high tech

The big event last weekend was the arrival of a large box from Amazon:

That's right: we finally committed to buying a sleek LED TV, to replace our old bulky CRT model. It's been great so far for our weekly Netflix rental - and over-the-air HD means we can actually watch football again!

We also got a DVD player that allows for quick connections to Netflix instant selections. We tested it out by watching "Surrogates", a sci-fi movie that came out last year. Gotta love the simple access to tons of movies, instantly!

And speaking of high tech, I could not help but exclaim excitedly at the open scene of the movie that featured a monkey controlling a robot arm with his thoughts. "That's my research!!!!"* Steve is well aware of this, but still, it was a thrill to see it on the big screen!

The movie itself was entertaining enough but I probably found it even more interesting than most people would, because for once, a science fiction movie was featuring science that I've studied in a lot of detail. Of course, Hollywood conjectured that this research, meant to help people with spinal cord injury regain control of their limbs or to give amputee patients more realistic prosthetic devices, would lead to legions of human-like robots that people use as "surrogates" for themselves - controlled through this technology by humans who basically sit at home in their PJs all day, while making these robots go about all the tasks of every-day life.

Made for an interesting story line, and it's always a fun exercise to think about possibilities of research, one day down the road. I don't think that having surrogates hooked up to us is the answer to society's problems, and think it would be quite an abuse of this technology. Luckily, being in the field, I have first-hand knowledge of just how slow this type of science progresses.... it's highly unlikely that this would happen in our lifetime. Brain science is extremely complex; scientists have spent decades trying to decode what goes on inside peoples' heads, and we still don't understand how it works very well at all! It's like this last panel of this PhD comic~

(It's funny to me because it's so true ~ my lab uses a very simple robot for experiments, and it has SO many quirks and bugs and breaks at an annoying frequency. And yes, that frequency definitely increases when the boss comes into the lab!)

Anyway for now we are feeling all high-tech at home with our fancy TV! And hurray for science in the media, even if it's the exaggerated Hollywood version!


*nerdy side-note: I have not actually done monkey research. My graduate research was mostly computational, and involved developing mathematical techniques to analyze the signals you would get from these brain recordings for controlling arm reaching. I tested out the computational techniques first using signals generated from computer simulations,  and later on some data that was recorded from muscle activity from human subjects who performed actual arm reaching movements. That's how preliminary all this research is ~  the processing and calculations that go into this work are not easy, and need to be figured out before it gets to the level of actual control in humans!