[HN Gopher] Brain implant lets man with complete paralysis spell...
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Brain implant lets man with complete paralysis spell out thoughts
Author : andrewgioia
Score : 179 points
Date : 2022-03-25 12:20 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.science.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.science.org)
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| I started (and quit) a PhD based on the Machine Learning
| algorithms used for BCI systems such as this.
|
| Every 6-12 months, someone will write a puff piece about their
| research in order to get grant money[1]/street cred. And every
| time, HN responds as if it's sci-fi tech from the future and I
| shit on everybody's dreams.
|
| So here we go:
|
| At a glance, nothing about this system in particular is new. It
| seems to solve the same problems as older invasive arrays from 15
| years ago, with the same deal-breaking flaw still unfixed
| (namely, the body rejecting the implant over time).
|
| He had OK-ish performance in a single patient (one character per
| minute on a good day), but single-patient performance is
| misleading as it's very common for a system to work with one
| "golden" patient but not others. Interestingly, no real research
| has been done (at least, none as of 4 years ago) to look into why
| this is the case - most "breakthroughs" are people throwing
| machine-learning spaghetti at the wall to cover up deliberately
| flawed benchmarking. (To be fair, this is more of a comment on
| the field as a whole than this particular trial. His results seem
| honest and humble.)
|
| The field is going nowhere, and this article is yet another
| shining example of this. Nothing will ever be achieved until we
| abandon the current paradigm and actually learn more about the
| underlying neurophysiology (or possibly create batshit-insane
| sensors).
|
| [1] They actually explicitly mention this in the article this
| time, which is pretty bold:
|
| >Chaudhary's foundation is seeking funding to give similar
| implants to several more people with ALS. He estimates the system
| would cost close to $500,000 over the first 2 years.
| soperj wrote:
| Curious why they go through each letter saying yes or no,
| instead of just teaching them how to pick letters based on a
| binary output (ie: a= 00000, b=00001)? you'd think the
| characters per minute would increase dramatically.
| tgb wrote:
| There's relevant scenes to this in the Stephen Hawking
| biopic, The Theory of Everything.
| tobylane wrote:
| Morse code, where dot is 'think about tennis' and dash is
| 'think about home'?
|
| https://amp.theguardian.com/science/2010/feb/03/vegetative-s.
| ..
| hackmiester wrote:
| It occurs to me that this is a binary search on the alphabet,
| but could be made into a much more human-compatible format:
| "Is the letter in the first half of the alphabet?" "Is the
| letter between A and F?"
| soperj wrote:
| yeah, I guess you'd start with the first 13/last 13 and
| break it down in halves from there. It would take only 6
| choices to pick a letter. I still think memorizing the
| binary version of the letters would be faster, and wouldn't
| take all that long considering the amount of use.
| dn3500 wrote:
| The code is (or can be) the same either way. I imagine
| after a few days the user would memorize the codes for
| the letters and skip the prompts.
|
| On a related note, one character per minute is about the
| same speed as the first trans-atlantic telegraph cable in
| 1858.
| blahblarblar wrote:
| When I was in neuroscience I came to the same conclusion.
| People just keep trying new ways to do information processing
| which is really easy and fun. Solving the biology and material
| science problems are fucking hard and high risk, as in, if you
| try you'll probably fail. It's going to be a very long time
| before these things are solved. Not to criticize because I'm
| also too cowardly to try tackling those problems for the
| aforementioned reasons.
| fossuser wrote:
| Any thoughts on Neuralink's work/approach?
| gibolt wrote:
| The promise is significantly reduced device costs for far
| superior electrode counts. Even if it can't interpret yet,
| the ability to get a more nuanced look at the firing of
| neurons should be a huge benefit to help increase
| understanding
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| tikwidd wrote:
| I wish all that grant money was spent on trying to cure the
| underlying diseases.
| eminence32 wrote:
| I don't really know much about this field. Can you say more
| about what "batshit-insane sensors" might entail?
| daedalus_f wrote:
| As pointed out by hprotagonist in a comment below, there have
| also been claims of research misconduct claims made against the
| principle researchers involved with this group. So not exactly
| promising. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30773013
| caycep wrote:
| I feel like this is science research in general - it's a battle
| for money, and only a few groups really manage great research
| vs. doing the whole grant application shuffle.
|
| What do you think about the few groups actually doing electrode
| design (i.e. there was a UC Berkeley/Lawrence Livermore group
| looking at electrode designs)?
|
| Vs. I think most of the innovations in BCI engineering happen
| to be in the commercial sector (i.e. deep brain stimulation
| electrodes from Boston Sci, Medtronic, Abbott, the arrays from
| Black Rock in Utah, Neuralynx, etc).
| FieryTransition wrote:
| Would you kindly care to explain how the field should change
| paradigm? Do you mean that " black boxing" the brain with
| input/output and hoping something will emerge is a non-
| productive endeavour, and that the neurophysiology, like a
| bottom up approach from biology/neuroscience, is the way to go?
|
| I'm a comp-sci student too, and considering what possibilities
| there are for studying BCI, machine intelligence and the brain.
| But I think that maybe, having approached it from a more
| biologically oriented angle would have been better. After
| having read "On intelligence" I'm just more aware how
| disconnected our modelling of intelligence and the brain/BCI
| is. On one hand, there's just "throw more computing power at
| it", and the other, there's cutting a fruit fly's brain into
| slices and building a special machine just to do so, while
| afterwards scanning the resulting pathways [0]. We can't even
| understand brains way less complex than our own, so I fear that
| a bottom up approach is way beyond my lifetime. I remember a
| Danish neuroscientist once said, that there's a higher chance
| to understand every star in the universe, before we understand
| the inner workings of the human brain.
|
| Do you mind me asking, what did you do instead?
|
| [0] https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/08/an-interactive-
| automated-3...
| andrewgioia wrote:
| Unbelievably hopeful and tragic at the same time. That he could
| learn to control electrode implants to communicate (in an albeit
| "rudimentary" way) is just incredible, but I can't imagine the
| feelings of unfairness at such a young age for him. Hopefully
| there's a path here to help others communicate much longer than
| they'd otherwise be able to.
|
| One of the other sentences he made out was "I love my cool son,"
| which hit particularly close to home given I'm the same age as
| well. Oy.
| thatjoeoverthr wrote:
| Has anyone else noticed this is sort of a permanent story? I've
| read it as news verbatim at least once a year since the 90s. It's
| the "Russian bombers intercepted" of medical science. This
| article is better than most, acknowledging prior work but only to
| a few years.
| burrows wrote:
| Are you sure it's the same story?
|
| Or are we seeing reports of incremental improvements to
| technologies for communicating with locked-in people.
| icoder wrote:
| Not sure if relevant but it's good to distinguish techniques
| that are in the end based on muscle activity, which, even if
| the tiniest ones around the eye, give VERY strong electrical
| signals compared to brain activity. That's what basically makes
| the 'consumer variants' tick as well.
|
| This article seems to be actually, entirely, and directly based
| on brain activity.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| There is a difference between using a brain implant and other
| devices like eye trackers and some type of muscle translator.
|
| I've seen a lot of the latter. I don't think I've ever seen the
| former.
| juice_bus wrote:
| One more step towards Lock In[0] sort of becoming real.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lock_In
| ramesh31 wrote:
| Now imagine he had a cochlear implant with bluetooth that allowed
| for two way communication. That's telepathy.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| First episode of Shark Tank[1] has you covered.
|
| [1] https://sharktanktales.com/ionic-ear-shark-tank-update/
| coffeeblack wrote:
| Isn't that what Musk's Neuralink is doing? They automated the
| invasive surgery to install the device, and their device has
| thousands of wires to read neuronal signals.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| Is there any peer-reviewed literature on what technology or
| advances Neuralink has? It's purported to do these things, but
| a lot of what I've seen is skeptical.
| JPLeRouzic wrote:
| There are a few publications by people with some connection
| with Neuralink. For example:
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6914248/
|
| (Elon Musk is author of this publication)
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34140486/
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33955717/
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33894832/
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33784612/
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33236720/
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33080229/
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31996696/
| bcj7393nsk wrote:
| a0-prw wrote:
| How did they get informed consent ?
| mkmk wrote:
| From the article: "His wife and sister provided written consent
| for the surgery."
| lettergram wrote:
| I've seen and built systems that are far less invasive --
|
| https://agenda.hep.wisc.edu/event/792/contributions/18594/at...
|
| With accuracy on par or better than described:
|
| > He eventually explained to the team that he modulated the tone
| by trying to move his eyes. But he did not always succeed. Only
| on 107 of 135 days reported in the study could he match a series
| of target tones with 80% accuracy, and only on 44 of those 107
| could he produce an intelligible sentence.
|
| In fact, some of these successful efforts were done back in the
| early 2000s.
|
| From the article:
|
| > Researchers inserted two square electrode arrays, 3.2
| millimeters wide, into a part of the brain that controls
| movement. When they asked the man to try to move his hands, feet,
| head, and eyes, the neural signals weren't consistent enough to
| answer yes-or-no questions, says Ujwal Chaudhary, a biomedical
| engineer and neurotechnologist at the German nonprofit ALS Voice.
|
| The speed and accuracy does take a hit using external nodes, but
| brain implants are frankly dangerous. They come with serious
| risks.
| icoder wrote:
| Does your less invasive solution work with fully locked in
| patients? Often these solutions rely (partially) on some tiny
| muscle activity still working, which they don't have. At least
| that was what I've been taught some time ago (could be early
| 2000s), and what's for sure hard to rule out in 'healthy'
| patients.
| lettergram wrote:
| It was developed for fully locked in patients, who have eye
| control. It uses a very similar mechanism except it's slower.
| Effectively you have to look at characters on a screen to
| type.
| burrows wrote:
| Are the risks associated with invasiveness fixed (eg, there
| will always be at least a 1/15000 chance that a patient dies
| within the first year of receiving a neural implant), or can
| they be reduced with better technology and more understanding
| of the brain?
| lettergram wrote:
| At the moment, there will always be damage.
|
| There's also risks associated with the surgery (that'll be
| much higher than 1/15,000; you're probably talking at least
| 1/1000 just for risk of initial surgery).
|
| Further, no implants last forever. They develop scar tissue
| around the implant. So you'll have multiple surgeries if you
| survive years.
|
| Technology can mitigate much of that risk, but we are pretty
| far away from removing risk. We also will need multiple major
| independent breakthroughs.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30773013 Previously:
|
| _The study comes in the context of past findings of serious
| misconduct against Birbaumer and Chaudhary. The findings
| concerned the data and analysis in two previous papers published
| in PLoS Biology. The two articles, subsequently retracted, also
| concerned the use of brain activity to decode the thoughts of
| completely locked-in patients. The German research agency,
| Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) found that the scientists
| failed to show complete analysis of their data and patient
| examinations in these previous studies and made false statements.
| The allegations do not relate to the findings of the current
| research which involved different methodology, supervision and
| analysis. In a statement to Technology Networks, Birbaumer said
| that the new study "shows that all accusations are wrong" and
| suggested that additional forthcoming legal developments would
| further exonerate his and Chaudhary's prior research._
| adam12 wrote:
| "I would like to listen to the album by Tool loud"
|
| That sentence speaks volumes to me.
| olyjohn wrote:
| I hope that somebody got the man a stereo, and turned it way
| up. Not just some random bluetooth speaker crap, like a real
| stereo. Loud, full and clear.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| We don't know _which_ Tool album he wanted, although various
| Rock /Metal sites that posted this article wondered if perhaps
| the lyrics to "Parabola" might be resonating with him at the
| moment.
| excalibur wrote:
| Might as well play them all, it's not like he has anything
| better to do.
| soperj wrote:
| Honestly seems like the perfect choice considering Maynard
| Keenan's mother, and her struggles being the subject of a bunch
| of his songs.
| jckahn wrote:
| 10,000 Days couldn't be more fitting of a request. But given
| how long he's been out I think the humane choice would be
| Fear Inoculum so he could finally get caught up!
| ______-_-______ wrote:
| > he made dozens of sentences at a painstaking rate of about
| one character per minute
|
| It's a good thing he wanted a band with a nice short name.
| Imagine if he was a fan of these guys https://www.metal-
| archives.com/bands/Paracoccidioidomicosisp...
| ChrisGranger wrote:
| https://www.metal-
| archives.com/bands/Eximperituserqethhzebib... has entered the
| chat.
| [deleted]
| mcdonje wrote:
| 50 years from now, complete paralysis will be no excuse for not
| having a job. /s
| telesilla wrote:
| A welcome upgrade to The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diving_Bell_and_the_Butter...
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