"Bionic Man"

At the talk that I went to last week, people eluded to some sort of human artificial limb research that I hadn't heard about. I'm pretty sure this is it, and I have no idea how it works yet, but it looks awfully cool, doesn't it?

Alva Noë

I have a hunch that Alva Noë really knows what he's talking about. I should probably read his book Action in Perception, where he makes the claim (maybe?) that perception is not established by activating certain parts of the brain, but rather by the "lawful connection of perception and action", which makes a lot of sense. One of the big issues in consciousness, for me at least, is that certain parts of the brain seem to just be associated with certain modalities. But why should vision be visual, how does that part of the brain know that its visual? By an action-type argument, we're able to make a connection between how we act, that is, moving around in the world, or manipulating objects in the world, and how we interpret this, that is vision. Perhaps once this is established, other sensory-substitution type stories will make sense, that is, explain why certain non-visual information, e.g. tongue stimulation will produce visual stimuli. What quality of that information is inherently visual as opposed to inherently auditory? If we glean "visual" information reliably from the environment, does that mean that it will always have a visual quality to it? Hmm.

Procrastinating

Right this moment, I am trying to write a paper applying parts of Patricia Churchalnd's Neurophilosophy to the VITE model, as described by Bullock & Grossberg in 1988. Problematically, I feel like I don't have a whole lot to say about the VITE model, as it's kind of an old version of the model and none too exciting a decade and a half after it's been developed. And yet, I am supposed to discuss whether it is at the correct grain of analysis.

Anyway, doing so I discovered a neat blog that is trying to apply VITE to a robot arm, which seems like a really good idea. I hope that more people realize that their intellectual struggles have a warm home in the world wibe web.

As far as my adventures, I went to see Lee Miller come give a talk at MIT, which appeared as though it may have been hosted by Emilio Bizzi, although I can't be certain, because I was late due to the very, very cold nature of the day and the very, very big nature of the McGovern Institute. I wish I understood more of it, but the big idea seemed to be the high correlation between neurons in Motor Cortex and muscle activation as recorded through chronic EMG electrodes. I didn't know people implanted that sort of thing, but it seems useful, especially if you're aiming at stimulating the arms that you have if you're paralyzed. Of course, there's still the "recruitment problem", which is that when you stimulate a muscle, the larger, fast-fatigable muscles are recruit more quickly, which is the reverse of what takes place when muscles function normally. Overcoming this problem is non-trivial, and there are also apparently problems with getting muscle fusion, or tetanus, at low enough frequencies. Unfused muscle movement is tantamount to twitching a lot, which is not the smooth movement that we're all familiar with.

It's also dawning on me that if I ever hope to be a "motor guy" I'm going to have to learn some hardcore anatomy and physiology of muscles, and also the spinal cord, in serious detail. We'll see.

Oh, and next time, I'll figure out consciousness.