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- In what is bound to become a much debated and highly
controversial experiment, a team of US scientists have wired a computer
to a cat's brain and created videos of what the animal was seeing.
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- According to a paper published in the Journal of Neuroscience,
Yang Dan, Garret Stanley and Fei Li of the University of California at
Berkeley have been able to "reconstruct natural scenes with recognizable
moving objects."
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- The researchers attached electrodes to 177 cells in the
so-called thalamus region of the cat's brain and monitored their activity.
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- The thalamus is connected directly to the cat's eyes
via the optic nerve. Each of its cells is programmed to respond to certain
features in the cat's field of view. Some cells "fire" when they
record an edge in the cat's vision, others when they see lines at certain
angles, etc. This way the cat's brain acquires the information it needs
to reconstruct an image.
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- Recognisable objects
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- The scientists recorded the patterns of firing from the
cells in a computer. They then used a technique they describe as a "linear
decoding technique" to reconstruct an image.
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- To their amazement they say they saw natural scenes with
recognisable objects such as people's faces. They had literally seen the
world through cat's eyes.
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- Other scientists have hailed this as an important step
in our understanding of how signals are represented and processed in the
brain.
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- It is research that has enormous implications.
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- Artificial brain extensions
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- It could prove a breakthrough in the hoped-for ability
to wire artificial limbs directly into the brain. More amazingly, it could
lead to artificial brain extensions.
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- By understanding how information can be presented to
the brain, some day, scientists may be able to build devices that interface
directly with the brain, providing access to extra data storage or processing
power or the ability to control devices just by thinking about them.
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- One of the scientists behind this current breakthrough,
Garret Stanley, now working at Harvard University, has already predicted
machines with brain interfaces.
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- Such revolutionary devices should not be expected in
the very near future. They will require decoding information from elsewhere
in the brain looking at signals that are far more complicated than those
decoded from the cat's thalamus but, in a way, the principle has been demonstrated.
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