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Dr Joe Rosen is reknown alright, a reknown nut.
Read this reprint from Harper’s
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1111/is_1814_303/ai_76134278
Funny, but after my aunt’s stroke, it didn’t seem like he brain could “rewire” it’s neurons to be able to regain effective control over the right side of her body. And these were existing, standard body parts, not some new surgical additions.
I’d say this is BS.
First of all, I think we’re all in agreement that grafted-on wings of any plausible dimensions would not be enough to let a human fly. So let’s drop that discussion. Such grafted wings would purely be decorative, but I don’t doubt that there’s a market for decorative wings. One calls to mind the beginning of a Heinlein story, “Jerry was a man”, where a rich woman commissions a decorative pegasus, ridable strictly on the ground, from a company specializing in bioengineered animals.
With that out of the way, there’s still the question of control by the brain. Have we all forgotten the lesson of the monkeys with friggin’ robot arms on their heads? Monkeys were trained to operate a joystick to play a simple video game. Electrodes were then attached to their heads, and a robotic arm hooked up to the electrodes to respond to the brain activity usually used for moving the monkeys’ own arms. As expected, the monkeys were still able to play the game, moving both their real arms and the robot arm in synch (the robot arm was manipulating the joystick). However, what wasn’t expected was that after a while, the monkeys started moving the robot arm to play the game without moving their natural arms. Even over the course of a short experiment, the monkeys’ brains were able to adapt to having an extra limb, and to disassociate that limb from their preexisting ones. I see no reason, in principle, why a human could not similarly learn to move wings independantly from our arms.
That’s because a stroke causes brain damage. The scientist in the OP is talking about the ability of healthy brains to adapt to new ‘connections’, and to create new neural connections as a result. Recreating that which existed before a stroke is potentially even more difficult. But it’s a completely different situation.
Is there an upper limit on the number of external limbs, wings etc. that can be attached to a human body? Like 127 USB devices on a computer?
There was a recent article in the NY Times (abstract only) that talked about research that was done to show that monkeys (and people) can add to their brains “map” of the body. They trained monkeys to use a little broom to get food out of their reach and monitored their brain activity. As the monkeys got more proficient at using the broom, larger areas in their motor cortex would light up. This seemed to indicate that the brain considered the extended reach of the broom to be part of their body.
Similarly, as people drive, they tend to think of their car as an extension of their body in space. Or if you have to use crutches, you eventually seem to “know” where they are in space, even though they’re not a part of your body.
I could see a similar thing happening with new appendages.
As far as stroke victims go–the left half of your body controls the right side of your body, and vice versa. It’s very hard to rewire those neurons. Especially when you’re old, as most stroke victims are. I did see some PBS special where a man had lost nearly a whole hemisphere of his cerebrum. However, he was young when it happened and his brain had more time to adapt. CT scans showed that his remaining hemisphere took up more than half of the space inside his skull.
The Vegas line had them beating the sharks with frickin’ laser beams on their heads by 4 points, but they failed to cover the spread… let that be a lesson to you kids! 
I saw an issue of The Authority some years back that made me realize something: feathered wings are VERY sexy on a girl. I never wouldn’t thought of it.
Birds have hollow bones and we don’t, so there’s that minor problem: we’re denser. (Try to act surprised. :D) Somebody else could probably give a math-based answer as to how much force they’d need to hold… Our legs have to support our entire body weight at times. The wings would have to be that strong, and more since the ground pushes against you with more force than air does (you’re not going to fall through the ground), and when flying you want to be able to maintain a constant altitude. The wings would have to catch enough air to keep our bodies in the flight, so I think they’d have to be pretty large. That means they’d have to be strong enough to support our entire weight during flight AND their own weight, which might be considerable once you throw in the extra musculature and stuff.
I would guess each “angel” wing would have to be around 60-100 cm to be very decorative. If they were much smaller you would look like an emu or, if dressed formally, a large penguin, probably not the look anyone would be shooting for. One of the “bats” would require much larger wings to look credible.
Wings made of natural materials such as bone, cartiledge, and skin would require a blood supply to nourish them. Wouldn’t this place a greater load on the heart and maybe other organs as well? Possibly a bad thing to do.
If someone were going for a bat or angel look, there would also be a lot of other mods required. For starters, a person would need to lose a lot of weight, probably an unhealthy amount. Not to fly, just to avoid looking like a turkey ready for market.
Another aspect would be rerouting that much blood supply to what would effectively be a pair of useless limbs with a lot of surface area. If I’m correct, this would cool the blood by a degree or so and the wannabe angel/bat would be cold most of the time, possibly to the point of needing an overcoat anywhere outside the tropics. The bats, with all that naked skin, would be the worst affected but I’d guess the angels wouldn’t get away scot free either.
The other thing would be the angel-wing attachment points. It would seem reasonable that it would take a lot of muscle to flap wings with any force at all and this muscle would have to be on the back, probably towards the outside of the body from the attachment points with the other end of the muscle attached to ribs. If I’m correct, this would make a large hump on either side of the attachment points and probably be pretty ugly. The ribs would also have to be reinforced some way to avoid spreading them too much when the wings flapped.
The last thing that occurs to me would be the covering for the wings. Feathers in the case of “angels” and some sort of fine down for the “bats.” If you used regular skin for the bat wings you might have to shave to avoid growing long hair on your wings. The angels would have the opposite problem and need to add feathers. Where do these come from? The angel isn’t going to grow feathers unless we’re talking about some kind of very advanced genetic engineering so would we be just glueing them on? I suppose it would allow the angel wannabe to color-coordinate her wings for every occasion but it seems to defeat the whole purpose of the thing.
Assuming the brain rewiring took place and the necessary nerves were present, then a person could probably extend the wings and maybe flap them with a lot of effort.
This doc is a loon and doesn’t seem to have thought this through very well. It seems that his mods would tend to cripple someone more than anything else. When one of his creations extended his wings and flapped them, he’d find it very difficult to avoid looking like a startled chicken.
Regards
Testy
:smack: WOULD’VE.
I find it interesting that the entire discussion in this thread revolves around wings. There is no mention of tails, wings or even another set of arms. Obviously, this is because we have some sort of inbred desire to fly (note that this also more or less dominates the discussion).
Something that bothers me and I thought would have come up by now is how do you get clothes to fit. Wings, tails, etc. would present a considerable problem. A cute little set of “devil’s horns” wouldn’t be so bad, but might still cause a problem when wearing a hat.
These items would most likely only appeal to the young, while we oldsters will only shake our heads and remark how sorry they will be when they get older. Which brings up the question; if one gets tired of having wings or horns can this operation be easily reversed? My bet is that it would be very expensive to get and probably less expensive to get rid of, as opposed to tattoos.
{quoteI find it interesting that the entire discussion in this thread revolves around wings. There is no mention of tails, wings or even another set of arms. Obviously, this is because we have some sort of inbred desire to fly (note that this also more or less dominates the discussion).
[/quote]
I agree that anyone would want to fly. I certainly would. As far as horns go, there is already a guy growing a set of “devil horns.” If you google for a guy called “enigma” you can find out a bit about him. He is implanting chunks of sterilized coral under his scalp. As I understand it, the coral is gradually replaced with bone. As far as horns are concerned, I don’t see why someone shouldn’t try them if they like. They are obviously non-functional and as a decoration shouldn’t hurt anything at all.
Regards
Testy