Introduction

Salt Lake City
University of Utah
C. What of the Science and Culture?
	David:	OK, last subject area. These are again a couple of slightly challenging ideas. I don't know if you've read Thomas Kuhn - 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions'. He wrote a book in the 60s, which was basically about the fact that social, economic and political issues have had a far greater influence on the progress of scientific research than is generally admitted by the scientific community themselves.
	Prof Norman:	It's true.
	David:	I think it's a given nowadays. It's seeped though - people may not have heard of Thomas Kuhn but the ideas have got through.
	Prof Norman:	Yeah, right. It's just reality, I think.
	David:	Given that DARPA are interested in CalTech's work on using the Utah array to develop exoskeleton weapons systems and what we've been talking about with this Mach 1 thing, for fighter pilots - pending the replacement of your array with a non-invasive neuro-mechanical response interface, but no doubt incorporating what has been learnt through research using the implanted array - do you fear that in the end, despite the many potential advantageous and beneficial applications of your work, history may remember your work as a crucial step toward the first thought-weapon.

	Prof Norman:	No. I know that, as you've described, DARPA is definitely against implanting chips in people and the reason they're afraid of this is if in fact there's any sense in enemies of the United States that there are chips implanted in people's heads - a pilot who is shot down or an infantryman who is caught, will immediately go through neuro-surgery while they take this chip out, and they just don't wanna have that threat, to their infantrymen and their pilots and whatever. So I don't think that's ever gonna happen, so I don't think we need to worry about that, and the idea of using external sensing systems - you need to understand the technology a bit better than perhaps you do - the reason that's not gonna happen, I don't believe, really, is 2 things: you need, in order to do something - when I'm doing this [moves arm] there is not one neuron in my brain which starts to fire. Not one. There's probably 20,000 neurons, which are firing when I do this. Now I can listen to 16 of those neurons and I can start to get a signature whenever I do this which is going to be different than when I do this [moves other arm.] But, in order to distinguish this from this, I'd need probably at least 16 or 20 or 50 or even 500 neurons, listening to 500 neurons… So when you're putting any kind of sensing system on the - external to the brain, you don't have any kind of selectivity of this firing pattern. You've got this thing called a skull which is big sort of low-pass filter of spatial information. So individual firing patterns get spread out dramatically and attenuated dramatically. Now you can also use magneto-encephalography - these are superr-conducting little coils that measure magnetic currents inside your head. We have a system over here at the Uni of Utah - Center for Advanced Medical Technologies - which has one of these devices which can measure little small electric currents which are associated with thoughts in your brain. Now this is a huge device. It looks like a hairdryer on a scale of about 10 - this gigantic thing that fits over your head which is just a gigantic huge thing. You stick your head inside this thing and you can actually get small little currents that are flowing associated with certain areas so if you're doing visual sorts of tasks you get currents excited over in this region [points to area of skull], if you're doing sort of auditory tasks you get sort of firing in this area [another area], if you're doing motor tasks you get firing in this area. And so you could do some sort of global mapping, but you can't do high-resolution mapping. And so you wouldn't be able to recognise the difference between this and this [moving different arms in different ways] or whatever, with this kind of a technology. And it's a huge technology to start with. Now they are making progress in these areas but I don't ever see you getting down to the resolution of individual neurons, which is what - the implant system gives you that capability, you can actually listen to individual neurons there, groups of individual neurons. That's what makes control possible.
	David:	So the suggestion is that the implants are here to stay, they won't be able to replace them.
	Prof Norman:	Yeah, I don't believe so. Now in fact - what I am hoping. Well I think the implants will be here to stay because they will provide a repertoire of therapeutic approaches to problems of the nervous system - but it's only one branch of therapeutic approaches. There's pharmacological approaches, there will be genetic approaches, there will tissue engineered approaches, there's a whole range of biological approaches to solving problems in the nervous system which don't exist today, just as ours don't really exist today either, which will give a neuro-surgeon, or a neurologist, a whole suite of tools to sort of look at, and say well with this particular problem which tool do I wanna use? So I think that this is not going to be an exclusive solution to the problem in the nervous system but its one of many. So I think that these will be here to stay but I look forward to our understanding of the biological system enhancing to the point where we can actually do more biological solutions than these human engineered solutions. I mean, as sophisticated as our system is I still think it's kind of a band-aid solution and I'm not that proud of it. I mean it's the best that we've got today, perhaps it's the best that we're gonna have for the next 5-10years, 20years maybe. Until the biological solutions get solved. And there'll be certain problems where these will be the only approaches, maybe, like traumatic injury or something like that - shotgun blast to the face, the eyes are completely shot and there's no way you can regenerate eyes perhaps for another 200 years. So in those cases an implant in the visual part of the brain to provide some sight restoration might be the only recourse available. But there are some genetic diseases that maybe a genetic solution could maybe obviate the need for an implant system. Because you could get in there early, solve the problem genetically, and there's never gonna be a problem. But there's some problems that we'll never be able to deal with. Aging. There's a pathology that I', not sure we'll ever wanna deal with. Do we want everybody to live for ever? I don't know what the story there is.
	David:	That's very interesting. One of the main reasons why I'm doing this research is cause the area I'm studying is peopled with writers who have many paranoias, and one of the things I wanted to do was actually to bring it down to earth a bit.
	Prof Norman:	OK yeah - well it's happened recently. [fetches article on Stevie Wonder.] This deal about artificial vision. Stevie Wonder, you know who Stevie Wonder is?
	David:	Yeah I do indeed.
	Prof Norman:	OK. He's blind- he's been blind since birth, and he went to John's Hopkins who was doing a retinal implant program, and John's Hopkins went nuts over this and they did PR in spades, and so this whole notion about will Stevie Wonder ever see raises all kinds of problems. And then, in response to that, there's a guy in upstate New York named Bildo Bell, who originally was here at the Uni of Utah, and he created an artificial vision system, and this picture actually appeared on the press - in a much bigger version - he actually sent this picture out to all the lay media - in a PR sort of self-promotion attempt. Now this picture, I think, did a lot more damage than it did good.
	David:	I can imagine.
	Prof Norman:	And you talk about a cyborg concept - look at this garden hose plugged into this guy's brain - doesn't look good.
	David:	As Dr. Garcia would put it - 'kloogy'.
	Prof Norman:	Exactly, well it is kloogy - but it also looks like a - it's a Frankenstein sort of image. And he actually showed that image to the world. Now I think that this raises a different issue which maybe we can talk about in a few minutes and that is - what kind of an implant system would people be willing to accept. And I don't think people would even be willing to consider anything as ridiculous as this. So what needs to be done is that you need to develop an implant system that is completely totally self-contained and powered through a wireless telemetry link. I mean that technology exists - wireless systems are getting quite spectacular now [holds mobile up] and people have built chips that can send signals over two or three miles. To send signals over two or three inches is a piece of cake. Not a piece of cake, but - we're working on that ourselves. But it's not trivial, but people have worked on systems like that. So one could imagine implant systems that were totally self-contained, and yeas you do a small bore hole here you do an implant, you put the skull back, suture the skin up and the person would look perfectly normal. There wouldn't be this sort of cyborg image. And I think that's an important issue - for this technology : There's two things that have to happen for this technology to really win: the two things are: It has to work - flawlessly. For long periods of time. That's a real challenge, right there. That's the biggest challenge. People are trying to figure out how to make it work

	David:	Once you put it in you can't be going back to replace it every ten years
	Prof Norman:	That's the real problem. Exactly, it's gotta work for decades. And how many systems work for decades? Very few. So that's a real problem. And the second problem is that it has to be cosmetically appealing, so if you implant something the person has to look like a perfectly normal person. Two big challenges. And right now we're not worrying about, necessarily, the wireless power and things like that, because we don't know if we can actually make things work the way we want them to work - yet.
	David:	But down the road when you're more confident about it working design is going to be a very important part of it.
	Prof Norman:	For sure. Now the last thing we could discuss, possibly - I don't know if you have anything else on your agenda. The last thing is - an ethical issue which we're really trying deal with ourselves. We're about to enter human experimentation here. Yeah - we haven't done it yet. And we have a neuro-surgeon in place to do our work. And we have an institutional review boards - these are sort of governing bodies at universities, they're composed of scientists, lay people, priests, whatever, just a whole spectrum of people. So we're positioned to start working with humans. Now we're gonna be very cautious about this. And we're doing it, I think, in a very responsible fashion. We're certainly not going to the press and talking to the press about what we're doing.
	David:	Yeah the guy from CalTech was quite clear that there's none of this research on his website because of the animal rights lobby.
	Prof Norman:	No. There're a real problem out there - we have less of a problem here. Utah is sort of - frontier out here, they go out and they shoot dear, and they bears and shoot everything, they shoot people here! There is a bit more of an animal rights movement that's happening here but compared to other places - England in particular - it's not a problem here yet. Anyway. The first experiments we're gonna be doing is in tissue which is gonna be resected normally. The tissue which is gonna be resected is - these are temporal lobe-epilepsy patients. These people seize every half-hour or every 45 minutes. Their life is hell - it's constant seizures. And they're refractory to pharmacological intervention - drugs don't do anything to these seizures. And the only way you can solve this problem - and I don't know how this was figured out, years ago, was they go in and they actually cut a piece of the temporal lobe out. Epilepsy starts in the temporal lobe, and it spreads everywhere. And if you go into the temporal lobe and you cut this piece of the temporal lobe out, then in fact the seizure incidence and severity can be considerably reduced or eliminated. So this is actually somewhat routinely done. Er here at the university they probably do 15 or 20 temporal lobe resections every year. So this human subject is gonna be undergoing neuro-surgery anyway. So we're gonna be implanting into these tissues for a half hour or an hour and listening to neurons, try and stimulate neurons, and then the tissue will be resected. We wanna make sure that we can implant these things safely that it doesn't any consequences to the implantation.
	David:	You'll be piggy-backing something that's going on already.
	Prof Norman:	Yeah exactly - so you're gonna cut a hole in a guy's head, but that's gonna happen anyway. And so once we're quite confident that we can do this safely and efficaciously then we're gonna start thinking about implanting blind individuals. That's still quite a ways away, that's probably two, three years away, something like that. Now the ethical question comes in. What kind of a system should you be implanting in the first blind person that you're going to implant? In other words - before we implant something into a blind person, should we have system which is completely functional - should we give him eye glasses with a camera on it, the processing electronics to take the signals, process them somehow, and send them down to the implant, and stuff - so it's a completely funtioning system - so that in fact, if he goes through this process, he can in fact maybe use it. But right now we don't know what the design specifications for an optode array or a stimulation paradigm should be.
	David:	You've got to do the research first. So you need a guinea pig.
	Prof Norman:	Yeah that's right - he's a real guinea pig. Now what we've tried to do, is to produce an implant system, I don't know we haven't resolved this one yet, but I think what we're gonna do is try to produce an implant system which will probably have a connector on it so there's gonna be this kind of Frankenstein concept - which I don't like - but the connector itself might have a little telemetry capability so there won't be this big garden hose of wires coming out, so it'll be a very delicate little wire that comes out. Or maybe not even a wire at all, we haven't decided yet, but the reason we don't want to put the electonics directly on the implant is because we don't have the electronics yet we can't design the electronics until we've done some preliminary experiments. So you can see there are some ethical dilemmas here - really ethical dilemmas, tough ones. And I just don't know -we have quite resolved these issues yet. If we wait to do an implant until we have a completely functional system - but if in fact - we're talking about a visual system at this point, partial sight for a blind person - why develop all this hardware, spend millions of dollars to develop all this hardware, if in fact the premise, which is that patterned electrical stimulation of the visual cortex produces discriminatable pattern percepts, proves not to be true. Then you've wasted millions of dollars and you've wasted a lot of time - when you could in fact out this information earlier on just through a simple sort of hard-wired system rather than telemetered system. Also the telemetry system itself decreases the reliability of the system - it's another level of signal processing that has to be done, another opportunity for device failure.

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