From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Fri Jan 29 1999 - 08:43:57 MST
Natasha Vita-More <natasha@natasha.cc> writes:
> As in neural interfaces. I am aware that the term comes from William
> Gibson's 1994 book _Neuromancer_, and that it is an interface with brain
> and computer, but I was querying about more current interpretations or
> references (not in books SF books, but in scientific/medical application.)
The INTER interface mentioned in my latest "this week..." posting is
probably state of the art as for peripheral interfaces. In the brain
there are various multichannel electrodes mainly used for research and
some experimental prosthetic work. The problems seem to be 1)
mechanical (getting things to stay in place), 2) biomedical (avoiding
immune reactions and degeneration), 3) signal processing (what is
going on?). Solvable, but we still have a long way to go. But already
we have mice that can control simple robot arms with their brains
(mentioned last CNS conference), single-cell recordings from a variety
of places in the brain, cortical electrodes and semi-permanent brain
pacemakers - enough to make most people think they have been dropped
into a sf novel. Which hopefully is true :-)
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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