Birth of the iHead?

There's been a huge upsurge in cool prosthetic technology recently, thanks to a mysterious increase in the number of first world otherwise-healthy citizens who are suddenly stumbling around the place missing a limb or two. But while advances like bluetooth-controlled legs are undeniably awesome, they're only half of the equation needed before the Detroit crime rate is cut by someone part man, part machine but All Cop. Mechanical parts and squishy human brains have a bit of dysfunctional relationship at the moment - while machines can learn how to interpret the desires of twitching muscles, the gooey nervous system tends to get annoyed or dead when the machine tries to inject signals back.

Which makes new surgery performed at the Ohio State University Medical Center all the more exciting. Surgeons have implanted tiny electrodes which successfully connected with the brainstems of people whose auditory nerve connections had lost a fight against neurofibromastosis. These electrodes transmit signals from a microphone in the ear and provide a sense of hearing. The sounds delivered to the brain don't exactly match the originals, but give people the choice between "slightly imperfect sounds" and "total science forever" and they'd have to be the most perfectionist librarian in the world to choose the latter.

The treatment has already helped five hundred patients, but the landmark in machine-mind interfacing heralds a new step in evolution. The ability to connect external devices to the inputs of the brain means we can not only replace missing senses, but in time develop fully integrated prosthetic (or additional) limbs or even engineer entirely new senses. At the moment the focus is on repair and replacement, where medical and research grants can fund the research. When the time is right expect a surge of commercially-financed advnaces when the "iHead" allows you total access to music at any time (and the RIAA starts suing people for even thinking of copyrighted music).

After that point, with the technology loose, well developed and well funded, expect the most incredible things to start happening.

Posted by Luke McKinney.

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