George the parrot is to be fitted with a prosthetic claw to stop the poor devil falling off his perch, so to speak. To be more precise – his perch will have a claw, and he will be trained to slot into it. One can imagine it sitting there awaiting its owner, like an old man’s pair of slippers warming by the fire. Every night, the African Grey will settle happily into his peg leg after a hard day’s flapping and chatting, nestle into his feathers and disappear into the land of nod.
No more for him the ignominious midnight plunge to the sandpaper, topped off with the exclamation ‘bloody hell’ (this is true, and brings to mind a brighter version of the sinister swearing toy parrots Gazza had gathered around him before he was sectioned). Does George still feel his old claw twitching, like amputees do? Does he suffer from phantom limb syndrome? Does he have his missing claw back when he dreams, flying from tree to tree in search of other African Greys to squawk with.
Recent advances in the mastering of electrodes to monitor and relay the impulses generated in the brain raise similar questions. Trained to walk on his hind legs, a chimp in North Carolina watched video of a lifelike robot imitating his walk in Japan – the signals from the mind of one drove the motion of the other. After a while (and many treats) the chimp was able to make the robot walk without moving himself, and it is planned to feed the walking sensation back to the chimp so it actually feels as if it is moving. The implications for the world of prosthetics are clear, although one can imagine the system might be in danger of hijacking by rogue electrical signals in the early days – pass a microwave and start imitating the ministry of funny walks, walk past a power station and begin doing cartwheels – but the sky’s the limit when it comes to immersive computer games.
The Nintendo Wii will look like small potatoes indeed, and the level of shock headlinery on the ‘video nasty’ aspect of actually imitating the brutal physical motions of fight games can easily be imagined. Could it be that much of the stress involved in modern computer games comes from the built up adrenalin of feeling like you’re doing something while sitting stock still on the couch? Would moving about and working out the pent-up aggression solve the problem? Or would people just sit there and imagine like they were moving about, just twitching the mental trigger like serial killers?
Excessive gamers could suffer a whole host of side effects, however – muscle memory twitches could find them kicking duvets three metres high, unexpectedly punching shop assistants or missing the faked muscle response of an extra limb they happened to have in an alternative existence. Perhaps if people missed their leisure tails or wings so much, a new branch or surgery might spring up to satisfy this need for add-ons. At the very least one suspects a lucrative new wing of psychotherapy may have to be invented.
News hour, with Jerry Caesar 