Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Use EMG to Control Your Friends”.
Okay, so would you tell me your name and what you’re doing here at makercon, my name is greg gage and i’m the co-founder with tim marzullo of backyard brains. So how about like a 20-second rundown of backyard brains, uh, so back our brains? We create kind of graduate level neuroscience equipment, uh that is found in universities, and we do that for the general public and for amateurs and makers to be able to explore and make discoveries about the brain. So how does that tie in what i’m dying to know? How does that tie in to robo roach? So uh? That’S a really good question, so the the cyborg cockroach, the robo roach uh, is actually a it’s a model of the latest and greatest in, and i say that in a very discouraging way: uh the latest and greatest in neurotechnologies, for sort of treating parkinson’s disease and Treating like deafness with cochlear implants or deep brain stimulation, so both those are techniques. You take a little small current and you put it inside the brain. You make neurons fire.
The robo roach is actually the exact same thing: we’re putting a little bit of current inside the neurons inside the antennas, which got the cockroach to think it’s touching something and it moves in the contralateral direction. So in a very in a very real sense. When you’re learning about the robo, roach you’re, actually learning about the the most advanced treatments that we have uh for neurological disorders, so this is something that works in people too. It is works of people, so that’s exactly it.
So the if you were to uh look at someone when they uh have a cochlear implant. They go into the doctor’s office, they’re going to be adjusting these dials and settings uh to for the stimulator inside the brain inside the cochlea inside the ear. That’S sending the signals to the brain when a student works with the robo-roach, they have a very similar app settings and they they tweak the the current in the exact same way, that’s being done in the medical society, so they uh there’s a lot of analogies between The the cyborg cockroach and what’s happening in the medical field, so there’s some other fun ways that you can use this electro stimulation in people yeah, so actually uh. So with with the human brain.
The the way the brain communicates to the outside world is through muscles and so uh. Basically the way i’m talking to you, i’m gestating with my hands. I can slap you, but everything i do, that is an output of my brain has to come through the muscles, and so we have muscle spikerboxes, which is able to record from that output of the brain by recording the electromyogram as the emg signals that are coming From the brain out to the to the muscles, so they actually hit the muscles. The brain signal comes down, it’s a spike and it hits the neural junction muscle and it turns into this motor action potential.
We can actually amplify that and record that uh and then what you can do is that, once you record that uh we can put that into an arduino and then we can actually send that signal into another person’s arm to hysterical results, to hysterical results. Exactly um, and – and is this something that you are, that you’re sharing that you’re making it available for you absolutely yeah, so we actually have a uh. We call it the the human to human interface and it’s a uh open source device that you can hook up to one person and then control another one. So if you’ve ever had issues where people say you don’t just understand me anymore now, you now you have an invention that allows you to feel what someone else feels.
Have you seen anybody adapt or modify it to do something different, so i mean like uh. All of our experiments are kind of open open-ended, so we’ll we’ll come up like the robo-roach, for example, uh. The robo-roach was there just as a way to sort of teach you what i just told you about cochlear implants. Well, there are some high school students in new york that saw that the cockroach adapts over about 20. You know tries the cockroach will stop turning, and so the students were wondering why. Why did it stop turning, and so they did their own experiment? They actually put little blockers on the on the cockroach’s eyes, and then they did they redid the experiment with new new cockroaches, and they noticed that they didn’t adapt as quickly. It actually took them about three or four times longer, and so what they found was that it’s actually the sensory perception from the antennas with the eyes that cause there’s a disconnect there, which actually allows the cockroach to adapt.
But if you take away that disconnection, then actually the cockroach don’t adapt as quickly so yeah. So people are hacking, our experiments all the time and actually making them better, and i got ta ask i heard uh. I heard peta had a reason yeah, so peta uh was very upset that we were uh, that we were sort of working with cockroaches in such a cruel way, but the uh with every experiment.
It’S important that we uh look at the sort of the cost-benefit ratio right and so what is the cost to the cockroach? You can ask that question so uh we do do a surgery on the cockroach and and in that surgery we do cut the antennaes. But if you actually look in nature uh, the cockroaches have antennas cut uh by nature, and so therefore they can regrow them uh. And so, but if you look at the benefit, that’s coming back, and so you can also check to see.
Does the cockroach live? Is long it does uh, you can check. Does the cockroach find food after this surgery? They do so there’s uh. So you can do all these kind of checks and balances to make sure that what you’re doing is not too costly to the cockroach. But then you look at the benefits society, society right, and so you got 20 of the world that has a neurological disorder. There are no cures for these diseases, we’re not training anyone on neurotechnologies or neuroscience in in k-12, and we should be doing that as a society, and so when you actually take those two and weigh them against each other, it seems to make it makes perfect sense That we should be using cockroaches in a way that science is uh advanced as far as the neuroscience and brain is concerned, great um. How should people look this up, so you can go to backyardbrains.com? We have experiments and we have a bunch of open source projects that you are welcome to browse or get involved in. Thank you great. Thank you. .