研究生 英语阅读教程 第三版 课文 lesson 11

Lesson 11 Mind over machine

Carl zimmer

Some monkey business in a Duke University lab suggests we’ll soon be able to move artificial limbs, control robotic soldiers, and communicate across thousands of miles—using nothing but our thoughts.

[1] Something incredible is happening in a lab at Duke University,s Center for Neuroengineering—though ,at first ,it is hard to see just what it is. A robot arm swings from side to side, eerily lifelike, as if it extends its mechanical hand. The hand clamp shuts and squeezes for a few seconds , then relaxes its grip and pulls back to shoot out again in a new direction. OK ,nothing particularly astonishing here—robot arms , after all , do everything from building our cars to sequencing our DNA . But those robot arms are operated by software ; the arm at Duke follows commands of s different sort. To see where those commands are coming from, you have to follow a tangled trail of the lab and down the hall to another, smaller room.

[2] Inside this room sits a motionless macaque monkey.

[3] The monkey is strapped in a chair ,staring at a computer screen . On the screen a black dot moves from side to side ; when it stops ,a circle widens around it. You would not know just from watching , but that dot represents the movement of the arm in the other room . The circle indicates the squeezing of its robotic grip ; as the force of the grip increase ,the circle widens . In other words , the dot an the circle are responding to the robot arm’s movements . And the arm ? It is being directed by monkey .

[4] Did i mention the monkey is motionless?

[5] Take another look at those cables : They snake into the back of the computer and then out again ,terminating in a cap on the monkey’s head ,where they receive signals from hundreds of electrodes buried in its brain. The monkey is directing the robot with its thoughts.

[6] For decads scientist have pondered ,speculated on ，and pooh-poohed the possibility of a direct interface between a brain and a machine — only in the late 1990s did scientists start learning enough about the brain and signal-processing to offer glimmers of hope that this science-fiction vision could become reality . Since then ,insights into the working of the brain — how it encodes commands for the body , and how it learns to improve those commands over time —have piled up at an astonishing pace ,and the researchers at Duke studying the maceque and the robotic arm are at the leading edge of the technology .“This goes way beyond what’s been done before,”says neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis , co-director of the Center for Neurogengineering. Indeed , the performance of the center’s monkeys suggests that a mind-machine merger could become a reality in humans very soon .

[7] Nicolelis and his team are confident that in five years they will be able to build a robot arm that can be controlled by a person with electrode implanted in his or her brain . Ther chief focus is medical —they aim to give people with paralyzed limbs a new tool to make everyday life easier. But the success they and other groups of scientists are achieving has triggered broader excitement in both the public and private sectors . The defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has already doled out $24 million to various brain-machine research efforts across the United States , and Duke group among them . High on DARPA’a wish list : mind -controlled battle robots , and airplanes that can be flown with nothing more than thought . You were hoping for something a bit closer to home ? How about a mental telephone that you could use simply by thinking about talking .

[8] The notion of decoding the brain’s commands can seem , on the face of it ,to be pure hubris. How could any computer eavesdrop on all the goings-on that take place in there every moment of ordinary life ?

[9] Yet after a century of neurological breakthroughs ,scientists aren’t so intimidated by the brain ;they treat it as just another information processor , albeit the most complex one in the word .“We don’t see the brain as being a mysterious organ ,” says Graig Henriquez ,Nicolelis’s fellow co-director of the Center for Neuroengineering . “We see 1s and 0s popping out of the brain, and we’re decoding it .”

[10] The source of all those 1s and 0s is ,of course ,the brain’s billons of neurons . When a neuron gets an incoming stimulus at one end —for example , photons strike the retina , which sends that visual information to a nearby neuron —an electric pulse travels the neuron’s length . Depending on the signals it receives ,a neuron can crackle with hundreds of these impulses every second . When each impulse reaches the far end of the neuron , it triggers the cell to dump neurotransmitters that can spark a new impulse in a neighboring neuron . In the way , the signal gets passed around the brain like a baton in a footrace . Ultimately , this rapid-fire code gives rise to electrical impulses that travel along nerves that lead out of the brain and spread through the body ,causing muscles to contract and relax in all sorts of different patterns ,letting us blink, speak ,walk ,or play the sousaphone .

[11] in the 1930s ,neuroscientist began to record these impulses with implantable electrodes. Although each neuron is in an insulating sheath ,an impulse still creates a weak electric field outside the cell . Researchers studying rat and monkey brains found that by placing the sensitive tip of an electrode near a neuron they could pick up the sudden changes in the electric field that occurred through the cell .

[12] The more scientists studied this neural code , the more they realized that it wasn’t all that different from the on-off digital code of computers . If scientist could decipher the code —to translate one signal as “lift hand ”and another as “lift hand ” and another as “look left ”,they could use the information to operate a machine . “this is not new ,” says John Chapin , a collaborator with the Duke researchers who works at the State University of New York Downstate Health Science Center in Brooklyn . “People have thought about it since the 1960s”

[13] But most researchers assumed that each type of movement was governed by a specific handful of the brain’s billions of neurons —the need to monitor the whole brain in order to find those few would make the successful decoding a practical impossibility . “If you wanted to have a robot arm move left ,” Chapin explain , “you would have to find that small set of neurons that would carry the command to move to the left ”. But you don’t know where those cells are in advance .

[14] Thus everything that was known at the time suggested that brain-machine interfaces were a fool’s errand .Everything , it turned out ,was wrong .

(1,145 words)

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