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Sunday, April 20, 2014

Brain Chips!!!

BY: Alexander Tyson

Its real people, the technology that we have once questioned possible is closer than you think. A recent incident caused a woman to become paralyzed and scientists have developed a censor that was placed in her motor cortex. Just by thought she can pick up drinks and reach for objects with a robotic arm. Eventually she will become more sophisticated and become capable of brushing her teeth and have fluent movement. This project sprung from the recent accomplishment of scientist who implanted a computer chip into a monkey’s brain to control the movements of another monkey.

This project of a monkey controlling another was aimed to find possible ways to treat people with cervical spinal cord injuries, and is quadriplegic, or have had brain stem strokes, which is proving to be successful. What scientist have accomplished was creating a functional cortical to spinal bypass where their able to record neural signals in the brain, extract information about what the user is intending on doing and then basically stimulating the spinal cord to produce movements in their paralyzed limb to those same intended target locations. For example, if the user were intending on moving upwards, they would select specific electrode contacts in the spinal cord to stimulate a movement that reaches that exact same target location.

This project itself is an innovative idea intended to help those who have had complications with their health. It would be cool to have the ability someday to send emails, text messages, download books, etc….but the speculation around these projects turning into a government experiment is not far fetched. In my opinion I would not be surprised if this idea and innovative achievement was twisted to a scheduled event to further monitor the movements of citizens. The president himself said they are trying to build an iron man to further protect troops deployed, but are they also trying to develop a kind of similar innovative chip in soldier’s brain to drop airstrikes at a thought? This new project is being called the Systems-Based Neurotechnology for Emerging Therapies (SUBNETS), and the goal is to be able to monitor the “mental health” of soldiers and veterans.  The following is how a recent CNET article described SUBNETS















3 comments:

  1. To be quite frank and to the point, I do not want any type of devices implanted into my body ...period

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  2. I completely age with my Morehouse brother above. Yes they are using this technology to help in the medical field at the moment, but who is to say that someone/government could not control that a persons movements. It is in fact on her motor cortex.

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  3. This is crazy! Nothing is stopping the government from basically controlling people.

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