See this article: http://scienceblogs.com/neurophilosophy/2008/10/brain_muscle_interface_helps_paralysed_monkeys_move.php
paper: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature07418.html Direct control of paralysed muscles by cortical neurons Chet T. Moritz, Steve I. Perlmutter & Eberhard E. Fetz From abstract: "Here we show that Macaca nemestrina monkeys can directly control stimulation of muscles using the activity of neurons in the motor cortex, thereby restoring goal-directed movements to a transiently paralysed arm. Moreover, neurons could control functional stimulation equally well regardless of any previous association to movement, a finding that considerably expands the source of control signals for brain-machine interfaces. Monkeys learned to use these artificial connections from cortical cells to muscles to generate bidirectional wrist torques, and controlled multiple neuron–muscle pairs simultaneously." What is remarkable is that readout from a single cell made it adapt to perform a specific action. It looks that the only indication brain had about the fact that this cell is now controlling the wrist, is sensory feedback from all the usual sensors. I'd say it's a challenge to models of knowledge representation, to be able to learn such dependencies. The output is collected not in some sort of prewired attractor that collects input from many cells, routed from pretrained processing stages, but just from a cell in the middle of nowhere. Brain is able to capture the feedback loop through environment starting from a single cell, and to include the activity of that cell in goal-directed control process, based on the effect on the environment. -- Vladimir Nesov [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://causalityrelay.wordpress.com/ ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=117534816-b15a34 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
