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From: mccool@dgp.toronto.edu (Michael McCool)
Newsgroups: sci.virtual-worlds
Subject: Re: Question about Harmonization of Computer/Eye Electronic Impulses
Message-ID: <1991Apr3.012655.15878@milton.u.washington.edu>
Date: 3 Apr 91 01:14:33 GMT
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erich@eecs.cs.pdx.edu (Erich Stefan Boleyn) writes:

>   Now...  there has been work on interfacing directly with nerves, but I am
>unclear on who is doing it and how far they have progressed.  A fairly
>substantiated rumor passed by me saying that there has been quite a bit of
>work done by a company (in the North Western area of the U.S., I think) on
>interfacing nerves with microchips by encouraging them to grow through holes
>and connect with the pads on the chip.  The rumor also included info saying
>that they are surprisingly successful.  I have no further info at present...
>although I am attempting to find out more.

Well, if you read the IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Computing, you will see
that articles on multi-contact neural probes are very popular just at the 
moment.  This is not as interesting as growing neurons into a chip.  The 
current state-of-the art is putting many contacts on a single probe fashioned
out of a sliver of silicon, so that nearby neurons can be recorded, and
should allow research into small "circuits" rather than just recordings
of single neurons and then guesses about what circuits they could
possibly be a part of :-)

How does this relate to direct neural interfacing?  I don't know, but
one COULD imagine an array of these things inserted into a nerve bundle,
which would give a three-dimensional grid of points for recording and 
stimulation.  And the scale wouldn't necessarily be that crude.  Of course,
the main problem is the research that still has to be done to understand
the signals we would record from such an array, and the kind of stimulation
that would make sense to the system.

Somehow, though, it all seems very crude, inserting PHYSICAL objects into
a neural bundle.  Guess I'm just a soft-palmed computer engineer and
will never have the guts to handle the bloody art of wetware hacking.

Michael McCool@dgp.toronto.edu