopol , California
Rajiv Kamar
research neurobiologist, Department of Psychology, University of
California at San Francisco
Fred Wright
computer systems engineer, Project One, Berkeley, California
ABSTRACT In previous years one of the authors (Wyckoff) reported on the
development of synthetic neurotransmitter analogs that, administered
intravenously, enhanced certain mental functions, including memory
formation and recall, and ability to maintain attention for extended
periods. Further efforts in that direction yeilded diminishing returns.
In an offshoot of this work, the authors investigated the possibility of
augmenting mental function by physically linking brain structures to
external computer hardware. After locating a suitable neural connection
site (the mammalian corpus callosum) we developed hardware and software
for the task. This paper describes our first unambiguously successful
results, obtained in a juvenile squirrel monkey, which was able, in
consequence, to play chess and to read at the level of a schoolchild,
activities far outside of its normal competence.
Our approach generalizes straightforwardly to human augmentation, and
points to the additional possibility of gradually migrating memories,
skills and personality encoded in fragile and bounded neural hardware to
faster, more capacious and communicative, and less mortal, external
digital machinery--thus preserving and expanding the essential
functional of a mind, even as the nervous system in which it arose was
lost. A mind and personality, as an information-bearing pattern, might
thus be freed from the limitations and risks of a particular physical
body, to travel over information channels and through the ether, to
reside in alternative physical hosts.
Introduction Traditionally human central nervous systems (CNS) and
electronic computation and communication devices have been linked via
the bodily senses and musculature--an approach requiring only simple
technology and incurring little medical risk. Unfortunately this
straightforward avenue has very low information bandwidth: effectively a
few kilohertz of sensory information (primarily vision) into the CNS,
and a mere one tenth of that figure out. Much higher transfer rates are
observed within the CNS. In particular, the corpus callosum connects the
right and left cerebral hemispheres with 500 million fibers in the
human. Each fiber signals on average at about ten hertz, for an
aggregate rate of several gigahertz: about one million times the
bandwidth of the senses. The corpus callosum connects to all major
cerebral areas, offering a spectacular opportunity for electronic
interaction. The primary challenges are the invasive nature and massive
scale of any comprehensive link. In other publications we have described
the design of "neural combs" which can be inserted non-destructively
into nerve bundles to make contact with a large fraction of the fibers:
they are scaled up relatives of cochlear implants used in nerve-deafness
surgery. This paper describes experiments in which neural combs were
implanted into the callosa of primates, and connected to a computers
running adaptive algorithms that modeled the measured neural traffic and
correlated it with sensory, motor and cognitive states, and later
impressed external information on this flow.
The animals (squirrel monkeys) used in the experiments have a CNS size
about one two hundredth that of a human, with a corpus callosum of less
than ten thousand fibers, greatly simplifying both the surgical and
computational aspects of the work. In each experiment a neural comb with
two thousand microfiber tines at ten micron separation, each carrying
along its length one hundred separate connection rings, was carefully
worked between the axons in the callosum of the experimental animal.
After a week to heal surgical trauma, a cable bundle from the comb to a
PDP-10 ten teraops multiprocessor was activated, and signals from the
tines were processed by a factor-analysis program. Once a rough
relational map had been obtained, a functional map was constructed by
presenting the animal with controlled sensory stimuli, and inducing it
to perform previously trained motor tasks, while correlating comb
activity. The functional map was further refined by processing the
responses to synthesized sensations introduced via the comb. After
several days of stimulation and analysis, the PDP-10 had a sufficiently
good model of the callosal traffic that we were able to elicit very
complex and specific behavior, including some that seem quite beyond the
capacities of the unaugmented animals.
Our most notable results were obtained with animal number three (#3),
out of five subjects. In one demonstration, we interfaced #3 to the
Greenblatt chess program, supplied with the PDP-10 software. We began by
fast-training #3 to discriminate individual chess pieces we presented.
Fast-training is similar to conventional operant conditioning, but
greatly accelerated because the responses we seek and the intense
rewards we generate involve fast, unambiguous, callosal signals, rather
than clumsy physical acts. We then configured the PDP-10 to reward the
animal (by generating callosal stimuli similar to those occurring
naturally when tasty fruit is seen) when it scanned the chess board each
time its turn to move arose. During the scan, the callosal recognition
and location signals for the various chess pieces are translated, by a
program module we wrote, into a chessboard configuration, which is fed
to the chess program, which returns a suitable move. Our program then
stimulates #3's food grasping behavior, directed at the piece to be
moved: in consequence, the animal avidly grasps it. Next, the target
square is singled out for attention, causing the piece to be moved
there. The attractiveness of the piece is then reduced and the animal
loses interest, and releases it. It took several intense weeks of effort
to "debug" this program. Among the problems we encountered were #3's
inattention to other pieces on the board: in early tries it would often
incidentally upset them when reaching for the piece to be moved. We now
activate an aversion response we had noticed in the mapping process: as
best we can determine, #3 now feels about a chess move as it would feel
about a luscious fruit that must be gingerly teased out of a thorn bush.
Another problem was the animal's wandering interest as it waited for its
opponent to move. We solved this by a mild invocation of its response to
certain predators. It now quietly but alertly, somewhat apprehensively,
awaits the move, drawing no attention to itself.
Another demonstration gave #3 more autonomy. We fast-trained the animal
to recognize individual letters of the alphabet, and to scan strings of
such letters it encountered. The letter strings were fed to a dictionary
look up program, whose output was then translated into appropriate
recognition signals for the objects, events and actions in the text. #3
soon learned to respond the labels of containers, and to choose those
whose contents were of interest (usually culinary). When the program is
running, #3 also shows an interest in books, and registers appropriate
reactions such as appetite, excitement, fear, lust and so on appropriate
to the stories it reads. Stories about food and outdoor adventures seem
to be preferred: curious for an animal that was raised in an indoor
breeding colony, and has spent the last five years in small laboratory
cages.
In future work we plan to expand the behavioral latitude available to
our animal subjects while executing programmed tasks, by writing richer
programs more responsive to the animal's internal imperatives, and also
by providing means for the animal to invoke major programs on its own
initiative. These extensions are, of course, interesting in the context
of future applications to human interface.
EMAIL text archive, Kyoto University datacenter, December 2010
Date:
Tuesday, 9 February 1999, 3:27 UT
To:
Chickie Levitt <chickie@neuro.usc.edu>
From:
Ushio Kawabata <ushio@kyotou.jp>
Translation:
jp1->am1
Encoding:
text:rsa-pubkey
Your musings yesterday on a permanent broadband mental link to the
worldnet were very thought-provoking. I think you are right, it would
allow the human mind to bootstrap itself in an effective way into an
entirely new, and much larger, arena of possibilities. In the early
stages the effect would be of an expanded mind, with the contents of the
world libraries as accessible as one's own memories, and the
computational capacities of the world's computers as available as one's
own skills. As integration proceeded, one might slowly download one's
entire personality into the net, being thus freed from all limitations
of the body. It is hard, from our present standpoint, to even imagine
what might be seen and reached from that perspective.
Have you any ideas on how to proceed? There was an article yesterday
article in Comp.Par on Andrew Systems' Crystal 3. It is probably
powerful and small enough to serve as a data compressor for a link: only
1/20 cubic meter for 10 TeraOps: Perhaps one could carry it in a
backpack for a perpetual connection?
********************
Date:
Tuesday, 9 February 1999, 8:16 UT
To:
Ushio Kawabata <ushio@kyotou.jp>
From:
Chickie Levitt <chickie@neuro.usc.edu>
Translation:
am1->jp1
Encoding:
text:rsa-pubkey
Usio-samba!
Well, it would still give a pain to carry your brain. A backpack
compressor might offer higher bandwidth to the net, but would be much
less convenient than a straightforward Eye-glass optic nerve interface
(and considerably more risky). I've been thinking of a way around having
to put all the processing in electronics, and still get higher overall
bandwidth in a vastly more compact form. *If* we could get the neural
connections to cooperate----to crossbar and compress the calloflow----we
could save 99% of the computation and external communication, making
callosum interface practical---- with data rate low enough for a
sat-cell relay. So then, you would have to carry around only a standard
multiplexer and sat-cell transceiver. The hard parts of the operation
can be distributed anywhere over the worldnet!
********************
Date:
Tuesday, 9 February 1999, 8:18 UT
To:
Chickie Levitt <chickie@neuro.usc.edu>
From:
Ushio Kawabata <ushio@kyotou.jp>
Translation:
jp1->am1
Encoding:
text:rsa-pubkey
That would be artful - a few chips at your end, giving access to the
world's data and processing power. Not only images and sounds, as with
Eye-glasses, but, with callosum access, feelings, motor sensations and
more abstract mental concepts, since the connection is to your cortical
areas for those functions. One could be in touch with almost anything in
the web with an intimacy now possible only with one's own thoughts! (on
the other hand, there is danger from useless net blabber all day long:
like mental tunes that will not cease).
Small problem: The crux of your suggestion is to build biological neural
structures to do most of the job we have been doing in electronics. How
does one persuade the neurons to, so conveniently, arrange themselves to
compress your callosum flow for satellite transmission?
********************
Date:
Tuesday, 9 February 1999, 8:19 UT
To:
Ushio Kawabata <ushio@kyotou.jp>
From:
Chickie Levitt <chickie@neuro.usc.edu>
Translation:
am1->jp1
Encoding:
text:rsa-pubkey
Well, that's the hard part all right. I have been reading in
sci.bio.research about gene hacking by the nerve repair crowd at
Hopkins. They've managed to develop viral vectors that infect neurons
and bugger their genetic initiator sequences so neural stem cells begin
differentiating in mid growth program of just about any structure they
want. They can grow an isolated callosum! - Though the ends come out
tangled, since there's no place for them to connect to.
********************
Date:
Tuesday, 9 February 1999, 8:19 UT
To:
Chickie Levitt <chickie@neuro.usc.edu>
From:
Ushio Kawabata <ushio@kyotou.jp>
Translation:
jp1->am1
Encoding:
text:rsa-pubkey
There must be many difficulties there. My friend Toshi Okada, who does
gene-engineering at Tskuba, tells me that in embryology, almost half the
information required to properly grow cell structures comes from the
previously grown structure: expressing the DNA code alone is not
sufficient to build working assemblies in most instances. Though perhaps
additional coding could be added to substitute for insufficient external
framework? That would be rather like building scaffolding in preparation
for construction proper.
********************
Date:
Tuesday, 9 February 1999, 8:20 UT
To:
Ushio Kawabata <ushio@kyotou.jp>
From:
Chickie Levitt <chickie@neuro.usc.edu>
Translation:
am1->jp1
Encoding:
text:rsa-pubkey
They've done some of that, but still get some distortion. It gets better
if the growth is started in the generally right kind of preexisting tissue
I'm thinking of growing a couple of square centimeters of cortical
tissue with callosal fibers that seek out and merge with an existing
callosum. The DNA hackery would be encoded into an RNA virus deposited
on the same electronic chip that contains the digital data interface.
The chip would have chemical target sites for one end of the new nerve
growth, and would be powered by body metabolism via an integrated ATP
fuel cell. Implant the chip somewhere on the edge of the corpus callosum
on the brain midline, and the virus will cause the surrounding brain
structure to grow a biological data-compressing interface between the
chip and the callosum.
The chip would have to be connected to some kind of external antenna to
communicate, maybe a thin wire through the skull, like a hair.
********************
Date:
Tuesday, 9 February 1999, 8:20 UT
To:
Chickie Levitt <chickie@neuro.usc.edu>
From:
Ushio Kawabata <ushio@kyotou.jp>
Translation:
jp1->am1
Encoding:
text:rsa-pubkey
Most interesting proposal! I'll ask Toshi if you can use some of
Tskuba's gene modeling and embryology software to help you with the
design. They've become quite good in the last few years.
I will contact you then.
Best wishes - Ushio
MILESTONES IN MENTAL AUGMENTATION
(side-bar to article in New Scientist, Stepping Out - The Mind
Unbounded, February 16, 2010)
1780
Luigi Galvani demonstrates a connection between nerves, muscles and
electricity by animating frog legs with electricity applied to nerves
leading to muscles, thus hinting at how the internal workings of a mind
could be coupled to external artificial devices.
1906
Ramon Cajal and Camillo Golgi receive Nobel Prize for developing nerve
staining methods and elucidating the detailed structure of the cerebrum
and cerebellum, so providing a rough roadmap for later intervention.
1929
Hans Berger invents the electroencephalogram (EEG) for recording
electrical activity in the human brain: a first crude, one-way channel
into the functioning of the mind.
1952
James Watson and Francis Crick determine the structure of DNA and its
mode of replications, and suggest its role as the control code for
biological growth, so laying the foundation for molecular biology, and
eventually the engineering of biological structures, including neural
assemblies for electronic interfaces.
1953
Wilder Penfield produces maps of the cortex by means of electrical
probes of its surface during brain surgery--evoking specific memories,
sensations and motor responses by stimulating specific locations, thus
establishing the geographic nature of mental organization, and
incidentally providing the first examples of artificial interaction with
the internal workings of the mind.
1959
Robert Noyce and Jack Kirby invent the integrated circuit, a way of
placing many electronic components on a single piece of crystal,
initiating at least a half century of exponential growth in electronic
complexity, the creation of mind-like machines, and eventually the
merger of biological and artificial minds.
1960
Frank Rosenblatt develops and reports on learning experiments with the
Perceptron, an artificial neural net: a way of organizing electronic
components in a structure that anatomically and functionally matches the
organization of biological brains.
1967
George Brindley and William Lewin implant an electrode array into the
visual cortex of a congenitally blind subject, and generate visual
phosphenes (spots) by camera-controlled computer activation of this
array, restoring some sight to a nerve-blind volunteer, and providing an
early major demonstration of a computer-nervous system symbiosis.
1969
Dexter Wyckoff and Rajiv Kamar demonstrate the neural comb, a low-noise,
high-bandwidth external channel to the nervous system, providing for the
first time potentially total external access to higher mental functions.
1971
Wyckoff, Kamar and Fred Wright use a neural comb with a PDP-10 computer
to enable a squirrel monkey to play chess and to read, an early example
of mental augmentation by electronic means.
1974
Walter House and Janet Urban install a cochlear implant driven by an
external computer, restoring partial hearing to a nerve-deaf patient,
and creating a successful medical niche for electronic substitution of
lost sensory functions.
1982
William DeVries installs first permanent artificial heart implanted in a
human subject, causing a major shift in the public perception of the
relation of "natural" biological functions to "artificial" mechanical
devices.
1987
Josephine Bogart and Paul Vogels install a neural comb in the corpus
callosum of an epileptic patient, and program an external computer to
interrupt seizures: the first human application of a neural comb.
1991
Carver Meade develops an artificial retina, integrating tens of
thousands of artificial neurons on an integrated circuit, developing
some of the analog techniques used in the electronic portions of future
"neurochips."
1994
Ushio Kawabata develops a successful predictive model of human cortical
behavior building on Edelman's "neural darwinism" formulation, an
essential step in providing the engineering environment used to design
the neural structures grown by neurochip viruses.
1997
Ushio Kawabata and Chickie Levitt develop an information-efficient
method of deriving functional neural anatomy from dense observations of
nerve signals, so laying the foundation for the mental mapping process
used to adapt a neurochip to its host.
2000
Chickie Levitt and Toshi Okada develop a genetic design for a neural
interface between the human callosum and a data transmission integrated
circuit. This design is encoded into RNA viruses which are part of
neurochip implants, and act by infecting nearby neural tissue, so
causing the growth of connective and data-compressing neuron structures
that connect the electronic portion of the neurochip with the brain.
2003
Chickie Levitt combines previous electronic, genetic and neural
innovations to produce the first complete, functional, self-connecting
neurochip.
2005
The first experiment with neurochips is partial success. A
neurochip-augmented chimpanzee demonstrates an equivalent human IQ of
190 for two months, before dying of a brain tumor.
"
