My attention was grabbed by an article in New Scientist, which revealed that experiments were being done in which a robot was controlled by thought alone. The human subject in a laboratory was wired to a functional MRI (fMRI) scanner, which read his intentions according to which parts of the brain cortex were lit up (in stimulation). This notional action was then relayed as instructions to a robot, thousands of kilometres away, which made the movement that the lab experimenter was thinking about.

Shades of the Avatar movie!

We all know we are on the brink of the era in which we can control computers by means of our thoughts; I even wrote about it in my 1999 best-selling book Virtual Medicine. Well, that day is come…

Moreover, we may soon reach a time when we can use a computer-controlled surrogate body to trek across the Sahara, shoot the rapids in the Grand Canyon, have dinner in Paris with a friend and even go to the moon.

This beats “virtual reality” to Hell and back!

True Embodiment

Tele-operated robots, those that can be remotely controlled by a human, have been around for decades.

This new approach goes way beyond that. What was truly remarkable about this experiment was that the human subject began to feel he actually WAS the robot. He felt it was part of himself. We call that embodiment.

Let’s learn more:

Functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, is a technique for measuring brain activity. It works by detecting the changes in blood flow that occur in response to neural activity – when a brain area is more active it consumes more oxygen and to meet this increased demand blood flow increases to the active area. fMRI can be used to produce activation maps showing which parts of the brain are involved in a particular mental process. Thought activation can be tied to the intention to make certain movements.

Researchers from the Advanced Virtuality Lab at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel, and colleagues took a student, Tirosh Shapira, through several training stages in which he attempted to direct a virtual avatar by thinking of moving his left or right hand or his legs. The fMRI scanner tracked Shapira’s brain activity and, using this the team was able to translate his intentions into computer signals.

The commands were then sent via an internet connection to a small robot at the Béziers Technology Institute in France, over 3 thousand kilometres away. When Shapira thought of raising his right arm, the robot would raise its right arm. Imagining moving his legs made the robot walk forward.

The set-up allowed Shapira to control the robot in near real time with his thoughts, while a camera on the robot’s head allowed him to see from the robot’s perspective.

Shapira soon learned to move the robot around freely. He could navigate a room, follow a person and even search for objects placed somewhere in the room.

Being An Avatar

It’s amazingly engaging, Shapira tells us. He really felt he was there, moving around. There was a need to concentrate, obviously, and he had to calculate a few steps in advance because there’s a small delay between thinking of a movement and it actually happening. But once you master that, it feels like being a puppet master.

To create a left turn, right turn or leg movements, Shapira found it helpful to think about very specific actions. This enabled the computer to more easily recognise the activated areas of his brain. “I imagined turning the knob of a faucet with my right hand and a gear with my left hand,” he reported. “It worked best when I thought about everything in really vivid detail, like what the faucet felt like to touch.”

To test the extent of Shapira’s feelings of embodiment, the researchers surprised him with a mirror. “I turned around and they’d put a mirror in front of me,” he says. He caught the first glance of his reflection. “I thought, ‘oh I’m so cute, I have blue eyes’, not ‘that robot is cute’. It was amazing.”

At one point the connection failed and one of the researchers picked the robot up to see what the problem was; Shapira had the feeling of being grabbed in person and wanted to shout “Hey, put me down!”

By this stage he was “being” the robot. That’s what we mean by embodiment.

Fooling The Brain

Apparently, the brain is very easily fooled into incorporating an external entity as its own. Over a decade ago, psychologists discovered that they could convince people that a rubber hand was their own just by putting it on a table in front of them and stroking it in the same way as their real hand.

It’s only a matter of time before scientists figure out clever add-ons, like stimulating muscles to create the sensation of movement. Smell, sight, sound and the sensation of moving one’s muscles will all add to the illusion. Indeed, one may be wrong to call it an illusion.

I am already asking myself are we merely embodied in our current flesh, through much the same delusion as these tests are showing?

I think so. I am not a body; I am a conscious entity. Experiences such as OBEs convince us that consciousness itself is independent of the physical body. This new discovery goes one step beyond that.

It could be that consciousness is wherever it considers itself to be and that even an avatar body makes a very convenient peg on which to hang our awareness.

As the robot avatars get more sophisticated, the sense of embodiment will grow until it is spooky real. Replacing the current robot with the HRP-4, made by Kawada Industries in Japan, will increase the feeling of embodiment as it is roughly the height of an adult human and has a more stable and dynamic walk.

Massimo Bergamasco, Antonio Frisoli and their team at the Perceptual Robotics Laboratory in Pisa, Italy, are investigating how to add sensations by making use of a well- known sensory illusion in which vibrations applied to tendons evoke the feeling of movement.

Health Applications

One of the outstanding possibilities of this technology could be solving the problem of patients who are locked in. These unfortunate individuals are almost totally paralyzed and helpless, yet perfectly aware and wide-awake conscious. They are a living identity which is physically trapped or, literally, “locked in” to a worthless body, which will never recover its function.

Now there is the possibility of re-joining life in a mechanical surrogate body. And early results suggest it won’t be too bad an experience. At least nothing like the misery so aptly and movingly described by Jean-Dominic Bauby, the celebrated former editor of Elle magazine, who was himself “locked in”, after a disastrous cerebral accident. He wrote a remarkable book (by blinking his left eye) about how it felt, called The Butterfly and The Diving Bell. The book was later made into a movie of the same title.

Researchers, along with Rafael Malach’s group at the Weizmann Institute of Science, in Rehovot, Israel, hope to collaborate with groups such as Adrian Owen’s at the University of Western Ontario in Canada to test their surrogate on people who are paralyzed or locked in.

Eventually, electroencephalogram (EEG) technology, which uses electrodes attached to the scalp to record electrical activity in the brain, is likely to prove more practical than fMRI. It is cheaper and more comfortable to use for extended periods of time but is not yet as sensitive as fMRI scanning.

Is There A Downside?

If it is not immediately clear who is controlling the robot, it could be extremely frustrating for someone interacting with it, says Leila Takayama at Willow Garage, a robotics company in California, who has studied the impact that telepresence robots have in the workplace.

“It’s a bit like when you share your Skype video feed with someone, but they don’t share theirs with you,” she says.

To some of us, this avatar effect could seem like a computer virus: something that got into your system and was clearly hacked by some remote intelligence—but you would very likely not know who was behind it! You would not be directly interacting with a human.

So what “rights” would the avatar have?

Amusing Legal Issues

It is likely that a number of legal issues will arise and may even need special “avatar laws”!

If a surrogate were kicked in the street and broken, it’s the same as damaging someone’s property, says Noel Sharkey, a roboticist at the University of Sheffield in the UK.

But if the avatar was really passing on sensation and presence to an invisibly human being, would that not be the same as assault? Early results suggest it would feel like an assault or attack.

Extraterrestrial Avatars?

This result answers an important question about life on distant planets. Currently SETI (the Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is sweeping the heavens looking for carbon-based life forms. They are willing to consider other possible life modalities, like silicon-based, maybe. But they are essentially looking for life.

But I doubt anyone there has thought of the possibility of intelligence in mechanical bodies! Yet it could be so, as we have seen. The conscious intelligence embodied in a mechanical doll might be at least as intelligent as a human; maybe more so.

I also have something strange to report, which will amaze you in this context: some people have long-ago memories of living in robotic or mechanical bodies (sometimes called doll bodies). Obviously, these were found on distant worlds.

Yet these memories are as fiercely defended as “real” past life memories.

There would need to be life forms somewhere back down the line, to start up doll bodies. But once they exist (apart from issues of maintenance), it seems that any robot creature could be grabbed by a conscious entity and used as “home”, in much the same way that a hermit crab seizes a shell and lives in it.

These are truly mind-boggling revelations.

[SOURCE: Embody A Robot With Your Mind, New Scientist, 23^rd July 2012, p. 19]