Rats controlled by RF chip in brain

news.bbc.co.uk...
This article is about 5 years old but nevertheless an interesting one.
It talks about guiding a rat through an obstacle course using a chip in its brain, and radio signals sent by a laptop computer. Scary stuff IMO. I hope the people will never accept these chips. Any thoughts?

i agree with the guy in the article saying it was kind of creepy. This is one of the down sides of technology. It has many many benefits, yet it has just as many downsides. I don't think people could be responsible with a technology like this.

on the other hand, who wouldn't want their very on remote controlled rat.
that be awesome and i want one now

It's really not "RF chips in the brain" at all.

It's like any other untethered rat stimulator (or bird for that matter) that I've ever seen. They have a little backpack/harness with the goodies in, and the heads have been fitted out with a set of electrodes. There's a connector on top of the rat's head, and a cable to the backpack.

Most times with birds they put the electrodes in the balance signals from the ear, in this one it looks like they give the rat a tweak in the whiskers as a signal. The rats are conditioned to respond to it in a Skinner box sort of setup. In this one, they added something extra in the way of a nucleus accumbens reward system stimulator. Sort of like giving the rat a crack rock for doing as told. There will be some sort of camera in the backpack for out-of-lab runs.

It's not like it's "mind control", although the articles often imply it. More like teaching Fido some voice commands and putting a cell phone on his collar.

Originally posted by Tom Bedlam
It's really not "RF chips in the brain" at all.

It's like any other untethered rat stimulator (or bird for that matter) that I've ever seen. They have a little backpack/harness with the goodies in, and the heads have been fitted out with a set of electrodes. There's a connector on top of the rat's head, and a cable to the backpack.

Most times with birds they put the electrodes in the balance signals from the ear, in this one it looks like they give the rat a tweak in the whiskers as a signal. The rats are conditioned to respond to it in a Skinner box sort of setup. In this one, they added something extra in the way of a nucleus accumbens reward system stimulator. Sort of like giving the rat a crack rock for doing as told. There will be some sort of camera in the backpack for out-of-lab runs.

It's not like it's "mind control", although the articles often imply it. More like teaching Fido some voice commands and putting a cell phone on his collar.

Ok it is a chip that is contolled by radio frequency.

You don't just wake up one day and build a device to control minds. There obviously has to be a beginning stage of the projects, and this certainly looks like it. They aren't teaching the rats anything. They do not retain this knowledge.

Bull#.

It is in fact mind control. The rats heads were opened up and the wires in their head from a circuit board on their backs and execute any command input by keyboard. Signals are sent to their brain that make them feel happy to follow these forced orders. There's an actual photo of a rat like this not shown in the linked article. It's kinda graphic and gave me the willies years ago. They demonstrated the technology in its perfected form in the Manchurian Candidate with Denzel Washington (using a single chip in the brain). I believe they have successfully done this to monkeys as well. One comment I remember was how scientists were getting the chimps to stop what they were naturally doing on command everytime and had them do things involuntarily like smile at the controller. They also responded with finding it creepy, as it made the subject behave like a drone.



[edit on 7-6-2007 by massexodus]

When people try to tell me it's not mind control I laugh to myself. Their defense is that it's not putting thoughts in people's heads, just electrical signals.....HELLO people, thats pretty much all the brain does, it sends electrical signals.

Originally posted by AcesInTheHole
Ok it is a chip that is contolled by radio frequency.

You don't just wake up one day and build a device to control minds. There obviously has to be a beginning stage of the projects, and this certainly looks like it. They aren't teaching the rats anything. They do not retain this knowledge.

Really, you're off base. It's a stock set of radio chips and a little op-amp circuit to deliver a current. I could design you one myself.

It's not like you pull out the Dr Evil Catalog and order a mind control chip.

Brain stimulation and ablation of brain areas to change behavior is not new, you get a lot of it in behavioral psych at any really good university.

And yes, sorry, but you do have to condition the rats to respond to the faux sensation correctly, usually in a Skinner box setup.

Before you knee-jerk a reply you should go investigate Skinner boxing and operant conditioning, I would suspect you could find a lot of scientifically accurate online info on animal brain stimulation for behavioral control as well.

Originally posted by massexodus
Bull#.

Nope.

It is in fact mind control. The rats heads were opened up and the wires in their head from a circuit board on their backs and execute any command input by keyboard.

They do not "execute any command input by keyboard", sorry. What this setup does (most other setups are very similar) is that it makes the rat perceive that a whisker has been touched, on the left or right side of his nose.

The rat has to be trained what to do when he receives this very limited command.

They also put in a limbic reward lead, which isn't unheard of but you don't often see it. I would guess the rats were hard to manage.

Signals are sent to their brain that make them feel happy to follow these forced orders. There's an actual photo of a rat like this not shown in the linked article. It's kinda graphic and gave me the willies years ago.

That would be the reward stimulator. "feel happy to follow the forced orders" is a bit off, it's like giving your dog a treat after he catches a frisbee. Only in this case it's a really NICE treat.

They demonstrated the technology in its perfected form in the Manchurian Candidate with Denzel Washington (using a single chip in the brain).

Funny, I don't remember any chips. The original Manchurian Candidate used operant conditioning and a sort of Skinner setup.

I believe they have successfully done this to monkeys as well. One comment I remember was how scientists were getting the chimps to stop what they were naturally doing on command everytime and had them do things involuntarily like smile at the controller. They also responded with finding it creepy, as it made the subject behave like a drone.

I find sheep herding dogs that obey hand signals creepy, too, and you get them to do that the same way, more or less. Only it's with treats and punishment, and breeding, which you could call genetic engineering.

Originally posted by AcesInTheHole
When people try to tell me it's not mind control I laugh to myself. Their defense is that it's not putting thoughts in people's heads, just electrical signals.....HELLO people, thats pretty much all the brain does, it sends electrical signals.

That's ok, when people who know bollocks about electronics or biology try to tell me something has "chips in its head" I laugh too.

If they tied little threads to its whiskers and used a servo in the backpack to tug on them, it would be essentially the same.

Originally posted by Tom Bedlam
Really, you're off base. It's a stock set of radio chips and a little op-amp circuit to deliver a current. I could design you one myself.

NO THANKS.

Brain stimulation and ablation of brain areas to change behavior is not new, you get a lot of it in behavioral psych at any really good university.

It's not what it is that scares, me it's what this technology will eventually evolve into that does scare me.

Before you knee-jerk a reply you should go investigate Skinner boxing and operant conditioning, I would suspect you could find a lot of scientifically accurate online info on animal brain stimulation for behavioral control as well.

Before you tell me how I should post, type skinner boxing into yahoo or google.....nothing comes up. As for operant conditioning, thats the method they are using now. What happens down the road? Technology does evolve.

No matter how you slice this, you will never convince me a chip in my head will be good. For every good use this technology brings, two evil ones come with it.

www.wanttoknow.info...

Afternoon sunlight poured over the high wooden barriers into the ring as the brave bull bore down on the unarmed "matador" — a scientist who had never faced a fighting bull. But the charging animal's horns never reached the man behind the heavy red cape. Moments before that could happen, Dr. Jose M. R. Delgado, the scientist, pressed a button on a small radio transmitter in his hand, and the bull braked to a halt.

Then, he pressed another button on the transmitter and the bull obediently turned to the right and trotted away. The bull was obeying commands from his brain that had been called forth by electrical stimulation—by the radio signals—of certain regions in which fine wire electrodes had been painlessly implanted the day before.

The experiment, conducted last year in Cordova, Spain, by Dr. Delgado of Yale University's School of Medicine, was probably the most spectacular demonstration ever performed of the deliberate modification of animal behavior through external control of the brain.


External control of the brain isn't mind control?

Originally posted by AcesInTheHole

NO THANKS.

Aw, come on. Seriously, though, we bid a couple of DARPA rat control projects just for fun. But we're not set up with an animal lab or an on-staff small animal vet so we didn't get it. The electronic parts aren't that tough, the real challenge is getting them small, light and low power so that the batteries last a long time. So it's more a packaging thing than anything else.

It's not what it is that scares, me it's what this technology will eventually evolve into that does scare me.

In terms of making you do the old Imhotep two-step whilst making you chant "What is thy bidding, master?" I'd say you have a long wait.

Before you tell me how I should post, type skinner boxing into yahoo or google.....nothing comes up.

Here are 1.6 million references, more or less.

As for operant conditioning, thats the method they are using now. What happens down the road? Technology does evolve.

Not for rats where you're stimulating whisker tactile nerves. Or shark electric sensors, or bird balance centers. OC is the usual method of choice. These things just pass on a prompt, you could use an LED flashing or a tone just as easily, if it was the sort of stimulus that got the animal's attention.

No matter how you slice this, you will never convince me a chip in my head will be good. For every good use this technology brings, two evil ones come with it.

Not withstanding that this article doesn't describe a chip in the head either, I haven't seen a lot of human implanted in-cranial electronics in the literature, certainly not any out for bid either. There's some hoo-ha about a hippocampal implant for people with gross brain damage, and I seem to recall some "pacer" implants for Parkinson's, but I don't know how well they work.

There was a lot of poop way back on a method to get your undivided attention in an interesting sort of way. But it didn't involve implants, just electrodes.

Originally posted by massexodus

The experiment, conducted last year in Cordova, Spain, by Dr. Delgado of Yale University's School of Medicine, was probably the most spectacular demonstration ever performed of the deliberate modification of animal behavior through external control of the brain.


External control of the brain isn't mind control?

Well, it is in the same sense as if you had shot the bull in the ass with M99.

If I render you unconscious, is that not mind control?

Look, it's pretty easy to wire up an animal to put it to sleep, paralyze it, fill it with insane rage, make it blind and so on. Most of that you could also do with a hot poker or a mallet, certainly you could do similar things with drugs.

What you can't do is get that bull to want to play with you, or pick out a certain person to attack, or want to ride one of those little circus tricycles, or only eat blue flowers or the like. Complex behaviors are not so easy to do. "Play dead", "Flop on the ground for me" or nothing is what you usually get.

The behavioral psych guys at one school I applied to had a cat with an on/off switch, so to speak. You can put a lesion in the reticular formation of a cat's brain (they have stereotactic cat brain maps, x marks the spot) and the cat will sleep 24/7. Unless you put a clamp on its tail. Then it will wake up, eat, poop, act like a cat. Take off the clamp and down it goes in a heap. No chips, no drugs, no conditioning. I guess you could call that mind control as well but I wouldn't.

I read something like this a few years ago in a Discover magazine. Only that it could make it go left or right and the same with a bull, if I remember correctly. Crazy science.

First and foremost, i need to point out that RFID chips and what is discussed in the topic article are NOT the same thing. RFID chips are implemented more and more as an answer to extremely efficient inventory control and more streamlined logistics operations. One day they'll help lines go much faster in grocery stores, which i don't hear anyone complaining about. They ARE NOT in any way able to send any kind of signal via electrical impulse because they have no electrical parts. They cannot be used to control minds.

With regard to the topic article.. While interesting, deep brain stimulation has been in use for years as an answer to treat resistant depression in people. Just do a google search for Deep Brain Stimulation and you'll find a very long list of results that lead back to scientific research, case studies, and real people who have benefited from this new technology.

Today, however, deep brain stimulation techniques are not able to necessarily control you in ways other than your emotions. This means that while an electrical impulse applied directly to a certain area of the brain can result in feelings of happiness, or even laughter, it cannot force you to kill specific people, or any of the things we should really be apprehensive about.

Originally posted by The Cyfre

Today, however, deep brain stimulation techniques are not able to necessarily control you in ways other than your emotions. This means that while an electrical impulse applied directly to a certain area of the brain can result in feelings of happiness, or even laughter, it cannot force you to kill specific people, or any of the things we should really be apprehensive about.

For now it is just the emotions...

How about extreme pain, that will make you do things against your will. I am sure a way will be found to cause more pain than the physical body could muster.

Dangerous waters are being crossed...

IMHO

Oopsie

Originally posted by AcesInTheHole
Before you tell me how I should post, type skinner boxing into yahoo or google.....nothing comes up.

Try typing "Skinner box" instead.

Rather surprising that someone concerned about 'mind control' doesn't know what a Skinner box is.

As for me, I can't wait for my chip.

[edit on 8-6-2007 by Astyanax]

Originally posted by Astyanax
Oopsie

Originally posted by AcesInTheHole
Before you tell me how I should post, type skinner boxing into yahoo or google.....nothing comes up.

Try typing "Skinner box" instead.

Rather surprising that someone concerned about 'mind control' doesn't know what a Skinner box is.

As for me, I can't wait for my chip.

[edit on 8-6-2007 by Astyanax]

Ok so this is just a primative form of mind control IMO. The rat would die of hunger, so it is forced to push the response lever. So either do what they want, or you die. Sounds a bit like torture as well.

Originally posted by AcesInTheHole
So either do what they want, or you die. Sounds a bit like torture as well.

Why does it have to be like this?

Forget RFID chips, which are mostly for business use in inventory control and logistics. But wouldn't you like to, say, be wired up to the Internet permanently? Wouldn't you love to do a google every time you couldn't remember a line of poetry, for example? Or communicate with people all over the world through a simple mental action? Get information about a strange neighbourhood as you walk through it? Or might that all be a bit too much of a temptation?

Originally posted by LoneGunMan
How about extreme pain, that will make you do things against your will. I am sure a way will be found to cause more pain than the physical body could muster.

Dangerous waters are being crossed...
IMHO

Sure, extreme pain can make you do things against your will. It's called torture and it has been used probably about as long as humans have been around as a means to get someone to do/say something against their will. But we don't need to cause extreme pain to your brain if we can just cut your finger off, right?

I think it would have to be very advanced, because we're talking about subtle influences that result in the formation of ideas, right?