The Hindu Business Line : A monkey moves a robot arm in MIT

MEET Ramez Naam who helped develop "two of the most widely used pieces of software in the world - Microsoft Internet Explorer and Microsoft Outlook," as one learns from the author introduction to More than Human from Broadway Books (www.broadwaybooks.com) .

"In labs around the world, researchers looking for ways to help the sick and injured have stumbled onto techniques that enhance healthy animals - making them stronger, faster, smarter, and longer-lived - in some cases, even connecting their minds to robots and computers across the Internet," he informs.

And if you didn't know already, science is "on the verge of applying this knowledge to healthy men and women." No need to fear because Naam assures that "these much-maligned technologies have the power to transform the human race for the better."

A chapter on `the wired brain' discusses neural interfaces. "For now, medical research into using brain implants to assist the blind, the paralysed, and those who've suffered brain damage will drive the development of the technology," predicts Naam.

Do you know that DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency of the US, would like to give the soldiers "the ability to control tanks, fly planes, and share information purely through thought"? They would like to cut the hand `out of the loop' to improve reaction time, so that "pilots will gain the ability to control more complex systems than their hands can currently manage."

The author cites the research breakthroughs achieved by Miguel Nicolelis and John Chapin - such as showing that a rat could control a robot arm in much the same way that a human could control a computer cursor, and that a monkey's neural activity picked up by seven hundred electrodes in the motor cortices of the brain and transmitted across the Internet could control a robot arm in an MIT lab, six hundred miles away!

Naam extrapolates: "Humans with neurons could control robots in remote hazardous environments or pilot unmanned planes over a battlefield from the comfort and safety of a base." What should have mystified the monkey, however, was that the robot arm moved, in another experiment, before the monkey expected it. Naam explains: "While nerve signals move at a relatively slow 100 metres per second, signals in electronic circuits travel at close to speed of light, about three thousand times faster."

The book cites Nicolelis' observation that shows the monkey in new light: "The monkey suddenly realised that she didn't need to move her arm at all. Her arm muscles went completely quiet, she kept the arm at her side and she controlled the robot arm using only her brain and visual feedback." The scientist infers, "The brain is so amazingly adaptable that it can incorporate an external device... as a natural extension of the body."

Don't tell me you're already working hard to get Naam's book land on your desk by the power of mere thought! Great read.

Merging of the real and the virtual

TO know more about the `1500 grams of densely packed cells and connections' sitting within our skulls, I pick up Steven Rose's The 21st-Century Brain, from Jonathan Cape (www.randomhouse.co.uk) . "The overwhelming majority of species alive today manage without brains or even nervous systems - and they manage very well; they are no less and no more highly evolved than are we," he writes. "The myriad life forms of insects and their complex behaviours show that big brains are not necessary for evolutionary success."

How humbling, that is. But, in the absence of brain, the behaviour is hard-wired - "fixed within the pattern of connections" - and so not much modification happens in response to experience, explains Rose. For instance, "a fly trapped on the wrong side of a half-open window cannot learn to fly round the obstacle, instead stubbornly banging its head on the glass as it follows its attempt to navigate towards the light." Ah, how often we too get into such patterns of behaviour!

Rose writes about how insects can be smart too. Ants can produce `propaganda' pheromones to disorient potential prey, honey bees perform waggle dance to inform their colleagues of the nature and distance of the food sources, and octopus can be taught to discriminate between rough and smooth, black and white, square and circle.

The author elaborately discusses the rationale of brain structure. One of the design problems he mentions is the need to pack so many neurons and "keep the wires from becoming crossed". Rose reasons: "One device is to coat each axon in an insulating layer of lipid, rather like the plastic sheath on electrical wiring. The lipid is called myelin; white in colour and rather greasy in texture, it forms the brain's well-known `white matter'." A better approach is found in the fish's optic lobes, he informs.

A chapter titled `from 1 to 100 billion in nine months' concedes that it is relatively easy to describe, even when it is hard to explain, "trajectory by which a fusion of human sperm and ovum results, over nine months gestation, in some 3-4 kilos of baby." Our system has `built-in redundancy', points out the author. So, "there are multiple possible pathways to a successful outcome," submerging the `typical' differences.

Towards the end of the book, where Rose discusses the merging of the real and the virtual, you come across a surreal suggestion of the French Philosopher Jean Baudrillard: that the 1991 Gulf war did not occur, except as a sort of endless series of computer arcade images, argues. Rose comments: "Just as taxi driving in London increases the size of the posterior hippocampus, so the fingering of a computer keyboard increases the brain's representation of the relevant digits - and, in the longer term, such technological change in turn drives evolutionary processes, by altering selection pressures and changing the definitions of favourable versus unfavourable genotypes."

Essential, brainy read.

Books courtesy: Landmark (www.landmarkonthenet.com)

Tailpiece

"Eeeek! Mouse!"

"Rat-o-phobia or suriphobia?"

"No, the computer mouse has fallen into the mousetrap!"

Books2Byte@TheHindu.co.in

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A monkey moves a robot arm in MIT

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