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Unused bandwidth in neurons can be tapped to control extra limbs:
What could you do with an extra limb? Consider a surgeon performing a delicate operation, one that needs her expertise and steady hands—all three of them. As her two biological hands manipulate surgical instruments, a third robotic limb that's attached to her torso plays a supporting role. Or picture a construction worker who is thankful for his extra robotic hand as it braces the heavy beam he's fastening into place with his other two hands. Imagine wearing an exoskeleton that would let you handle multiple objects simultaneously, like Spiderman's Dr. Octopus. Or contemplate the out-there music a composer could write for a pianist who has 12 fingers to spread across the keyboard.
Such scenarios may seem like science fiction, but recent progress in robotics and neuroscience makes extra robotic limbs conceivable with today's technology. Our research groups at Imperial College London and the University of Freiburg, in Germany, together with partners in the European project NIMA, are now working to figure out whether such augmentation can be realized in practice to extend human abilities. The main questions we're tackling involve both neuroscience and neurotechnology: Is the human brain capable of controlling additional body parts as effectively as it controls biological parts? And if so, what neural signals can be used for this control?
[...] Two practical questions stand out: Can we achieve neural control of extra robotic limbs concurrently with natural movement, and can the system work without the user's exclusive concentration? If the answer to either of these questions is no, we won't have a practical technology, but we'll still have an interesting new tool for research into the neuroscience of motor control. If the answer to both questions is yes, we may be ready to enter a new era of human augmentation. For now, our (biological) fingers are crossed.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Immerman on Wednesday February 01 2023, @02:39PM (2 children)
I believe the first question has already been answered in the affirmative for monkeys, so probably will be for us as well.
As for exclusive concentration... I'm not even sure what exactly that's supposed to mean. "While you're doing other things?" That seems really likely considering the brain is a massively parallel computation engine, and monkeys have already demonstrated that they can repurpose some of an arm's neural circuitry to move a robotic arm to play lab games while interdependently using their real arm.
Granted, some aspects of monkey cognition completely blow us out of the water, but it seems unlikely that controlling cybernetic enhancements would be one of those.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Wednesday February 01 2023, @05:53PM (1 child)
The question is how much cranial capacity do we want to give up just to have another arm or two in that case. The physical space that the brain is located in is limited. It's part of why we hit a certain point where we can't learn more without forgetting other things. Granted, it is a lot, far more than what a person is likely have time to learn, but there is a limited amount the brain can store. Those neurons that would drive this are coming from other functions and it will be interesting to see how much of a reduction it makes to other functions.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday February 01 2023, @07:27PM
Pretty sure nobody alive has gotten anywhere close to the storage capacity of the brain, we forget shit because
1) we recorded almost nothing to begin with - something like 95% of the details in a typical memory are completely imagined in at the time of recall, with some of the imagined details replacing the recalled details on every recall (which is why old, treasured memories tend to be among the least accurate)
2) keeping a memory ties up cell resources, consuming calories, so it gets erased as soon as practical unless it's actually used regularly. Same way your muscles shrink when unused - they don't atrophy spontaneously, your body is constantly actively removing calorie-expensive "wasted" capacity. Every calorie saved is that much longer you can survive through hard times.
3) retrograde memory interference means that new memories are constantly partially overwriting old memories, so anything that doesn't get regularly used is eventually lost under a mountain of new information.