Thread: Modern barbrisn

Monkey controls robot hand through brain implants
NewScientist Picture of the day February 2012



Jianhui manipulates objects with his hands and gets a drink as a reward. Unknown to him, not far away a robot hand mirrors his fingers' moves as it receives instructions from the chips implanted in his brain.

Zheng Xiaoxiang of the Brain-Computer Interface Research Team at Zhejiang University in Zijingang, China, and colleagues announced earlier this week that they had succeeded in capturing and deciphering the signals from the monkey's brain and interpreting them into the real-time robotic finger movements.

The two sensors implanted in Jianhui's brain monitor just 200 neurons in his motor cortex, Zheng says. However, this was enough to accurately interpret the monkey's movements and control the robotic hand.

Humans have used electrodes to control prosthetic arms, but Zheng claims this research looks at the finer movements of the fingers.

"Hand moves are associated with at least several hundreds of thousands of neurons," she said. "We now decipher the moves based on the signals of about 200 neurons. Of course, the orders we produced are still distant from the truly flexible finger moves in complexity and fineness."

I have seen lots of video's of developmental and learning phycology research videos where animals were being tortured with little justification beyond safisfing the sadistic pleasures of those involved. But these films all had a few things in common, they were all in black and white, because they were made in the 1950's-60's after which they were effectively banned as immoral.

So I am more than a little shocked to see this picture demonstrating just how far back china is dragging world moral development. because I cannot see any justification for this experiment, and it is truly shocking

Ah, those cruel Asiatics strike again. You wouldn't find primate experiments being conducted by fine upstanding white folk. Well, except the ones at dozens of research centres in Europe and the States. Gory details at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_...-human_primate

^"Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name"

for over 50 years there have been ethic's panels that sanction animal experimentation as time has progressed the requirements that the experiment be demonstrably useful and that animal suffering is minimised has continually increased.

If you can find any animal experiments in the west that are as unnecessary and cruel as this one in the last 20 years.... please feel free to contribute it as a working link

Animal testing on non-human primates - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Scroll down and you'll see an awful lot worse than a few implants. Here a cut and paste for what went on at Cambridge:

In the UK, after an undercover investigation in 1998, the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV), a lobby group, reported that researchers in Cambridge University's primate-testing labs were sawing the tops off marmosets' heads, inducing strokes, then leaving them overnight without veterinarian care, because staff worked only nine to five.[71] The experiments used marmosets that were first trained to perform certain behavioral and cognitive tasks, then re-tested after brain damage to determine how the damage had affected their skills. The monkeys were deprived of food and water to encourage them to perform the tasks, with water being withheld for 22 out of every 24 hours.[72][73]
The Research Defence Society defended Cambridge's research. The RDS wrote that the monkeys were fully anaesthetised, and appropriate pain killers were given after the surgery. "On recovery from the anaesthesia, the monkeys were kept in an incubator, offered food and water and monitored at regular intervals until the early evening. They were then allowed to sleep in the incubators until the next morning. No monkeys died unattended during the night after stroke surgery."[74] A court rejected BUAV's application for a judicial review. BUAV appealed.

If you look around, you'll find more in the same vein.

I'm doing some research in Cognitive Science, and monkeys do tend to get their brains probed; the notion of mirror neurons, for example, came off the back of sticking probes into the poor little blighter's brains...

The simians will rise against us before long.

In fact, these uprisings will not be limited to our nearest cousin.

Beware all human-form.

This experiment seems to be harking back to the 1950's a lot of suffering for little gain.

How much suffering does it entail? I can't see anything in that article which supports any conclusions about the degree of suffering endured by the monkey. Unless it's just that it's being done by cruel, inscrutable orientals....and I guess that's probably sufficient to justify any number of absurd conclusions.

if you are going to cut and paste your evidence without going to the trouble of putting more than a line of value add, at least get it all in.

I did. You cut and pasted from a different page. Really, is it that hard to keep track of these things? In case you're still confused, I copied from here:Animal testing on non-human primates - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (and I gave you the fucking link to follow) and you seem to have copied from here: Cambridge University primates - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia