I'm not saying we'll never have something like this, but the "cut the cord and put it on top of the other cord" method described here seems massively, massively naive, like pre-enlightenment level medicine.
I'm not saying we'll never have something like this, but the "cut the cord and put it on top of the other cord" method described here seems massively, massively naive, like pre-enlightenment level medicine.
Are you saying that even if the connection is there, the brain can never learn to utilize it if it doesn't jibe with the way the brain "is"?
Basically each neuron in the spine is independent and really long so a local cut breaks connections several feet from the break because the cells die. You can't fix things because unlike fiber optics or cable each side does not line up even in the original person let alone someone else.
I'm not sure if we can say this with any level of certainty. If anything, the nature vs. nurture dichotomy could translate directly to hardware vs. software. What nature gives you is hardware, and what you learn is software.
It's like running Crysis, and having your video card's capability increase,
1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone...
I think it's more like installing Crysis, and having more of your hard drive devoted to Crysis than before.
I'm not a neuroscientist, but my understanding is that the changes were directly related to processing, not memory.
Not really. Well, only true in the sense that a PC has zero software, it's 100% hardware, because, after all, a magnetic disk or a SSD is hardware too.
It's not inconceivable that the brain could successfully send an action potential all the way from the cortex to the tip of the toe in a new body, but the 'rewiring' that would need to take place to make it happen in concert with the million other neurons (and many times that number in connections and networks) necessary for basic control or locomotion is simply not feasible on this scale.
Putting a new finger where an old finger was removed is hard enough, and the brain has enough trouble rewiring itself to make that halfway decent. Rewiring for a whole limb or body, to say nothing of all the viscera, I really just don't see happening without some kind of massive assistance on a nano level, stuff that's sci-fi for now.
Then as you mature, the myelin sheath starts to grow, which "locks in" the high frequency stuff it's already learned. By the time you're born you've lost the ability to learn about events that takes less than 3-4 ms to complete. By the time you're twenty, it will be at about 50ms. This is why people who start learning a sport at 3-4 years at most effectively have an insurmountable advantage.
This has all sorts of effects that you will recognize in a growing human being. Short-term memory starts using progressively longer frequency signals to store itself. Reaction speed for anything new goes down (reflexes, and trained behaviors learned earlier stay in force though). Your ability to reason about things far away massively increases (a 4 year old kid cannot plan more than 20 minutes or so ahead without adult help, which mostly consists of reminding them what they were doing every 10 minutes or so).
Furthermore the way your brain compresses signals is by distributing itself. There are small parts of your brain everywhere in your body, and several big blobs in your head. Every muscle has a cluster of neurons on it, and things like the heart, bigger muscles (like stomach muscles, biceps, triceps, ...) have large clusters on them. Those are clusters that do the same learning process as the rest of your brain, they're not preprogrammed. So your brain does not directly control your body, it negotiates what should be done with those local clusters. Because of this your body is able to have very short feedback loops controlling your muscles despite the fact that the decision process itself takes tens of milliseconds (and happens 1-2 meters away from the actual muscle). Now these clusters start out as blank as the rest of your brain, but they grow together, and they learn to communicate together. Different people send signals differently (well, the basic structure of the signal is the same, the semantic meaning, such as which muscle it affects, what timeframe it's talking about, ... is not). This is why if you connect a robot arm to a human, they cannot use it for fine motor control, even after months of practice, it improves to a pretty pathetic level, and just doesn't improve further (certainly not enough to write at normal size with it). If you want to be pedantic, there is more than one level of indirection. The first is the "brain region" -> spinal cord interface, and then every 15 cm or so in your spinal cord is another layer of control, and every point where neurons split up is another control point.
Here's a rather basic introduction : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_control#Sensorimotor_feed...
All this means that your brain's lower level body control is effectively a ROM by the time you've grown up, and it is very dependant on tiny variations in the length of neurons to various parts of your body. Every single human body has a custom protocol for controlling the muscles that's different from everyone else's (so it's not possible, like in the movies, to mount something on the spinal column and take over motor control). Connecting up a brain to a new body, assuming you can keep it stable until the person wakes up, will immediately lead to a seizure (because the brain will be sending wrong signals to the heart), extremely rapid breathing, violent convulsions, ... until the patient is dead.
In order to do this surgery, they had to cut a piece of her spine and in the process cut some nerve pathways. Post surgery, she still has trouble walking and other general motor skills. The brain is the software and hardware, any changes to it will alter its software.
I wonder about that. I can see healing and plasticity going a very long way over time, but intuition is telling me there's not enough plasticity in the wiring of critical autonomic functions.