I trained in St. Louis and have been to Ken Smith's lectures. It's a very cool technology and vastly better than not, but it isn't quite the same thing as we see. The patients are jazzed, though, because it's a lot more than not seeing anything at all.
They'd already invented a visor that did this same thing about 10 years ago. But it was MUCH bigger. I'm talking Cyclops from the X-men bigger.
As for the comment about chips being connected to neurons, they're already connecting people's brains to wires that control a mouse cursor on a computer screen. They tested it out on quadraplegic's, and after 6 months, they had mastered moving the mouse cursor simply by thinking about it. The really outrageous thing about this is that the scientists didn't seem to know what they were doing at all. It was just kind of a "Let's see what happens when we connect these wires to their grey matter and tell them to concentrate really hard on getting that thing to move."
And it's also old news about how the military has used electric impulses in the brains of rats to control their movement. Remote control rat anyone?
I figured we were there with Ananda, and the mirrors in eyes for superhumanly perfect vision, and the growing of spare human body parts on rats, and...
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-07 03:27 pm (UTC)give it up for technology... c'mon, give it up...
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-07 03:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-07 04:05 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-07 06:40 pm (UTC)Eeeeeee.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-07 07:23 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-07 08:05 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-08 06:37 pm (UTC)relatively close. A lot better than before. About bloody time, too.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-10 05:29 am (UTC)As for the comment about chips being connected to neurons, they're already connecting people's brains to wires that control a mouse cursor on a computer screen. They tested it out on quadraplegic's, and after 6 months, they had mastered moving the mouse cursor simply by thinking about it. The really outrageous thing about this is that the scientists didn't seem to know what they were doing at all. It was just kind of a "Let's see what happens when we connect these wires to their grey matter and tell them to concentrate really hard on getting that thing to move."
And it's also old news about how the military has used electric impulses in the brains of rats to control their movement. Remote control rat anyone?
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-10 12:40 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-10 01:26 pm (UTC)...yeah.