Conjoined twins who share a brain
www2.macleans.ca
www2.macleans.ca
Her husband, Doug, drums up business. “We deliver food, flowers, whatever anybody needs,” she says. “We charge $5 for delivery in town.” Money is tight. Each time they get ahead, there’s a financially draining trip to Vancouver.
What!?
Some of the greatest leaps in understanding about how our brains work, not to mention untold wonders in technological advancement might be presented to us on a platter via this once in a multi-generation opportunity and they're housed in some crap rental trying to deliver flowers to make ends meet??? This family should immediately be declared a national treasure and have the full support of the Canadian government.
Expensive? Morally nebulous? Look, we yanks will build a multi-100-million dollar prison and get over the moral gray-ness of water-boarding just to find a few bombs. Helping out what might turn out to be a simple disabled pair of twins in exchange for knowledge that may improve humanity forever shouldn't be that much of a stretch.
I know this might be an unpopular opinion and attract downvotes, but I just got a +70 for what I though was a throwaway one-liner. If that's how the karma flows, then bring it.
I doubt a line of twins joined at the brain will show up looking for handouts.
The family is of course entitled to do what it deems proper, but neuroscientists may have a wonderful opportunity here. Perhaps I'm over-reaching, but there seem to be many topics -- some of them very practical -- upon which the twins may offer insight: brain-computer interfaces, the sense-of-self, seat of consciousness, the semantics/syntax of thought, distinction between language and thought, information processing... etc.
It also seems sad that this might be the closest thing we ever get to a truly alien intelligence (depending on how tightly coupled they are). Imagine a creature that not only can't conceive of living a life uncoupled from its binary partner but may be horrified by the thought. And what will we do with this fantastic intelligence, unique in all the world? Reality TV.
This is probably the single biggest opportunity for mankind.
If there are some folks in Canada that could organize some kind of fund to help the kids - count me in. I hope they might agree to help us all back in return.
Where it gets really messed up is when you look at people who've had major parts of their brain removed. I remember reading about a man who had half his brain removed and was able to function almost perfectly after therapy. If you were able to take half of someone's brain out, then put that half into another person (who you'd removed the full brain from) would that make them two separate people or still one?
So while it's an interesting question, it's impossible in practice (even if we had the capability of "reattaching" a portion of the brain).
If not, show me your work and I'm sure I'll become a big fan :)
Thankyou for forcing me to google the wonderful world of hemispheroctomy.
Check out these bad boys:
http://technorati.com/lifestyle/family/article/girl-has-half...
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,836175,00.h...
I'm happy to accept anything you post on the opposite side, I just found these stories interesting.
Stretchy head holes?
The wiki page for the other girls has information and links: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Abigail_and_B...
Also - what would it be like to see from two sets of eyes?!
Hell, what happens when one dreams while the other is awake! INCEPTION.
> what would it be like to see from two sets of eyes?!
Something else I thought about was the supposed tendency of identical twins to have have a pseudo-dialect between each other. Perhaps these two don't communicate with the outside world as much because they're too busy communicating, silently, with each other.
Direct quotes from them: "come play" "No" "Bounce it!" "Stop that!" "Hug!"
This being Hacker News, however, I think there are broader implications. Understanding what Tatiana and Krista experience may prove invaluable if we develop some sort of direct neural interface. It's already been shown that we can adapt to synthetic limbs or additional sensory inputs. (Interesting experiments done with magnetometer sensing http://feelspace.cogsci.uni-osnabrueck.de/en/index.html) However, I feel like this could prove it possible to directly inject data into the brain, since everything we experience is from sensory input.
Basically, is telepathy fundamentally possible? Or would the raw neural data be incompatible across brains? I think these twins could explain a lot about that.
My guess is that when we start inserting info directly into the brain, the most immediately successful way will be to hijack existing inputs directly (vision, audio, etc), and the most successful long-term approach will simply be to just lob the data in in some suitable encoding with some suitable high-quality feedback and let the neurons do the hard work.
The mathematical model for a spiking neuron is reasonably well understood, as far as I know: http://izhikevich.org/human_brain_simulation/Blue_Brain.htm
I did take the code he mentions and play with it. Is behaviour is fascinating. I hope to be still alive when we have enough computing power for simulating a single brain, and to be able to directly cross-connect it to mine.
The guy you linked to is using a simpler two-variable model with correspondingly lower fidelity. The goal of the Blue Brain Project, which this guy seems to think he has bested, is to model all of the features of a biological neuron and, more importantly, how they wire together.
The Hindmarsh-Rose, Hodgkin–Huxley, and other mathematical models are phenomenological models. They are meant to reproduce the observable characteristics, like the peak potential, bursting behaviour, refractory period, things like that. They can reproduce the traces of biological neurons with good accuracy (like the link in the GP), and the papers describing the model mention ion channels and whatnot, but they're very abstract. They're not made to reproduce the biology.
How fast is your code performance-wise ?
I think the point he is making is that his model is "good enough".
The code that I was running was able to emulate ~40000 neurons and their connections on a Lenovo T60 laptop in realtime. (the number might be off by an order of 2-4, I remember playing with different numbers, but do not remember the exact value).
Interesting thing was that the "waves" that emerged by themselves, and with a certain size of the network they were sustainable even when I removed the initial "random noise" stimuli.
I did not figure out a decent way to attach the inputs/outputs to this "soup". Since this capacity does approach the brain size of an ant, might be fun to toy with a "virtual world" "inhabited" by connected computers running the simulation.
Could be a fun project, even if a little impractical. (Though I sadly lack the knowledge in the domain to make it happen).
That code has problems simulating multiple neurons for some reason (possibly thread safety in GSL?). But, it can simulate one neuron at 20x realtime, with dumping traces to disk. If I were to disable dumping traces, it'd be primarily limited by GSL's differential equation solver.
(Sorry, too tired to respond to the second half of your comment)
(Actually we can trace the visual input some ways up the core processing path, too, which is interesting. I don't know what the state of the art is now but a few years ago when I was learning about this in school we had a clue that there's a lot of neurons dedicated to edge detection, orientation detection, and movement detection. It's not a miracle that humans see better than computers, rather a lot of our brains are dedicated to doing a lot of computation in parallel long before this rises to the conscious level.)
Picking an appropriate encoding for a new sense may not be absolutely trivial but it is something we might be able to do today. What I wouldn't expect to happen any time soon is the direct memory interface, or anything that interfaces any more directly than a simulated sense or simulated limb. I can imagine a phantom limb interacting with a simulated computer desktop and overlaying the visual system without more than the expected leaps in technology; imagining something that allows you to simply remember Wikipedia just as if you memorized it is much harder to even imagine.
I hear this analogy all the time but it makes no sense to me. A color is either physical light or the idea in your head of a particular color. If we agree on both of those, what is left that could be meaningfully compared to decide if we are "experiencing" it as the same or different?
Could I be experiencing a poodle as a banana, even though I think it's called a poodle and it actually is a poodle?
If we agree on both of those [..]
what is left that could be meaningfully compared
The experience of green is, by definition, whatever goes on in your head when you look at green. If you scanned our brains, you might find different patterns of neurons firing, but there is no sense in calling either of those patterns anything besides "green".
The experience of green is, by definition, whatever goes
on in your head when you look at green
On another note, not involving the actual experience: I was just reading the wikipedia entry on 'Grue and bleen'. It ends with:
Kripke then argues for an interpretation of Wittgenstein
as holding that it is not possible to state the meaning of
a word.
You may also be interested in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinguishing_blue_from_green_...
The exact scope of the term is not universal, but it might be well expressed as the atomic level of individual mental experience. Even if we experience the same physical wavelength of light and can address it on the same terms, we may nonetheless have entirely different qualia connecting that physical data and that shared mental construction of the color. And there's no way we would ever know!
But this doesn't work if you convey "original" thought. If I imagine something, I can only describe it to you, and there's is no way to be sure you are experiencing what I imagined. What you experience is based on how you process that input and what you think of. Your brain may be set up completely differently from mine, so would they be compatible?
I guess the real question is, is it possible to agree on an idea without having a reference?
That's my point.. to even ponder whether or not we have the same idea in our heads, there has to be some objective form of the thought that is compatible with both of our brains. Then, assuming there was some miraculous way to get the thought into my head, I could compare it with my own thought to see if they match.
If, however, brains are structurally unique to the point that thoughts are meaningless outside of the context of the particular brain that thinks them, then why is it interesting to ponder if our thoughts are the same or different? Of course they are different since the notion of their sameness is a non-sequitur.
The notion that we use the former type of thoughts to think about colors, and that they are interchangeable -- that I could see red in the same way that you see green, while seeing actual green as something else -- is conceivable, but completely unnecessary to explain anything about the mind. You can simply remove that step and get a simpler and equally adequate theory to explain color vision, so why would we even contemplate the step existing?
They do have separate brains, but what about the Thalamus bridge? That may leak some info.
I'm curious to see a radiography on this, anyone has more links about it?
"you just can't pigeonhole them [emphasis added]"
Stealth pigeonhole?
The photo on the right doesn't show any buttons and the opening for the neck seems way too small for them to fit their whole body through it.