From: Brett Paatsch (bpaatsch@bigpond.net.au)
Date: Tue Aug 05 2003 - 19:13:45 MDT
Ramez Naam <mez@apexnano.com> writes:
> From: Party of Citizens [mailto:citizens@vcn.bc.ca]
> > Would you say this issue sums up to whether there
> > is DIRECT INTERFACE WITH THE NERVOUS
> > SYSTEM or not? If so, that creates a special kind
> > of cyborg, a "neurobot" if you will. Anybody with a
> > heart implant is a cyborg, but Warwick may have
>> been the first neurobot.
>
> Warwick wasn't even the first neurobot. There were
> at least 50,000 people before him. Today there are
> 80,000 people with cochlear implants.
> There are at least 30,000 people with deep brain
> stimulating electrodes to control the sympoms of
> Parkinson's. There are hundreds of people taking
> part in clinical trials of deep brain stimulators to control
> chronic pain, depression, and obsessive compulsive
> disorder. And there are more than a dozen people
> who have electrodes in their visual cortex, their
> motor cortex, or their retinas.
One of the things I am trying to get a handle on is
is the state of the art in neural implants in 2003.
Current state of the art is a reasonable baseline
for extrapolating and estimating future trends and roll
out times.
The more that has been done, the moral hurdles have
been cleared with ethics and legislative bodies and the
better our understanding of the human nervous system
the closer we are getting a handle on how to do memory
enhancement and eventually uploading.
I'm also aware that there new technologies can compete
with each other to solve the same underlying existing
problems. It may be possible to restore neural damage
with stem cell treatment or shunt around the break
with some sort of electronic bridging implant. At this
stage I don't think either has been done.
Do you have sources for the Parkinson's electrodes,
the deep brain stimulators and the motor cortex stuff
you mention above Mez?
Regards,
Brett
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue Aug 05 2003 - 19:21:47 MDT