-Caveat Lector-
Friday, October 8, 1999 Published at 20:57 GMT 21:57 UK
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 attached 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.
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 recognisable
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.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Steve Wingate
California Director
SKYWATCH INTERNATIONAL
Anomalous Images and UFO Files
http://www.anomalous-images.com
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