Monkey controls robot with its thoughts

There’s an astonishing story in the Times today about a monkey, Idoya, who has electrodes implanted in her brain. The electrodes are able to pick up on the activity that controls Idoya’s legs, and the signals are then transmitted to a computer and ultimately to a robot capable of walking. Got all that?

So Idoya walks on a treadmill and — thousands of miles away in Japan — a robot walks in step with her. Idoya can see the robot walking on a computer screen as she pounds the treadmill. Got that?

Then, Idoya’s treadmill is stopped. And the robot keeps walking, because Idoya is thinking about making the robot walk. Wow!

The implications for this are absolutely staggering, especially in terms of its applications to human disability. (Plus, robots and monkeys working together would make a great Sci Fi movie).

All this reminds me of some of the reasons I got interested in Buddhism. When I was at high school and studying science I realized that the signals going along nerves from, say, your eye to your brain are exactly the same as the signals that are going along your nerves between your ears and your brain. Ditto for the other senses.

So the sense organs are different. The experiences in the brain are different. And yet in between the sense organs and the brain all senses are conveyed by the same little sparks of electricity flowing along nerves. So it occurred to me that our experience is created in the mind (or brain). The difference between the smell of a banana and the color of grass is produced in the mind. And we can never actually know what we’re sensing. We can never experience things directly — we can only experience the pictures, sounds, etc that are produced in the brain. If we had different brains we’d experience very differently. If we re-routed our nerves, say by taking olfactory nerves into the visual cortex, we’d see smells.

I can’t tell you how fascinating this was, to realize that we live in a “Matrix”-like illusion. That got me thinking about the nature of reality, the nature of perception, the way we construct experiences, and all that interesting stuff. I even predicted experiments exactly like the one involving Idoya (although I imagined the robot being on the Moon). And no monkeys were involved (or harmed).

(Anyway, I hope they’re nice to Idoya. After all, she’s a sentient being. And she can control 200 lb robots with her thoughts.)

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