Thanks Gavin! I’ve added Beyond Boundaries to my reading list.
The potential connection between BCI and self-recognition is fascinating. Offhand, do you know any references for insect neural interface studies that might be comparable to the monkey example you describe?
The example that first springs to mind is the work of Kanzaki’s group who study odour plume tracking in silk moths. They have made robots controlled by both a moths walking action (also a movie) and also by its measured neural activity. However, when doing electrophysiology on insects it is common to completely wax their body in place and amputate their legs/wings to minimize electrical noise caused by muscle movement (which they did in the moth case). I’d forgotten this, and it does make it a bit harder for insects to demonstrate self-awareness in a similar way to the monkeys. Still, it’s recently become more common to make recordings from actively behaving insects, as active behaviour has been found to modulate many neural responses (such as optic lobe processing of visual motion), so some more relevant examples might have been published recently.
Thanks Gavin! I’ve added Beyond Boundaries to my reading list.
The potential connection between BCI and self-recognition is fascinating. Offhand, do you know any references for insect neural interface studies that might be comparable to the monkey example you describe?
The example that first springs to mind is the work of Kanzaki’s group who study odour plume tracking in silk moths. They have made robots controlled by both a moths walking action (also a movie) and also by its measured neural activity. However, when doing electrophysiology on insects it is common to completely wax their body in place and amputate their legs/wings to minimize electrical noise caused by muscle movement (which they did in the moth case). I’d forgotten this, and it does make it a bit harder for insects to demonstrate self-awareness in a similar way to the monkeys. Still, it’s recently become more common to make recordings from actively behaving insects, as active behaviour has been found to modulate many neural responses (such as optic lobe processing of visual motion), so some more relevant examples might have been published recently.