Nervous Yet?
The hairs on the back of your neck stick up in suspicion. You’re positive someone is trailing your steps and quicken your pace. Just to confirm the truth you turn around to view emptiness hanging behind you. Confused, you move forward. A few steps more and you’re sure someone is attacking on your left. You turn to the right and escape only to discover the perpetrator isn’t there. Where is this mysterious figure?
What if this person doesn’t exist and an outside signal is affecting your nerves. Remote influences is reality for some cockroaches. In August 2012 researchers at North Carolina State University presented strong evidence to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) of remote control opportunities in living insects. For instance by making cockroaches believe there were predators approaching from behind the cockroaches speed up in a forward direction. The research group was able to extend this control of movement into left and right as well.
The nervous system, which relays information throughout the body through electrical signals, is the reason for such control. From a networks perspective imagine the uninfluenced nervous system of the cockroach as a balanced and stable network, which is seen below in the image below:
Consider then neural network of the cockroach starts in the balanced state of the top left hand corner. When the researchers choose to control the cockroach they introduce imbalance into the network by controlling . They do this by stimulating one or more nodes in the network to change the signal being sent. Assuming only one node has been altered, the cockroach’s neural network then moves to the state in the left hand bottom corner of the image. As a result the cockroach attempts to move to what it perceives is a safer place restore balance to its network. This brings the network back to the initial state which is more natural. Keeping the cockroach in a unbalanced state is key to continuous control over its system. In the future this technology can be extended to other beings, such as humans.
That’s the part that makes me nervous.
Source: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-09/08/cyborg-cockroaches