How Do You Feel What You Can't Touch? Scientists Crack the Nerve CodeSydney Morning Herald/Liam Mannix (Dec 12)
This is a major discovery. It will help people who have lost their limbs, and nerve function restore function via prosthetic limbs. It may make it possible to replay things people feel.
Will "The Matrix" be far behind? (Just kidding)
"The electrode captures the signals from the nerves, which look like tiny electrical spikes. Nerves send data in binary – either a ‘spike’ or nothing. The data is encoded in the frequency of the spikes - spike-code, it's called.
“The code is complex, very very complex,” says Dr Birznieks – too complex for a human to ever break. So the team feeds it into an artificial intelligence which is trained to break encryption.
And it worked.
After taking seven years to confirm their findings, Dr Birznieks and colleague Dr Richard Vickery published a paper in Current Biology in 2017, using their data to show the timing between the spikes also contained information.
"People always thought for decades that nerves just respond to the amount of stimulation by the amount they fire,” says Professor Anthony Burkitt, a leading researcher at the NeuroEngineering Laboratory at the University of Melbourne.
“What we now have discovered is there is information encoded in this very fine timing.”
Evesdropping on nerve signals is amazing. But even better is sending your own nerve signals – and the lab can do that as well.
They use a special device capable of very rapid movement. It taps out a code on a volunteer’s finger – each tap coinciding to a spike in the spike-code.
Rather than feeling repeated taps from the machine, the volunteers felt whatever the code was telling them to feel. So far, this technique only works for simple stimuli – but one day, the team hopes to find ways of simulating all sorts of sensations using the spike-codes.
"We can now recreate these spike codes - or design our own - as we wish," says Dr Birznieks."
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