Volume 2, Issue 4 
4th Quarter, 2007


Upgrading Humans - Technical Realities and New Morals

Kevin Warwick, Ph.D.

Page 4 of 5

I cannot see why we could not have infrared.  After all, your television set has an infrared sense, surely you feel a little bit jealous that you don't have that.

Why not have for yourself an ultraviolet sense?  Well, go for it.  X-ray is the one perhaps you remember from an old Ray Milland film, “The Man with X-Ray Eyes”.  Well, before too long we could all have X-ray senses. Why not?

Years ago I worked in the telecommunication industry, and communication has always been very, very important to me.  I think it is important to what we are as humans.  I really feel terrible that we are so pathetic at communicating, and can we improve? Well, why not?

I have the implant in my nervous system. Irena, my wife, had electrodes pushed into her nervous system, a process called microneurography [1], and we linked our nervous systems together.

image 9
Image 9

When I moved my hand, my motor neural signals were transmitted across into Irena's nervous system.  When she moved her hand, the other way, my brain actually received her neural pulses.  When she went, one, two, three, in terms of moving her hand, my brain received, one, two, three pulses.

What we actually achieved was a telegraphic [2] form of communication, directly from nervous system to nervous system.  Which is like a telephone system, if you like, but missing out the interface of giving the signals by your mouth into the microphone, converting them from electro-chemical signals to mechanical pressure waves, and then back to electrical signals, which seems such a laborious process, why not stay with electrical signals?

That is what we were doing.  It is the first step really on a form of communicating ultimately directly from brain-to-brain.  That is where my main focus of research is now, looking at the possibilities of communicating directly from brain-to-brain, both human-to-machine and then back the other way, but also human-to-human.

I think it will take us into a completely new world with lots of exciting possibilities for me.  Not just from a therapeutic point of view but from an enhancement point of view.  A little bit matrixy, if you like, when we look at machines sending signals directly into the brain of a human, but from a communications point of view, tremendously exciting that in the future we will be able to send signals, graphical pictures maybe, who knows where we can stop.  It is a very exciting future with this type of technology linking human brains and machine brains together.

 

Footnotes

1. Microneurography is a method to record the traffic of impulses in human nerves with percutaneously inserted needle electrodes.
www.neurofys.uu.se/v2/index.php?lnk=research/micron  October 12, 2007 5:41PM EST

2. Telegraphy is the long-distance transmission of written messages without physical transport of letters, originally by changing something that could be observed from a distance (optical telegraphy). Radiotelegraphy or wireless telegraphy transmits messages using radio. Telegraphy includes recent forms of data transmission such as fax, email, and computer networks in general.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegraphy  October 12, 2007 5:44PM EST

 

 

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