“Monkey see, monkey do,” is a well known phrase; but it’s so passé—how about “Monkey THINK, robot do!” The following news isn’t going to be found in your grandpa-pa’s science textbooks kiddies, no sir! With movies like the Matrix popularizing the notion of humans as organic batteries, it takes little nowadays to surprise a teenager with the possibilities science brings to the table in the real world when it comes to “biotechnology”.

Cropping up in the news once again is the tale of two lucky-ass monkeys who gets to prove to the world that the brain’s neuronal pathways can in fact communicate with pure technology.

Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University have stuck a probe wire, the width of a human hair, into its motor cortex. The primary motor cortex controls movement with the help of thousands of nerve cells that travel through the motor cortex at the same time. The probe’s tiny electrodes collect the electrical impulses of about 100 neurons and interprets the brain data with a special mathematical algorithm that fills in the blanks using software that then sends the results to a robotic prosthetic arm that performs the monkey’s desired action—ie. Get the food, put it into my mouth, for yummy yum in my tummy tum. (National Geographic Video)

My first question after coming across this news was: How the hell does a computer, OR an algorithm for that matter, understand how to recognize what a hundred neurons are telling it to do? It’s actually easier than I thought to understand, and here it is in short.

• The immobilized monkey would be conditioned to watch the robotic arm move towards food, grab the food, and move the food to its mouth countless times.
• This action provokes neural activity.
• The software captures the patterns in this neural activity and creates a sort of image of this repeated action.
• The robotic arm is then hooked up to the software and the monkey who sees food in front of it; the same monkey conditioned to think “get food and put it into my mouth”.
• The software detects the conditioned neural pattern, fills in the blanks, and voila!
• Monkey gets the food and puts it into his mouth!

Still want the details and the true hoo-haah behind it all? Andrew Schwartz, Ph.D., professor of neurobiology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and senior researcher on the project explains the information gathering process:

When the monkey wants to move its arm, cells are activated in the motor cortex. Each of those cells activates at a different intensity depending on the direction the monkey intends to move its arm. The direction that produces the greatest intensity is that cell’s preferred direction. The average of the preferred directions of all of the activated cells is called the population vector. We can use the population vector to accurately predict the velocity and direction of normal arm movement, and in the case of this prosthetic, it serves as the control signal to convey the monkey’s intention to the prosthetic arm.

Here’s a YouTube video from Discovery that also describes the process some more:

As much as I’d love to say this is “current” news, it’s actually quite old—nearly a decade old to be exact! This article was published in 2004, 2005 and again in May 2008. All of them discussing this new technology and the discoveries made along the way. But before the monkey started laying down the yellow brick road, a lab rat was chiselling out the actual bricks in 1999.

Researchers at MCP Hahnemann University (also in Philadelphia) developed a method for recording brain signals onto electrode arrays in lab rats that would in turn control a robotic arm without actually moving a muscle. These early experiments were intended to demonstrate the possibility of implanting electrodes into the brains of humans who have lost their limbs. These implants would then communicate and control a prosthetic limb that takes the place of the missing biological one.

In both the case of the rats and the monkey, both test subjects accepted the artificial limb as their own and as a means to achieve their conditioned goals. They simply had to think about what they wanted and the robotic limb would obey their commands. In the case of the monkeys the adapted so quickly to the extra appendage that they were using it to push food into their mouths better while ignoring new offerings or even liking the robotic fingers clean.

Before any of us go off running around ranting about the awesomeness of monkey and robots coming together to end all wars concerning Monkeys Versus Robots, we need to take a step backwards in all that’s fantastically awesome and respect the true relevancy of these experiments, explained by Dr. Schwartz in 2004, 2005 and 2008:

This is a breakthrough in the development of neural prosthetic devices that will someday lead to devices that could help people who are paralyzed or who have lost limbs.

The beneficiaries of such technology will be patients with spinal cord injuries or nervous system disorders such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or ALS.

Now we are beginning to understand how the brain works using brain-machine interface technology. The more we understand about the brain, the better we’ll be able to treat a wide range of brain disorders, everything from Parkinson’s disease and paralysis to, eventually, Alzheimer’s disease and perhaps even mental illness.

This technology, along side that developed by researchers at Duke University Medical Center, in which a walking monkey’s brainwaves are collected by electrodes in a similar manner and transferred to a pair of robot legs on the other side of the globe which move based on the generated “walking algorithm”, speaks of amazing developments to come. None of which include a real-life Optimus Primal for one of the upcoming Transformers movie in the next decade.

Even though this all spells coolness for limbless victims, the technology is still less then perfect and won’t be seen any time soon—at least not in a commercially viable way. The robotic limbs aren’t built with pressure sensors to detect the difference of handling a stuffed toy versus a crystal wine glass. Also, the current electrode probe degrades within weeks of implantation. That being said, it’s not stopping the researchers at Pitt from developing a more complex unit with wrist manoeuvrability and humanlike hands!

All this robot-monkey-business can only lead to a barrel of fun in the next decade to come!

Cartoon by Andrew Fulton: Twitter | Flickr | Website