ARTIFICIAL HEARTS AND MINDS
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Unfortunately science-fiction stories almost always reflect our darkest fears: a monster coming up out of a primordial ooze to threaten us. Or we may think of the story of an artificial heart implanted in a loving little girl that allows the child to function as a cheerful family member while secretly plotting to destroy dad, mom, her brother, and the family pets. Then the lovely child moves into an orphanage to continue her rampage.
This is the kind of tale that filled the imaginations of science-fiction writers 20 or 30 years ago when scientists first started serious work on creating an artificial heart. Now AbioCor, a company based in Massachusetts, says it has come up with one--the world's first completely self-contained replacement heart.
Perhaps sometime soon artificial hearts will be realities for many who suffer heart failure even if not for the loving little girl in our horror fantasy. Recent discoveries, however, have opened the doorway for a more intriguing science-fiction tale. What about a replacement brain? Think of it . . . but why always think of science fiction in terms of danger and fear? What if that thing from the primordial ooze brought us some fantastic new discovery unlike anything we've ever imagined? Why not imagine an artificial brain that is programmed to do good things and make us happier?
Here at Soul Vibrations Digital Universe we'd love to have a story like that. If one of our visitors can imagine such a story then please get in touch. It doesn't have to be a fairy tale. A dramatic plot conflict could arise when the law of unintended consequences start popping up all over the place. Happiness can get a person into a lot of unintended trouble in the world today.
Implanting an entire organ is something that is done with the heart, but doing it for an entire brain is still very far away. Instead of a replacement brain the usual science-fiction scenario involves the implantation of a silicone chip into an already functioning human brain.
This is exactly what is happening in real life--the world's first artificial silicon chip to replace a part of the brain, the part that is important for learning and memory (the hippocampus), started a test-phase with lab animals in early 2003. The effort is being made by a team of scientists lead by Theodore Berger of the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles.
"We are developing a VLSI-based, biomimetic device that can bi-directionally communicate, and functionally interact with, the afferents and efferents of the hippocampus (or a subregion of the hippocampus)," says the web site of the Center for Neural Engineering at USC. This is how college professors say: "We're developing a silicon chip that can affect and be affected by messages from the subregion of the brain that creates memories."
In addition to reading positive stories about the insertion of memory chips into human brains, you might want to create a good science-fiction plot of your own. Nothing is likely to spark you imagination more than: Heaven in a Chip: Fuzzy Visions of Society and Science in the Digital Age by Bart Kosko, Ph.D.But anyway, back in the real world, Theodore Berger and his team will be working with lab rats and then monkeys for up to ten years, and "it is not unreasonable to think that in 15 to 20 years such a chip could help, to some degree, a patient who suffered from hippocampal damage."
When a brain chip is ready it will first be used in humans in areas of the brain damaged as a result of head trauma, stroke, epilepsy and neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer's disease.
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Science & Healing
