From: jtm@cs.cornell.edu (Jan Thomas Miksovsky)
Subject: Brain/Environment "bottleneck"
Date: 28 Feb 90 18:12:59 GMT
Message-ID: <2193@milton.acs.washington.edu>
Organization: Cornell Univ. CS Dept, Ithaca NY


I keep hearing things like, "Won't it be great when we have a direct 
neuron-level interface to a digital system so that we won't be slowed 
down by things like typing."  But how wide would the bandwidth between 
our minds and a virtual reality system really be if there were no 
"bottlenecks" like hands and keyboards?

Think for a minute about how fast you can type or manipulate a mouse 
when you're processing at top speed.  When I'm really flying, I can keep 
maybe eight or ten operations in my Mac's buffer: I'm pounding away on 
command keys, and dialog boxes that begin to pop up on the screen are 
blown away before they can ever be completely drawn.  I can keep this up 
for maybe a minute or so; then I have to step back and figure out what 
I'm going to do next.

If we could directly manipulate the computer with neuron pulses, yeah, 
sure, we could cruise along at light-speed.  But if we're performing any 
kind of analytical task, wouldn't we still be limited by the speed of 
our consciousness "processor"?  We might think something like, "Load up 
the simulation of the house I'm building," and even if WHAM the 
simulation appears right away, it's going to take us a second or two to 
figure how we next want to manipulate the environment.

The real speedup will probably occur in tasks that are repeated so 
often, and learned so well, that conscious thought isn't required.  
Think about when you play some sport that you're good at: balls and 
sticks or whatever are flying around, and you can just move around, 
reacting to the environment without having to spend a lot of high-level 
processing time considering your next move.

                              *  *  *  *  *

A related issue:  What research has been done in this area?  There's 
been some talk on the net recently about research involving direct 
stimulating the visual processing areas of the brain to provide blind 
people with sight.  Does the opposite work -- with prosthetic limbs, for 
instance... Can brains learn to trigger neurons in order to activate a 
foreign object?

-- 

Jan Miksovsky                                ...uunet!applelink.apple.com!D4710