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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: 1) by jman on Thursday February 02 2023, @02:43PM (1 child)
Have also thought for awhile it would be cool if we had large, bushy tails, with a hand at the end featuring two thumbs. You could open absolutely *any* jar, and would never have to wait for a seat.
What this would do to the furniture and clothing industry, am not sure, but I know folks wouldn't be able to easily sleep on their backs anymore.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Immerman on Thursday February 02 2023, @05:23PM
Well, all our smaller cousins still have them, it's the great apes that lost them. At a wild guess I'd say that as they got larger and spent more time on the ground their tails were no longer strong enough to support their weight, making them much less useful (strength increases with cross-sectional area, while mass increases with volume, so the square-cube scaling law applies)
Which would mean that you've got this big heavy tail that's no longer particularly useful, but still requires a bunch of calories to support. And thus any mutation that shrunk it would bestow a calorie-conserving survival advantage.
Now that getting enough calories is no longer a challenge for most people, it would be interesting to reintroduce prehensile tails. They couldn't support our weight, but having an extra grasping limb to hold your bag, coffee cup, etc. could be really handy. Not to mention it's basically a tentacle that could reach into all kinds of out of the way places - great for reaching behind then under the refrigerator to knock that thing you dropped out to where you can reach it, or fishing out the ring you dropped down the drain.
Could be incredibly handy in space too, where weight doesn't exist, and having an integrated, consciously controlled maneuvering "tether" could be incredibly useful. Might add that to the standard "spacer upgrade pack" along with the cancer immunity we copy from whales, and the anti-muscle-atrophy trick we copy from some hibernating animal.
We still have at least some of the genes, there are mutations cause people to be born with small tails (normally amputated immediately), and as our understanding of DNA improves it should be easy enough to borrow whatever is needed from our more distant relatives to restore a long, fully prehensile tail.
Fluffiness would seriously interfere with grasping ability though. And getting even a normal hand to grow on the end would be some serious Frankenstein shit. Though cybernetics might be an option, as could getting the tail to split into two "tentacle-fingers"at the end - a mutation that shows up from time to time in various species. I doubt even a hand would be any more useful for opening jars though - a tail lacks the leverage provided by rigid arm bones, and would likely have to be exercised enough be much thicker than your bicep before it could apply anywhere close to the same force. Which would likely also severely reduce its flexibility.
On the down side - tails would require completely redesigning our chairs in order to be able to slouch. Might not be worth it.