/ News
Intercontinental mind-meld unites two rats
The brains of two rats on different continents have been made to act in tandem. When the first, in Brazil, uses its whiskers to choose between two stimuli, an implant records its brain activity and signals to a similar device in the brain of a rat in the United States. The US rat then usually makes the same choice on the same task.
Miguel Nicolelis, a neuroscientist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, says that this system allows one rat to use the senses of another, incorporating information from its far-away partner into its own representation of the world. “It’s not telepathy. It’s not the Borg,” he says. “But we created a new central nervous system made of two brains.”
Nicolelis says that the work, published today inScientific Reports 1, is the first step towards constructing an organic computer that uses networks of linked animal brains to solve tasks. But other scientists who work on neural implants are sceptical. Lee Miller, a physiologist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, says that Nicolelis’s team has made many important contributions to neural interfaces, but the current paper could be mistaken for a “poor Hollywood science-fiction script”. He adds, “It is not clear to what end the effort is really being made.”
Animal engineering
In earlier work 2, Nicolelis’s team developed implants that can send and receive signals from the brain, allowing monkeys to control robotic or virtual arms and get a sense of touch in return. This time, Nicolelis wanted to see whether he could use these implants to couple the brains of two separate animals.
His colleague Miguel Pais-Vieira started by training one rat — the encoder — to press one of two levers, as indicated by a light. An implant recorded neural activity in the rat's motor cortex (the area that controls its movements), compared it to earlier recordings, and converted it into a simpler signal: a single pulse representing one lever, or a train of them representing the other.
These pulses were delivered to the motor cortex of a second rat in the same lab — the decoder — which reacted by pressing its own levers. If it chose the right one, both rats got a reward. This happened 64% of the time — a low rate of success, but significantly greater than chance (see video).
The rats achieved a similar accuracy at another task in which they had to judge different stimuli with their whiskers, and implants linked their somatosensory cortices, the regions involved in touch. This link worked even when one rat was in Natal, Brazil, and the other in the Duke lab.
But Andrew Schwartz, a neurobiologist at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, notes that the decoders performed poorly, even though they had to solve only a basic task with just two choices. “Although this may sound like 'mental telemetry', it was a very simple demonstration of binary detection and binary decision-making,” he says. “To be of real interest, some sort of continuous spectrum of values should be decoded, transmitted and received.”
Better, stronger, faster
Nicolelis argues that even in this simple task, the rats showed some interesting emergent behaviours. Because the encoder always got an extra reward if the decoder chose correctly, it started making movements that were cleaner, smoother and faster than at the beginning. That increased the signal-to-noise ratio in its brain activity and inadvertently provided the decoder with signals that were easier to decipher.
Such interfaces have many applications, says Nicolelis, from creating organic computers to uniting different parts of the same brain that have been cut off by damage or disease. But Sliman Bensmaia, a neuroscientist from the University of Chicago in Illinois, says that if the goal is to make better neural prosthetics, “the design seems convoluted and irrelevant”. And if it is to build a computer, “the proposition is speculative and the evidence underwhelming”.
Nicolelis is undeterred: his team is already working to link the brains of four mice. The researchers are also set to start similar experiments with monkeys, in which paired individuals control virtual avatars and combine their brain activity to play a game together. “Rats don’t have a sense of self so it’s hard to say what the effect on the animals are,” he says, “but monkeys can collaborate in a much more complex way.”
Source: http://www.nature.com/news/intercontinental-mind-meld-unites-two-rats-1.12522
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Founded by Russian entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov in February 2011 with the participation of leading Russian specialists in the field of neural interfaces, robotics, artificial organs and systems.
The main goals of the 2045 Initiative: the creation and realization of a new strategy for the development of humanity which meets global civilization challenges; the creation of optimale conditions promoting the spiritual enlightenment of humanity; and the realization of a new futuristic reality based on 5 principles: high spirituality, high culture, high ethics, high science and high technologies.
The main science mega-project of the 2045 Initiative aims to create technologies enabling the transfer of a individual’s personality to a more advanced non-biological carrier, and extending life, including to the point of immortality. We devote particular attention to enabling the fullest possible dialogue between the world’s major spiritual traditions, science and society.
A large-scale transformation of humanity, comparable to some of the major spiritual and sci-tech revolutions in history, will require a new strategy. We believe this to be necessary to overcome existing crises, which threaten our planetary habitat and the continued existence of humanity as a species. With the 2045 Initiative, we hope to realize a new strategy for humanity's development, and in so doing, create a more productive, fulfilling, and satisfying future.
The "2045" team is working towards creating an international research center where leading scientists will be engaged in research and development in the fields of anthropomorphic robotics, living systems modeling and brain and consciousness modeling with the goal of transferring one’s individual consciousness to an artificial carrier and achieving cybernetic immortality.
An annual congress "The Global Future 2045" is organized by the Initiative to give platform for discussing mankind's evolutionary strategy based on technologies of cybernetic immortality as well as the possible impact of such technologies on global society, politics and economies of the future.
Future prospects of "2045" Initiative for society
2015-2020
The emergence and widespread use of affordable android "avatars" controlled by a "brain-computer" interface. Coupled with related technologies “avatars’ will give people a number of new features: ability to work in dangerous environments, perform rescue operations, travel in extreme situations etc.
Avatar components will be used in medicine for the rehabilitation of fully or partially disabled patients giving them prosthetic limbs or recover lost senses.
2020-2025
Creation of an autonomous life-support system for the human brain linked to a robot, ‘avatar’, will save people whose body is completely worn out or irreversibly damaged. Any patient with an intact brain will be able to return to a fully functioning bodily life. Such technologies will greatly enlarge the possibility of hybrid bio-electronic devices, thus creating a new IT revolution and will make all kinds of superimpositions of electronic and biological systems possible.
2030-2035
Creation of a computer model of the brain and human consciousness with the subsequent development of means to transfer individual consciousness onto an artificial carrier. This development will profoundly change the world, it will not only give everyone the possibility of cybernetic immortality but will also create a friendly artificial intelligence, expand human capabilities and provide opportunities for ordinary people to restore or modify their own brain multiple times. The final result at this stage can be a real revolution in the understanding of human nature that will completely change the human and technical prospects for humanity.
2045
This is the time when substance-independent minds will receive new bodies with capacities far exceeding those of ordinary humans. A new era for humanity will arrive! Changes will occur in all spheres of human activity – energy generation, transportation, politics, medicine, psychology, sciences, and so on.
Today it is hard to imagine a future when bodies consisting of nanorobots will become affordable and capable of taking any form. It is also hard to imagine body holograms featuring controlled matter. One thing is clear however: humanity, for the first time in its history, will make a fully managed evolutionary transition and eventually become a new species. Moreover, prerequisites for a large-scale expansion into outer space will be created as well.
Key elements of the project in the future
• International social movement
• social network immortal.me
• charitable foundation "Global Future 2045" (Foundation 2045)
• scientific research centre "Immortality"
• business incubator
• University of "Immortality"
• annual award for contribution to the realization of the project of "Immortality”.
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