Remotely Controlled Rats

[Danecookie]

I'm sure most of you have heard and/or read the story by now, as it's been out for several months, but I still find it intriguing. I'm wondering what you all think about this development, and its implications. Perhaps this would be better placed in the ethics forum, however.

 

For those of you who haven't learned about the technique of controlling rats by remote, check out this article:

 

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/05/0501_020501_roborats.html

[marsbarz]

I'm sure most of you have heard and/or read the story by now, as it's been out for several months, but I still find it intriguing.

 

Hehe, this article is dated for the first of May, 2002.

Quite old news, I remember watching a program on the discovery channel which covered this.

[quantum.INF]

Wow, the things that you learn... Well I have just learned about this now and I think that quite frankly it is very scary. What bothers me the most is that if they could do it to rats, could they do it to higher organisms? (Such as apes or perhaps even humans?) Also I am afraid that the military will be using this technology rather exclusively, my case in point the atomic bomb. Einstein never intended for it to be used as a weapon, he thought it could be a way for people to get an inexpensive source of energy. So I guess there is really only one way to see if they will use it for military purposes - wait for a rat strapped with a camera to sneak into your shower!

[Helix]

"They" just figured out how to do the same thing with sharks. Seems as if the CIA/NSA wants to use them to spy on vessels undetected. As if pushing back gov't authority wasn't hard enough without Fido working for the other side...

[Elliott]

Here is a video of a remotely controlled human.

[alt_f13]

Here is a video of a remotely controlled human[/url'].

 

WTF was that?

[pink_trike]

Its been done with dolphins also.

 

Very scary considering the sacred marriage between science and military institutions, and the tendency toward market-driven scientific research.

[Edtharan]

This "remote Control" over the rats (and sharks, etc) is done partly by training (like giving a reward to a dog when it obeys your command). The Rats had several electrodes inserted into their brains some of which mimiced the stimulation of either the left or right whiskers, and another which stimulated the pleasure/reward centers of the rat's brain.

 

It was shown that the rat still had complete choice over its actions (like it wouldn't make a jump it knew it couldn't do even if it was "told" to do so). A human could be controlled like this, but we still would retain our ability to choose a particular action or not.

 

However, if the control was placed in the parts of our motor cortex that controled our muscles, we would not be able to control the actions, but we would retain the ability to know that we were being controlled.

 

When scientists discover the regions of our brain that govern our ability to choose (and they are zeroing in on these) then we can fully claim that they can remote controll someone. This kind of controll will most likely need to activate several areas in controled paterns of stimulation, as this is a more complex issue.