Engineered material can reconnect severed nerves
news.rice.edu
news.rice.edu
I've mostly given up on commenting on this on HN. I have an incurable condition and it makes zero difference that these practices directly negatively impact my life and scare the hell out of me, such observations get down voted and attacked and treated like crazy talk.
I'm sorry for what your social contact is going through.
... or just make it a plane's control surface.
I don't see why it's fundamentally impossible?
Unless you had a tinfoil hat (well, suit).
> To establish this digital bridge, we integrated two fully implanted systems that enable recording of cortical activity and stimulation of the lumbosacral spinal cord wirelessly and in real time (Fig. 1a).
In fact, the conductor was half-joking. I'd probably go for fiber, even if it adds latency at the endpoints.
Some pretty basic encryption scheme should handle infosec angle.
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 down and perhaps this helps keep the transmission time more constant as yu grow, so that what you have learned about walking, catching a ball, drinking hot coffee from a cup continues to work. Imperfectly -- kids are clumsy -- but enough that you can quickly adapt and not have to keep learning all over again.
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
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.
The remaining problem is to figure out how to keep a brain alive in a vat, and making the life-support devices small enough to fit inside the body. It's probably not too difficult; you need to circulate blood, remove carbon dioxide, add oxygen, add glucose. You could probably keep the brain alive indefinitely.
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.
And then that would live on in a new environment, becoming something entirely different.
I take it you have never written any large applications or simulations.
Talk about jumping to conclusions.
One that I would personally be very interested in would be improving human-computer interactions. Preferably with no quirurgical procedures, or something extremely non-invasive and quick.
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 allows feeding pixels directly into the brain. Same with prosthetics, if they'd be better than biological ones. Then if you have cyborg eyes, arms and legs, why have a biological 'core' which is pretty much useless at this point.
Storing the brain in the body would actually be a bad idea. Human brains could be stored in a warehouse and they'd control robotic bodies remotely. You'd be able to jump into different bodies all over the world, and choose from different form-factors (ant, whale, dragon, etc.) This would actually be easier to implement, because the life-support system for the brain could be larger and consume more energy and other resources. You'd also be able to choose whether you want to live in a simulated world or a physical world through robots.
I think this is where we're quite realistically heading in less than 50 years.
They're exploring the "digital eye" concept you mentioned. Really cool stuff. Probably less than 50 years for the fixing some types of blindness.
I also want some kind of biological USB, that we need years of training to be able to use fast xD
This always seems to be followed by something that demonstrates that the poster did not understand correctly
"We have a computer that can play chess, which means we'll soon be able to replace humans by AIs" - someone in 1970
> You could probably keep the brain alive indefinitely.
> It's probably not too difficult
Why do 1/3rd to half of people above 85 have Alzheimer's/Parkinson's/Dementia then ?
Software developers have very simplistic and optimistic views about these things, we're very far away from anything remotely close to have you're talking about. The human body is infinitely more complex than what your comment hints
Come on man, I can't believe people do these wild extrapolations out of nothing like this, when every two days an article on HN and a hundred on reddit claim to definitely cure cancer and aids and whatnot
We have always (OK, at least since Ancient Egypt) known more about mathematics than about physics.
We have always (...) known more about physics than about chemistry.
We have always (...) known more about chemistry than about our bodies.
The available technology mirrors that.
Imagine attempting to wire up a datacenter that is actively trying to rewire itself (and not necessarily to your plans).
it's all connected to an organic deep neural network
which means that the specific arrangement of the physical wires doesn't matter. because there's a training period in which the neural network literally learns to control the body anyways
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK326735/ [2] https://www.theguardian.com/education/2012/nov/12/improbable...
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 to "move" the leg, but effectively the "IP address" for the leg was changed so my "move" signals were going to where my head thought the leg was instead of to the new connection. Instead, I would estim a specific muscle and "listen" in my head for where "noise" was coming from. That "noise" was the electric buzzing from the estim'd muscle contraction. Eventually, I learned how to concentrate to make a muscle contract, and many steps later (pun intended), I learned to walk again.
Sensory nerves didn't need a push signal, they're like a constant inbound feed when connected. When the sensory nerves reconnected, it is something you definitely notice. Going about your day, and suddenly you feel an jolt, like being shocked, and over the next few hours to days the area that is reconnecting is burning, stinging, feels like it is being crushed by pressure, and cold all at the same time. It was much more intense than when your arm falls asleep. The sensation can be maddening but it eventually passes as your body begins to sort and acclimate the signals.
All of these steps on calibrating the sensory nerves and learning how to contract and coordinate muscles is something we take for granted as people usually sort it out when they're infants.
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 toes again for the first time in a year. It's not like what you see on the movies.
Wallerian degeneration -- yes, degeneration -- is part of the healing process of some grades of nerve injury. Things literally get worse before they get better, as the fragment left of the crushed axon degenerates to its root and then regrows. It's incredibly slow -- around 1mm/day at most -- and a matter of probabilities. What's also worth mentioning is that there are plenty of internal nerves too, where restoring function after a trauma would be life-changing -- like the Vegas nerve, which buggers up lots of things if damaged slightly, or, in my case, some of the nerves in the fundus and neck of the bladder, meaning that my toileting is really very different than it was before.
I'm glad you're doing better, and hope you continue to do so. I've no idea if the device the article is talking about will ever help, but nerve injuries cause so much disability worldwide I'm glad they're continuing to be worked on.
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.
Regenerative medicine of living tissues is extra hard.
As another commenter posted, there are 31 "bundles" of nerves carrying a total of a few hundred thousand individual fibres. The odds of re-connecting a human spine correctly are simply incredibly small.
I was actually expecting more, since that is effectively IO for the whole body, and each individual nerve fiber tends not to fire more than tens of Hz.
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 equivalent of an infrastructure project spanning (based on a quick count of the number of houses on each block in Oakland) the equivalent of around six miles, or roughly from downtown Oakland to El Cerrito on a map of the Bay (~4 BART stations). And you have to do that on a scale where precision manufacturing is incredibly hard, where you're dealing with extremely difficult problems of chemical synthesis, in a living body, without provoking the body's defense or repair mechanisms to stop you. And that's assuming you even know what you're trying to do, which requires an understanding of the machinery of those cells that we often don't have.
https://www.khanacademy.org/science/biology/human-biology/ne...
It's just interesting the way we've progressed.
How does the bus protocol work - it is not like it is 5V/-5V , it is insanely complex ???.
Repairing severed nerves is more like an entropy-reversal class problem. I don’t think we could even put a sufficiently broken tea cup back together exactly as it was.
Building something to interface with a biological system, though, is another matter entirely. It could as well be alien technology. It requires reverse engineering a lot of extremely complex stuff that was not designed by our civilization. So incomprehensibly complex that we only fairly recently made enough progress in other fields to be able to build tools to meaningfully poke at it.
To the best of our knowledge, it wasn't designed at all. It's more like giving a monkey a typewriter and millions of years, with a very crude feedback function (evolution/natural selection) that makes it very hard to backtrack out of a local maximum.
It's quite hard to interface with it because it's not designed to be interfaced with and the whole thing works pretty much by accident, and where changing any variable could throw it off.
Obviously. There is no functional separation between components (some proteins do multiple unrelated jobs), there's no distinct hierarchy (layers just kinda flow into each other), and there's way too much global state that works seemingly something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5mwVv5NjhA
I think we're just blind to how insane nature is compared to our mere half assed copies of organic processes
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, like maybe release adrenaline or calm down?
“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.”
Silly as this is, Ian Banks had a way of taking the mere hint of the possibility of a thing to it's logical extremes. His characters change sex, regrow limps, or morph themselves into a different alien species basically in an orgy of hedonism and utopianism. Definitely science fiction/fantasy when he wrote it but eerily close to becoming science fact as time progresses.
Researchers oversell their results for publishing and funding purposes. Then the university oversells those results to draw in students/investors.
Curious if others feel the same way or if I'm just too cynical at this point...
at a minimum, this isn’t far off
Is this true? I left academia a long time ago, but I'd be surprised if it's that good. I'd actually suspect it's the inverse and only 30% can be replicated.
The non-cynical version: Half of a researcher's job is disseminating results -- to other researchers & the populace at large. I'd much rather have excited university announcements (even over-reaching ones) than the rage-porn news that dominates the airwaves & "mainstream news" homepages.
Besides: Any serious researcher will just revert to the actual peer-reviewed source material. It was linked in the article. Here it is: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41563-023-01680-4
And here's the PDF: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.24.477527v2....
As someone who has peripheral knowledge in this space (piezeoelectric & magnetostrictive devices and neural stimulation & recording): I've never seen a magnetostrictive material capable of developing a DC bias. Further, driving the device in a non-resonant mode for neural stimulation is even more new to me -- that's quite fascinating, and I'd say that article lives up to the hype from my 1000-ft vantage. I.e. This was effective reporting.
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.
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.
Cochlear implants are controversial in the deaf community, but they also have a relatively clear purpose and effect (vs being "arbitrary").
His whole point being that ethics is not about what some majority might instinctively believe is best for everyone, and that other perspectives must be considered.