Putting Thoughts to Work

Face to face, human input-output devices aren't too bad. My brain doesn't get too far ahead of my mouth most of the time, and even when I talk fast people generally seem to follow what I am saying.

But when it comes to electronic communications, it's different. Think of all the time you spend just on email. Wouldn't it be easier if you could just think the words and have them appear on the screen through some kind of magic electronic dictation process? Scientists have taken the first steps in that direction in a study published today in Nature. Using a brain implant, a paralyzed man was able to control the movement of cursor and in doing so, perform several simple tasks:

Paralyzed Man Uses Thoughts to Move a Cursor, by Andrew Pollack, NY Times: A paralyzed man with a small sensor implanted in his brain was able to control a computer, a television set and a robot using only his thoughts, scientists reported yesterday. ... “If your brain can do it, we can tap into it,” said John P. Donoghue, a professor of neuroscience at Brown University who has led development of the system...

In a variety of experiments, the first person to receive the implant ... moved a cursor, opened e-mail, played a simple video game called Pong and drew a crude circle on the screen. He could change the channel or volume on a television set, move a robot arm somewhat, and open and close a prosthetic hand. Although his cursor control was sometimes wobbly, the basic movements were not hard to learn. “I pretty much had that mastered in four days,” Mr. Nagle, 26, said ... He said the implant did not cause any pain. ...

The sensor measures 4 millimeters by 4 millimeters — less than a fifth of an inch long and wide — and contains 100 tiny electrodes. The device was implanted in the area of Mr. Nagle’s motor cortex responsible for arm movement and was connected to a pedestal that protruded from the top of his skull. When the device was to be used, technicians plugged a cable connected to a computer into the pedestal. So Mr. Nagle was directly wired to a computer, somewhat like a character in the “Matrix” movies.

Mr. Nagle would then imagine moving his arm to hit various targets. The implanted sensor eavesdropped on the electrical signals emitted by neurons in his motor cortex as they controlled the imaginary arm movement. Obstacles must be overcome, though, before brain implants become practical. ...

If implants were available that enabled you to process information more efficiently, would you want one? If implants were to give workers a productivity advantage, would you feel pressured to get one even if you weren't fully comfortable with it? I would get the implant I imagine with little hesitation.

Comments

[Bruce Wilder]

hey, i felt pressured to learn to type -- the only really useful skill I learned in high school -- and i still am not entirely comfortable with a keyboard. shift, tab, return, how did these keys get their names?

[piglet]

You are completely missing the point. This implanted sensor doesn't enable anybody to "process information more efficiently", it is a very limited support device for a paralyzed person, enabling him to do certain tasks that his body could perform much more efficiently were he not paralyzed.

"Wouldn't it be easier if you could just think the words and have them appear on the screen through some kind of magic electronic dictation process?" This is a difficult matter but I think we don't "think words". Most of our thoughts cannot be easily translated in language, in fact transforming thoughts in words is a major intellectual task that we don't always succeed at (this is probably an understatement). Our natural "input-output devices" have been shaped by evolution to achieve truly amazing capabilities - we only usually don't appreciate them as we take them for granted.

"If implants were available that enabled you to process information more efficiently, would you want one? I would get the implant I imagine with little hesitation." If you are serious about that, Professor, then you must hold your own intellectual activity in rather low esteem.

says...

Question is do we need so much efficiency or thinking at lightning speed? At what point are we going to become just machines in a Matrix, if we keep mutilating ourselves with more and more external or internal gizmos? Maybe we already are there and we just don't see it. Enjoy life, you only have one.

[Mark Thoma]

Piglet:

I agree entirely - one of us missed the point.

If glasses were available to help you see better (to enhance that input device you rave about), would you use them? Hearing aid implants? Laser surgery? Implants to help the blind detect light?

A person who could now use a computer at all before, but can with implants (though as the article states, voice recognition software is better at this currently), would process information more efficiently. Wouldn't they?

[Nelson]

Wouldn't it be easier if you could just think the words and have them appear on the screen through some kind of magic electronic dictation process?I don't think an implant that would write down every thought that crossed your mind would be a good idea. anne seems like a smart woman, I wonder if she's pretty too. What am I going to have for lunch today. I better end this post before it goes on too long.

[piglet]

"A person who could now use a computer at all before, but can with implants, would process information more efficiently." Let me put it that way. A crutch might enable me to move faster if my leg is injured. However this doesn't translate into "crutches make humans run faster". The crutch doesn't improve the locomotive capability of my body, it only compensates for an impairment of that capability due to an accident (for example). The same applies to glasses and the other examples you give.

I understand you expect that brain sensor technology to somehow enhance your intellectual efficiency. I find that highly implausible, apart from all the ethical questions that such technlogy might raise.

[Mark Thoma]

My dentist, who has perfect vision, uses glasses to enhance it even further. I'm glad she does.

My doctor, who hears perfectly well, uses a stethoscope. He uses all sorts of things to enhance his natural senses. I'm glad about that too.

Sunglasses for those with perfect vision? If they avoid an accident with a truck full of goods, is that an increase in efficiency?

Technology already enhances our productivity, this is just a matter of stepping it up, perhaps, to a new level.

[Mark Thoma]

A post from awhile back that motivated the question about whether other workers would feel pressured to get implants (and an answer to Piglets efficiency questions). These tags that are implanted in people for security identification save the time-consuming process of checking identification each and every time the worker enters a restricted area:

Human-Electronic Hybrid Workers

I know my president will support me in this call to rid the earth of mutant human-electronic hybrids:

US group implants electronic tags in workers, by Richard Waters, Financial Times: An Ohio company has embedded silicon chips in two of its employees - the first known case in which US workers have been “tagged” electronically as a way of identifying them. CityWatcher.com, ... said it was testing the technology as a way of controlling access to a room where it holds security video footage for government agencies and the police. ... “There are very serious privacy and civil liberty issues of having people permanently numbered,” said Liz McIntyre, who campaigns against the use of identification technology. ... The technology’s defenders say it is acceptable as long as it is not compulsory. But critics say any implanted device could be used to track the “wearer” without their knowledge. VeriChip ... said the implants were designed primarily for medical purposes. So far around 70 people in the US have had the implants, the company said.

I don't have a great argument against this if it's done on a voluntary basis, especially it it's reversible, but something about it 'bugs' me. Maybe it's because I doubt that it would be truly voluntary if firms are allowed to do this to promote more efficient operations. What if you were the only member of a work crew who wouldn't do it and it slowed the entire group down? Would peer pressure matter? What about the military or police where there are clear advantages to having all members tagged? Should embedded ID or more complicated electronics be required, particularly if not doing so puts lives at risk? This is a door I'd rather keep closed in both the business and government sectors.

[Blissex]

«The technology’s defenders say it is acceptable as long as it is not compulsory.»

Entirely true, and continuing to employ people is not compulsory either.

«Maybe it's because I doubt that it would be truly voluntary if firms are allowed to do this to promote more efficient operations.»

It is free agents in a free market. You can choose between employment and tagging. Nobody forces you.

«What about the military or police where there are clear advantages to having all members tagged?»

What a naive question. In the military the rules are different (the police is not quite extreme as that). If your superior tells you ''go to the doctor and get this shot'', you do the shot, whether it is an id tag or anti-flu.

[piglet]

"A post from awhile back that motivated the question about whether other workers would feel pressured to get implants (and an answer to Piglets efficiency questions)." Now I'm at a loss. You are mixing quite some different things to make your point - which point, actually? Your original posting moves from an auxiliary device for a paralyzed man to the idea of extracting thoughts from brains more efficiently than it is possible using those cumbersome "human input-output devices". My answer to that is still: if you want that, you must hold your own intellectual activity in rather low esteem.

[Bruce Webb]

Oh my God I feel old. The other, smarter and now proved younger Bruce W asks this:

"shift, tab, return, how did these keys get their names?"

Once upon a time we had the unlikely contraption known as a 'manual typewriter'. Take your average keyboard and subtract the F-Keys, the arrow keys, Tab, CapLk, Ctrl, Alt AND Del, to say nothing of ESC and the numeric keypad and you had the manual keyboard. Each 'key', a strike head on the end of a mechanical arm had two characters, for the lower three lines of the keyboard an upper and lower case letter and certain punctuation marks, while the upper row gave you numbers and special symbols.

When you held down the "shift" key the whole striking mechanism would shift up physically so as to put the uppercase characters into play. Tabs were set manually and "returns" were handled by manually moving a return lever from right to left after each and every line typed. And oddly enough the quality of the key stroke depended on how hard you hit the key. Lots of people could be fast, but having your print quality come out even meant modulating your finger strength as you typed, you had to type heavier with your little finger than your index figure to deliver the same amount of carbon to the paper. And forget the 'erase' key, it didn't exist.

Before there was the word processing revolution there was the IBM Selectric with exchangeable print balls and then the erasure cartridge. Man it was great to be alive and typing in 1974. Unimaginable advances in typing technology. Why even Professors could be expected to type their papers. Who knew?

[Mark Thoma]

Then by using a computer to do things like store large files instead of remembering it your head, you must "hold your own intellectual activity in rather low esteem," similarly if you ever use a calculator. Sorry, but that argument doesn't fly at all.

That wanting to make something better implies it is bad, or unsatisfactory to begin with (has no utility) is a false premise. So no, it doesn't imply that at all.

I'm done, this is going nowhere, (and it's taking too darn long to type) - sorry if you don't like to imagine.

[billy]

Quite remarkable - a blessing to the severely handicapped.

>Wouldn't it be easier if you could just think the words and have >them appear on the screen through some kind of magic electronic >dictation process?

It would be. But this will most probably require you to train the device to know you, sort of like calibrating todays voice recognition software.

Daniel Dennett tried to derive experiences from neural properties and concluded that no one has any idea about what they are experiencing when they claim they experience something. Of course, there are opposing arguments.

If you are interested, is Dennett's or the wiki for

[Mark Thoma]

Piglet:

I thought this was an interesting observation that you made - want to think more about it.It is interesting that Mankiw, in his July 7 blog article (http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2006/07/women-in-labor-force.html), cites data that women's employment in the US has started to decline since 2000. He doesn't add: despite tax cuts that should have had the opposite effect, according to his blog articles of July 8 and 10.

[anne]

Yes; I would have otherwise missed the interesting comment in catching up on these threads. So, tax cuts spur employment except when they lessen employment :) The tax cuts however have been largely meaningless to middle income employees and entirely meaninful to the wealthiest. Also, the tax cuts had less of a growth effect than equivalent revenue sharing with the states would have had. Employment whether men or women was all too little effected by the tax cuts.

[Movie Guy]

I am opting for the brain sensor that has spellcheck built in the chip.

Well, that and the model which will tap the 90%-93% of my brain that I haven't figured out how to use.

I will pay extra for that chip.

[Movie Guy]

Yeah, I know. It might not help me.

[cm]

MG: That 90% of your brain that you are not using will come in handy when the 10% that you are using now has died off. Or something to that effect.

Also the ability to learn, i.e. form new neural connections, requires a measure of redundancy.

[Nelson]

A post from awhile back that motivated the question about whether other workers would feel pressured to get implantsWell, there's a certain class of worker that's known for getting implants to further their careers. You could ask one of them.

[piglet]

"I'm done, this is going nowhere, (and it's taking too darn long to type)"

I agree it's going nowhere, but I have a suggestion. Let us try paying attention to what we are actually doing when we "think", and when we try to communicate "thoughts". What is the language and grammar of thoughts, how would an extracted thought look like? Food for thought ;-)

[cm]

piglet: Perhaps that's not the point. (Well, I'm not exactly sure either what the point is.) One can imagine (whether feasible or not) implants/probes that are able to extract emotional responses to external stimuli, and their use for "mental drug tests". Entirely voluntary of course. You don't have to take it, only when you want to keep being a "team player".

One should think such Orwellian imaginations are overblown and that rational employer behavior is to look for actual subject-matter performance, but then why do we have dress codes and actual drug tests? (And I have read of "lie detector" tests, at least in the FBI, where they are supposedly used to fight corruption and detect double agents.) While select places may have legit concerns about hard to detect malfeasance, in others maybe conformance is more important than performance.

[piglet]

cm, you are talking of using implants to better control people. This is something control freaks will be interested in but probably not the kind of implant that Mark Thoma would voluntarily have inserted in his head, unless I got him completely wrong ;-)

[Movie Guy]

I was having a bit of fun with my previous comments.

More seriously, I have a friend in Washington, D.C. who is once again studying this technology and other approaches to determine what technologies offer the best hope for his wife who has advanced ALS.

He explained a few days ago that the Japanese have had this technology for about 15 years and have continued to try to improve it. He is still not satisfied that the technology is adequate to justify drilling a hole in one skull. And so on.

[cm]

piglet: Control not via the implant, but the new "surveillance" opportunities the implant may offer.

Let me illustrate this with the caption of a cartoon I saw a long time ago. One prison inmate in striped suit and with a ball chained to his leg tells another, "the thoughts are free, but I actually wrote them down". That's what this type of objection boils down to.

Regarding "efficiency", we are on one page in that mental processes are not "strongly structured" so that a single thought can be "extracted", or even identified. Or that it can even be satisfactorily defined (for the purposes discussed here) what a thought is, as opposed to other brain processes.

The "efficiency" thing reminds me of Asimov's original Foundation trilogy where the Mule was capable of "high-pressuring" people to his ends by mid control efforts, accelerating and enhancing their thought process (at the expense of their physical well-being, though that was only hinted).

In Mark's scenario, that would be "voluntary".

[cm]

I read something similar, referring to (hypothetical) drugs inducing a state of alertness and averting sleep over periods, and potential applications towards military and business. The same question was posed, will workers feel compelled to use such drugs to become more "productive" and further their "career".

[Mark Thoma]

I've been meaning to run down this link in case you are interested in the thought conversion problem:

http://www.discover.com/issues/oct-04/cover/

Here's a bit of the article:...The neural code is often likened to the machine code that underpins the operating system of a digital computer. Like transistors, neurons serve as switches, or logic gates, absorbing and emitting electrochemical pulses, called action potentials, which resemble the basic units of information in digital computers. But the brain’s complexity dwarfs that of any existing computer. A typical brain contains 100 billion cells—almost as numerous as the stars in the Milky Way galaxy. And each cell is linked via synapses to as many as 100,000 others. The synapses between cells are awash in hormones and neurotransmitters that modulate the transmission of signals, and the synapses constantly form and dissolve, weaken and strengthen in response to new experiences.

Assuming that each synapse processes one action potential per second and that these transactions represent the brain’s computational output, then the brain performs at least one quadrillion operations per second, almost a thousand times more than the best supercomputers. Many more computations may occur at scales below or above that of individual synapses, says Steven Rose, a neurobiologist at the Open University in England. “The brain may use every possible means of carrying information.”

Optimists recall that in the middle of the last century, some biologists feared that the genetic code was too complex to crack. Then in 1953 Francis Crick and James Watson unraveled the structure of DNA, and researchers quickly established that the double helix mediates an astonishingly simple genetic code governing the heredity of all organisms. The neural code is not likely to reveal such an elegant, universal solution. The brain is “so adaptive, so dynamic, changing so frequently from instant to instant,” says Miguel Nicolelis, a neural-prosthesis researcher at Duke University, that “it may not be proper to use the term ‘code.’ ”

Nicolelis has faith that science will one day ferret out all the brain’s information-processing tricks—or at least enough of them to yield huge improvements in neural prostheses for people who are paralyzed, blind, or otherwise disabled. Yet he believes that certain aspects of our minds may remain inviolable because our most meaningful thoughts and memories are written in a code, or language, that is unique to each of us. “There will always be some mystery,” Nicolelis says...

[Devang]

I think you guys are wrongly comparing something which may help you learn faster, with ordinary tools that after learning how to use, help you do your work faster. Like Mr. Thoma said, you have to still have to learn how to use these implants, which is different person to person.

If there will always be that little bit unknown, and we may not know what that bit exactly is, I wouldn't want to image much. Baring that restraint, I could use more RAM, and a better video card in me (I'm above computer-brain analogies, but since the article mentioned it...). We don't know enough about the Brain or artificial Neural Networks to realistically know what to expect in the future. Especially when each Graduate student can invent a new type of the latter in his CS thesis if he wanted to.

[cm]

Devang: You are making a "macro" distinction. At the "micro" level, more or less the same happens. (Learning by doing anybody?) With the caveat that (supposedly) the rate of learning slows down with age, so the "performance mode" dominates.

When I was "just learning" in school or college, it was quite hard work, thank you very much. Those who were not willing to do the work, and rather hung out in the afternoon/evening, didn't learn much, to an approximation. (But as a side not, they are not necessarily less successful in life, if not in profession, overall.)

I'm aware that this says little about the original speed of information processing/exchange issue.