It would be hard to come up with a nooze story goofier than this. Maybe even impossible.
Scientists Plan to Grow Neanderthal Brains and Install Them in Robots
Be the first on your block to get a crab-like little robot with a genuine Neanderthal brain! “What am I supposed to do with it?” you ask.
I dunno, Teach it to play Parchesi?
The fact that someone could even conceive of this shows the hubristic and foolhardy nature that some of these people possess. While it would be possible to keep some cells alive in a petri dish, sustaining an entire brain would, in itself, be quite an accomplishment. What none of these people has ever explained to my satisfaction would be how they propose to have the brain communicate with the machinery, and vice versa.
Computers can interact with machinery, using specialized equipment to convert signals into something that the machinery understands, such as a computer printer which is told what to print by the computer, or a computer mouse, which converts its movement over a surface into a signal the computer can understand and interpret. Fair enough, these are all electronic signals, being passed between electronic devices.
There are electrical signals in the brain, but anyone that thinks the brain’s activity it a series of 1s and 0s, such as a computer, has vastly misjudged the situation, and underestimated the complexity of the brain by many orders of magnitude.
Medical science has helped victims of seizure disorders with electrical stimulation of the brain, but this is far from being able to program the brain or to be able to harvest signals from the brain into machine-readable language. They can use PET scans for real-time analysis, but all this can show is areas of brain activity. For example, interacting with a beloved mate would “light up” certain areas of the brain, and interacting with a good friend might light up these same areas, but to a lesser degree, and a pleasant interaction with a clerk at a store might light up the same regions, but to an even lesser degree.
So yes, by having a PET scan running, you might be able to make a very crude map of how someone feels about another person, but that is a far cry from being able to break this down into specific thoughts. One might feel a bit cooler towards a close friend because of some transient situation; perhaps a miscommunication or irritation that the friend hasn’t been in touch, but once again, to extract any meaningful information would require continuous scanning, and a map of reactions to various people over a long period of time, just to discover that one is a bit miffed at their best friend, at that particular moment. It would be a lot easier to ask the person, and observe body language giveaways as to whether the answer is forthright.
There’s one more aspect to this, and that is the fact that brains are one part of your nervous system, and the peripheral nervous system is just as important. Ever get a sick feeling in the gut, when something bad happened? That’s a response which involves the neurons in the intestines, which is the second largest collection of neurons in the body.
We can do fine work, such as replacing the tiny screws in a pair of eyeglasses, because our fingertips send signals back to the brain, to supplement the eyes and any other senses involved. If we drop a tiny screw, we might hear it hit the floor (assuming it is a hard floor) and that’s another piece of information that the brain can’t collect on its own.
So to make the leap from some cells in a Petri dish, to an entire brain, being continuously sustained and nourished, and then connecting that brain to machinery in a meaningful manner, is a huge leap, and if they believe that they can blow past these challenges at their very will, they are quite mistaken.
I work with making computers talk to other computers, every work day. Some of the systems are astoundingly powerful and capable, but an infant mouse is far more capable than even the most complex of computers.
John Carradine to Woody Allen: “It’ll show those people who said I was mad!”
And exactly how do they know what Neanderthal brains are like? Even if they have a bit of DNA, brains are more than DNA and living organisms are more than brains. This reminds me of one of the things I objected to about the first Jurassic Park film — that the central character considered himself an expert on how velociraptors hunted. I asked the gentleman I saw the film with whether the velociraptors had left behind an operational manual by Raptor von Clausewitz. My friend started talking about archaeological bits and pieces, and I said, “In other words, they’re guessing.”
They’re ALWAYS, guessing about dinosaurs, because there aren’t any left alive. Some guesses are better than others. Prof. Henry Fairfield Osborne, once the director of the American Museum of Natural History,, was guilty of more than a few whoppers.
Too many scientists buy into the theory of evolution as if it is true, so they believe (pun intended) that if they can do something they have no moral restraint not to do it.
Ian Malcolm, in Jurassic Park: “You were so busy thinking if you could do it, you never thought if you should.”