-Caveat Lector-
>From the BBC
" It is research that has enormous implications."
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Friday, October 8, 1999 Published at 20:57 GMT 21:57 UK
Sci/Tech
Computer uses cat's brain to see
Scientists have literally seen the world through cat's eyes
By BBC News Online Science Editor Dr David Whitehouse
In what is bound to become a much debated and highly controversial experiment,
a team of US scientists have wired a computer to a cat's brain and created
videos of what the animal was seeing.
According to a paper published in the Journal of Neuroscience, Yang Dan, Garret
Stanley and Fei Li of the University of California at Berkeley have been able
to "reconstruct natural scenes with recognizable moving objects."
The researchers attatched electrodes to 177 cells in the so-called thalamus
region of the cat's brain and monitored their activity.
The thalamus is connected directly to the cat's eyes via the optic nerve. Each
of its cells is programmed to respond to certain features in the cat's field of
view. Some cells "fire" when they record an edge in the cat's vision, others
when they see lines at certain angles, etc. This way the cat's brain acquires
the information it needs to reconstruct an image.
Recognizable objects
Scientists saw recognisable objects
The scientists recorded the patterns of firing from the cells in a computer.
They then used a technique they describe as a "linear decoding technique" to
reconstruct an image.
To their amazement they say they saw natural scenes with recognizable objects
such as people's faces. They had literally seen the world through cat's eyes.
Other scientists have hailed this as an important step in our understanding of
how signals are represented and processed in the brain.
It is research that has enormous implications.
Artificial brain extensions
It could prove a breakthrough in the hoped-for ability to wire artificial limbs
directly into the brain. More amazingly, it could lead to artificial brain
extensions.
By understanding how information can be presented to the brain, some day,
scientists may be able to build devices that interface directly with the brain,
providing access to extra data storage or processing power or the ability to
control devices just by thinking about them.
One of the scientists behind this current breakthrough, Garret Stanley, now
working at Harvard University, has already predicted machines with brain
interfaces.
Such revolutionary devices should not be expected in the very near future. They
will require decoding information from elsewhere in the brain looking at
signals that are far more complicated than those decoded from the cat's
thalamus but, in a way, the principle has been demonstrated.
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