Their ethical section on Kickstarter is a joke. People apparently said that this is a toy and you turn animals in a toy and the only response is basically:"Well, it's not a toy, because we could give it an extremely complicated title to make it sound like research."

Research has the goal of producing some sort of output. A paper, general knowledge, whatever. If people want to do some neuro science research, they should do it in a controlled environment and release a paper afterwards, but not buy a DIY cockroach-antenna-controller-toy for five bucks and call the toy "a research project".

I would have preferred a full holographic and interactive mouse multiphysics simulation I could manipulate to my heart's content, but those don't exist. These types of educational tools can inspire the future scientists and educating the young minds that will do tomorrow what we can't bring ourselves to do today is worth the sacrifice, as long as we take care to not waste life needlessly.

Doesn't it seem more like it's being marketed as an educational toy? Is it really appropriate to transform other life forms into our toys?

Bramie, I don't necessarily approve of their presentation but their product is an effective teaching tool, especially if their iPhone is better than the crap neuroscientists usually have to deal with. I just hope the people who buy the roackes understand that.

I'm all for promoting research and understanding and I could see a role for this in a classroom, but they way this is being sold is far too toy-like for me. If you can just order an "augmented" cockroach off the internet to mess around with, it becomes a commodity or product and there is not much left to learn from it.

I also think that, although you are not actually taking over the body or brain of the cockroach, you are definitely taking over (a good deal of) its perception of reality, however primitive that may be. The fact that cockroaches can learn to ignore the artificial impulses and "escape the Matrix", so to speak, makes me feel only slightly less uncomfortable about doing this on a large scale.

It's probably because I don't view it as "escaping the matrix." The neural system of a cockroach is relatively simple but they're patching into a very small portion of it. We can't tell what the real side effects are but for all intents and purposes, you're sending it a signal that is equivalent to, say, someone touching your left or right ear. Except the cockroach's sensitivity is dialed up and the antenna are one of their primary navigation sensors so it's more like flashing a big wall to the left or right off your vision. Here you get into issues of complexity and intelligence and I'd rather avoid that. Let's just say that to generate an equivalent response in humans, you'd have to do a massive patchwork on the brain, far more invasive (imo) than what they're doing to the cockroaches.

The fact that the cockroach so easily habituates to such massive stimuli should actually tell you a lot about how unphased and how simple its nervous system is. Only in cases of total neuron death/disconnection (spine or neck break ripes the neurons in the spinal cord causing paralysis) can most pain and other "danger sign" signals be totally cut off in humans. For example, you will get acclimated to normal house smells pretty fast, but usually not to smells of sulfur/rotting eggs because of an evolutionary adaptations. The more complex a nervous system is, the more difficult it is to habituate specific stimuli artificially(generally speaking). In the cockroach the neurons connecting the antenna to the rest of the brain are very simple and can be habituated by just stimulating them to release neurotransmitters over and over again. After a while the cockroach just ignores the sense, like you would ignore sight if it was pitch black, instead focusing on sound.