Implant Can Now Control Brain Functions Remotely

Ah! this would be perfect for infiltrating Area 51 via implanted microchip bird to satellites controlled by ground-based supercomputers. We are living in cybernetic times indeed, the uses of it are endless. Just think controlled bird flu assassin's lol....

[edit on 27-2-2007 by XPhiles]

Originally posted by lombozo

Well said Tom Bedlam. That's why I asked the question, in a couple of years time can technology advance to the point that it could be an implant?
Whatever the device was that was used on this pigeon, it had to be small enough and light enough to allow it to fly.
This is what we are allowed to hear. I believe that for every one thing we hear, there are things we do not hear about.

Tom, from your post, it would seem that you know a little bit about the subject, and that's cool. In your opinion, can the technology advance?

Also, I really would like to see the eyes flash red. (Sorry, had to go there!)

Well, depending on the distance you want it to run at, it can be pretty light. The battery is the bulkiest part. It has to be light for a pigeon to fly with it. The circuitry's not that bad, weight wise, esp if you're stroking me a big check to get the weight down.

Hell, if it wasn't for the power problem, I could put a cell phone on the bird and you could call it. Batteries are just awful. But in this case, there's not much point in letting the bird get out of sight so you don't need a lot of range or battery time.

As far as advancing, there's a lot of research into better neural interfaces. But you have to understand that what you can get in the way of responses is sort of limited. Seeing through its eyes, hearing through its ears, making it feel some complex emotion,doing some complex spontaneous act, those things will most likely never happen, because of the utterly stupendous problems involved in them. We don't have a millionth of the understanding to do that.

However, you can train some very very complex actions into some animals. If you've never looked into pigeon guided missiles, you should. Dogs and apes can be trained to do very complex acts. In that case, you only need a couple of electrodes...orgasmic pleasure, and mild pain.

Then you just use operant conditioning. If Fido gets the ball, you make him happy. Pretty soon he'll be running mazes or running across Area 51 to take photos or whatever you'd like.

With more electrodes, you could have it wake up, go to sleep, feel hunger, whatever, but they're all pretty basic.

I think with the rat thing, they were wanting to see if it was going to be feasible to insinuate them into a base to take photos or plant listening devices. I'm sure I've tossed the proposal away years back.

As far as putting the entire thing INSIDE the animal, you end up with a lot of issues with power (recharging the batteries through the skin is a pain, but possible) and radio transmission, which is a lot tougher. It's damned hard to transmit out of a nice conductive animal full of saline. If you didn't mind Fido having a whip antenna it wouldn't be so bad.

Originally posted by Ex
Tom,
Thank you for the insight!
I would seriously like to know though,
If the chip controls direction and balance,
how long will it take to program the chip to
Kill or Not Kill??Eat or Not Eat??

The ramifications are mind boggling.
I am sure this will not stop the discovery process of
uses for this wonder.

How far has the science really gone????

Well, basic things you can generally fish around and find. Like I said on a previous post, I think that cats are pretty well mapped.

So hungry, probably, sleepy, oh yes. There was a senior project in behavioral psych where they made a cat with an on/off switch every three or four years. You ablate a very specific area of the reticular activating formation, IIRC. If you put a pin on the cat's tail, it will get up, play, eat, generally act like a cat. Take off the clothespin, and the cat falls in a heap, dead to the world. Damndest thing you ever saw.

Kill, I don't know. Go berserk, yes, but I'm not sure berserk behavior = efficient killing. You could make a cat a 100% freak job berserker but not, say, the cat equivalent of Hannibal Lecter. Setting off basic emotions is easy, causing detailed planning and sociopathy = extremely complex behavior. I wouldn't think it possible, but then I'm not a behavioral psych guy.

It was our opinion we could meet the project specs by Skinner boxing some rats and using inaudible cues from the backpack. Like I said, we're not set up for live animals and none of us are veterenarians.

Originally posted by lombozo

Taking away anything/everything they want. They could literally turn the entire population into a bunch of automotons, who go to work, and sleep. They could make it that everyone who reaches a certain age, kills themselves.
They could make false emotions appear real. Make everyone think they are having a wonderful time, when in actuality they have no "life" whatsoever.
I know I'm going Orwellian here, but is it really so far fetched?
Think how much Bush would like something like this. An entire nation, who never questions. They just work for the "Imperial Leader". Doing his every wish without hesitation.

Nah, I can't see it. You're talking spectacularly ticky brain surgery, with open craniums, on each and every person? No way. Plus those things you're listing are all way way way too complex of emotions and behaviors to control with simple electrode stimulation.

It would be a lot cheaper to simply shoot a few people until they did what you wanted, worked great for the former soviet union and nazi Germany, no million-buck-a-citizen surgery required.

Well how long will it be before they start producing remote-control pets for the market? Animals have rights to their own free will as well!

Originally posted by malganis
Well how long will it be before they start producing remote-control pets for the market? Animals have rights to their own free will as well!

And what about us and our FreeWill???

Last I heard from the major systems of thought circulating around that was one thing that no matter what except for giving it away by choice that couldn't be interferred with.

Have the rules changed? Did I miss something? Am I Rumpelstiltskin?

Our Power To Choose replaced by Technology.

Interesting................

Are the Black Eyed Kids a metaphor for giving our will away unwittingly>

Originally posted by interestedalways

Originally posted by malganis
Well how long will it be before they start producing remote-control pets for the market? Animals have rights to their own free will as well!

And what about us and our FreeWill???

Yeah well obviously that's the scariest part. But I think they would want to introduce the technology gradually, firstly with remote-control pets that would appeal to the novelty-obsessed consumers. Then for 'useful' things like controlling criminals, then military, public, who knows where it could go!

Originally posted by Tom Bedlam
As far as putting the entire thing INSIDE the animal, you end up with a lot of issues with power (recharging the batteries through the skin is a pain, but possible) and radio transmission, which is a lot tougher. It's damned hard to transmit out of a nice conductive animal full of saline. If you didn't mind Fido having a whip antenna it wouldn't be so bad.

Now here's a question for you Tom. I recently adopted a puppy from a local Animal Orphanage. It is law here, that all pets adopted from such locations must be microchipped. You can't even tell where the microchip is. How does this maintain it's powere supply?

How about a Pacemaker? Here is an interesting link which talks about the development of generator which runs off the bodies energy, thus providing a permanent power supply.

A variable-capacitance-type electrostatic (VCES) generator that harnesses ventricular motion was developed with the aim of driving a cardiac pacemaker permanently without a battery. The developed model of the VCES generator was handmade, but it was too large to implant into the thoracic cavity of a laboratory animal. For this reason, to demonstrate its feasibility, a somewhat complicated method that measured the left ventricular wall motion by means of the accelerometer module put on the free wall and reproduced the motion in real time with a vibration mode simulator was used. The VCES generator was vibrated on the simulator, and its generated power was supplied to the cardiac pacemaker, which then stimulated the heart. A mean power of approximately 36 7W was generated, which was enough to drive the cardiac pacemaker. Continuous electric generation and cardiac pacing were performed successfully for more than 2 h in the animal experiment.

www.springerlink.com...

In my opinion, this technology will advance to the point that this "remote brain control" will be available.

Originally posted by lombozo

Now here's a question for you Tom. I recently adopted a puppy from a local Animal Orphanage. It is law here, that all pets adopted from such locations must be microchipped. You can't even tell where the microchip is. How does this maintain it's powere supply?

It doesn't have one. The interrogator (that's the wand thing) emits a time-varying magnetic field that the tag intercepts. It gets a few milliWatts of power from it at most, implants are all h-field parts and that's notoriously inefficient. It won't work at a distance due to the sixth-power fall off of power with distance.

The tag doesn't actually transmit at all, it just throws a load on and off of the interrogator's exciter, and that only when the wand's over it providing the power.

How about a Pacemaker? Here is an interesting link which talks about the development of generator which runs off the bodies energy, thus providing a permanent power supply.

Pacemakers usually run from lithium batteries, some from rechargeables (not many) and a few from plutonium (they don't do that much anymore).

At any rate, it's a battery, and as I said, pretty large for a bird or rat.

That other thing is really unwieldy, it's not so much "running off the body's energy" as I think you're interpreting it...it's more like a bike generator sort of thing that's strapped to your heart. Your heart moves around a lot when it beats. Yeah, it works, sort of, but I think you're going to have a lot of issues with this over time. Just rough spots on the endocardium causes a lot of pain (see "cardiac rub"), I can't imagine what it would be like to have this generator strapped to my heart.

So now, you have to have an open skull operation AND a thoracotomy...we'll just split your chest down the middle, strap a generator onto your heart, run the wire up to your skull, crack your skull open, and implant a micro? I think there's too many issues here to count.

Found some pictures on this.




See Link for more pictures.

Looks a bit gruesome.

OMG

I could have lived my whole life without witnessing that. What is that pink stuff surrounding the electrode? Is it fake brain tissue like material???

That is too close to Artificial Intellegence for my liking.

Poor Pigeon, Poor humanity

Naw, it's sort of a bone glue type stuff. They don't want it wiggling around.

Usually the animals end up with infections around the implant there, as you might imagine.

Yes, the body tends to attempt rejection of foriegn objects.

Good luck getting one of those in me. I'll take death, thanks.

Yes, it's hardly a look that's about to become a fashion trend.
I still wonder with the advent of nano-technology when a "chip" will be available that can be implanted. I have a hard time believing that it's not coming.

Originally posted by lombozo
Yes, it's hardly a look that's about to become a fashion trend.
I still wonder with the advent of nano-technology when a "chip" will be available that can be implanted. I have a hard time believing that it's not coming.

Its coming for sure.

Phase 1) The ID cards will of course be the first step which will mostly serve as testing out their network.

Phase 2) Once they feel the network is solid and all the bugs are out, they will implement the next phase which is a chip implant only for tracking purposes. We've already seen those on cnn many times.

Phase 3) Then into our brain for tracking and control all together. The selling points would be very simple as well.

[edit on 2-3-2007 by leafer]

You're probably right leafer. Your theory makes sense. Just a question of when.