Multiple choice

The experiment described above is ultimately an attempt to

Directions: The passage below is followed by a question. Answer the question on the basis of what is stated or implied in the passage.

In a major step toward helping paralytic victims walk again, Duke University researchers have announced that they had proved monkeys can use their brainpower to control the walking patterns of robots. The investigators implanted Idoya, a rhesus monkey, with electrodes which gathered signals from her brain's motor and sensory cortex cells as she ambled along on a specially built child-size treadmill. The electrodes recorded the cells' responses as the monkey walked on the treadmill at different speeds; simultaneously, sensors on Idoya's legs tracked their patterns of movement. The information was transmitted real time from their lab in Durham, to control the commands of a humanoid robot in Kyoto, Japan.

Through the electrodes in her brain, the researchers discovered that some neurons fire at different phases and frequencies, depending on their role in the process. During the experiment, the robot continued to move for several minutes after Idoya stopped strolling on her treadmill indicating something else also.

The team’s goal is to finally enable real-time direct interfaces between a brain and electronic and mechanical devices that could be used to restore sensory and motor functions lost through injury or disease. The team hopes that one day soon, they will also master sufficient syntax to talk back to the brain, which would enable them, for instance, to build a human prosthetic arm laden with sensors to send tactile feedback into the somatosensory cortex of its user.

The experiment in monkey-to-robotic motion is the latest in a long series of studying the primate brain's ability to stimulate robotic arms through neural signals. In 2000 Nicolelis and his colleagues described how they had reliably translated the raw electrical brain activity of an owl monkey named Belle into signals that successfully directed the actions of robotic arms based both at Duke and at an MIT lab 965 kilometers away in Cambridge. Belle's tiny hand moved a joystick left or right to correspond with a horizontal series of lights on a display panel in a Duke lab; both robot arms followed suit.

A few years later, the team listened in on brain signals generated by a rhesus monkey named Aurora using a joystick to play a video game and translated them into commands for a mechanical arm to duplicate the motions. Aurora was ultimately able to move a robotic arm sans the joystick, using only her thoughts, an experiment that the team believes addresses fundamental questions about how brain circuits operate.

  1. prove that monkeys can help robots walk

  2. prove that signals carrying information from the brain, when passed on to a robot can help it walk

  3. act as an intermediate step towards prosthtically enabling the physically incapacitated.

  4. prove basically a very scholarly point that information from the brain controls all limb movements

  5. master enough language to interact with the brain
Reveal answer Fill a bubble to check yourself
C Correct answer
Explanation

Option (1) represents only the surface of the experiment. If you go deeper, you will realise that it is only a stepping stone.  Option (4) is the ground on which the entire theory rests. It can never become the final goal as it is already a well-known fact and in fact is the premise on which the entire experiment rests. Option (5) is again a milestone in the process of achieving the final goal. Hence, ruled out. Pay attention to the word ultimately in the question stem and go back to the very first line of the opening paragraph and also the 4th paragraph in particular, which leads us to the right option (3).

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