response to 5&6 NBC

Megan Barton

Response to ch. 5 & 6 NBC

                This was a very interesting read. I could understand most of it, for once, which is great news for me.  I’m not sure what I want to talk about first, so many new ideas and possibilities were brought to my attention in this reading. Let’s focus on the mind control aspects.

                One of the studies mentioned was intended to enable a blind person to see using a camera and computer set up attached to their brain. The results weren’t as incredible as you might imagine from this information. The person was able to perceive visual-like sensations. They would react to objects that seemed to come at them in one study for instance. They couldn’t really see like they would had, they had working biological sight. They even kind of hooked the person up to a TV and the internet. While the results aren’t there yet, you could imagine the possibilities. What would you “see” if you were hooked up to the internet? Would you see code kind of reminiscent of the Matrix or would you kind of exist in a virtual world? If the later was true, imagine all the possibilities for MMOs. If you were hooked up to a computer and saw the virtual world as if you were actually there and you were logged on to an online game, would your body move and react in the real world to what you saw and experienced in the virtual one? Would you perceive a sense of pain if you saw yourself get zapped with electricity or slashed with a sword? These are all outlandish ponderings but in a more practical and realistic view, the possibilities of enabling the blind to see again are phenomenal.

                Along the same lines of the aforementioned online video-gaming aspect, Steve Potter’s study begs similar inquiries. He used in vitro grown rat hippocampal neural tissue to control a virtual animal. One is left to wonder what this makes the creature. Is this creature “alive”? The tissues controlling the animal are most definitely alive, but are attached to no living body. Does this make the creature a computer program and thus not living, or does the living tissue take precedence and rule the being as living? After a time, would the living tissue have integrated enough with virtual body to experience sensations of pain or pleasure inflicted on the virtual body? This brings on very interesting pondering in my mind. Would it be possible to attach the mind of a fully paralyzed individual to a virtual avatar so that the person can live on in that reality? Or maybe integrate the person’s mind into a 100 percent mechanical robot body? Would it be like having bodily control again? In a different imagining, in a far off future, having built on this study, would such a world exist in which a person could wear a headband, similar to those used in the game Mind Flex, to attach their neural activities to an online virtual avatar to play in online games, or go to virtual speed dating meetings, or family reunions or even business meetings? Just imagine this world, how easy it would be to keep in touch with family in a more in- person kind of way than the existing technology of today.