Undergraduate Neurophysiology Lab

[kenneth paul collins]

Some further thoughts on M.A.D.

The "sleeves" should, of course have visible grids so 
that they can be positioned on the body in standardized 
fashion.

Of course, too, the more electrodes in the arrays, the 
better. Modern multiplexing can economize with respect 
to needed channels. But I'd really like to see the 
full-blown "thousand"-channel neck, back, knee-down, 
elbow-to-finger-tip versions.

The M.A.D. "trace" will be most-useful if it's 
represented on a computer-monitor topographical map of 
the body (just like a topographical map of the mountains 
& valleys of, say, one's community, but depicting degree 
of muscle activation rather than height above sea 
level). 
The images could be zoomed, and panned via a mouse, 
touch screen,  or light pen. A graphics tablet could 
also be connected so that the treating Clinician could 
annotate, diagram, enhance, etc., and print copies of 
all such stuff.

Standard anatomies, skelletal, musculature, nervous, 
internal organs, could also be fed right into the 
imagery, and could be intensity-adjusted, and mouse or 
light-pen accessed, which would bring up catalogs of 
pertinent info - like an expert system, or a patient's 
prior history, or an athlete's baseline - all of this 
would be to facilitate the Clinician's ability to 
diagnose injuries.

(EMG's usefulness with respect to internal-organ 
injuries would be a very-interesting thing to explore. 
I'd not be surprised to discover that, once a 
highly-refined database was developed, that 
skeletal-muscle activation patterns do point subtlety to 
internal disease. But, at this point, this is 
speculative. You know, when one has an attack of 
appendicitus, or Pneumo thorax, or gall stones, or 
ulcers, or a green-apple stomach ache, one's posture 
varies as one's skeletal musculature "suspension-bridge" 
adjusts itself so that pressure is taken off the 
"soreness". Well, in such muscle-activation dynamics, 
there's a huge quantity of useful diagnosis info that's 
currently going to waste. (I'd study this problem in a 
minute, just to find out the extent of such usefulness.) 
This technique could become something like "xrays" that 
specifically target "the sore spot" :-). I mean, in the 
muscle-activation data, there would be stereotypical 
patterns that, through experience, would come to point 
right to trauma in specific internal organs. Skeptical? 
Think that internal pain is too-diffusely-organized? 
I'll wager ($5.oo) that there's more than enough info. 
Remember, the musculature forms a precisely-engineered 
"suspension" system. Thousands of muscle fibers, each 
one activated just so, contribute to the 3-Dimensional 
"leveraging" of the body's posture so that the 
pressure on the injured tissue will be minimized. 
Remember your last back ache? Remember how, as your body 
tended to hold a special posture, a set of muscles 
became over-taxed, and the pain "shifted"? Well, M.A.D 
will nail all of that down. "Movies" can be made of all 
such "adjustment" dynamics, and these, too, will point 
directly to the tissue damage with respect to which the 
CNS is "striving" to minimize pain. All of this will be 
directly-readable in this array-type EMG.

Such imagery can be presented in many useful "modes", 
but variation from "normal" would form a 
particularly-good basis for emergency diagnosis. 
Injuries would stand right out on the computer image.

There's a =lot= more. One thing that comes to mind would 
be battlefield applications of the mature technique. 
Medics can't carry an xray machine around with them, 
but a medic with a set of M.A.D. "sleeves", and a 
ruggedized laptop could diagnose a lot of battlefield 
injuries in the absence of xray.

{BTW, the neural basis for this M.A.D discussion is 
given in footnote 11 of the paper version of the 
"Automation of Knowing..." ms ("limping behavior"; 
I'm not certain, but it should be about the 11th 
"button" in the hypertext version). Of course, the 
technique is worth millions & millions, so folks might 
imagine that, since this is just one more thing that I 
feel shoulda coulda funded all of my research efforts on 
behalf of the Children, that it's "curious" that I'm 
still being relegated to the "garbage heap". What does a 
man have to do to win his "Eagle"? It's all so "curious" 
to me. It's like folks see me as some "alien 
intelligence" that's completely divorced from all of the 
human needs that folks experience. It's like I 
invent stuff like M.A.D., and folks treat my work as 
if it's their own work. It's all so curious. Yes, 
because I feel an obligation to do so, and because it's 
taken everything I had (financially) to just do the 
inventing, etc., that I cannot "manufacture" this or 
that that I've invented, I've put stuff into the Public 
Domain. But is there no one, in all of Humanity, who 
will give a man credit for the work he's done? It's all 
so "curious" to me. I've loved folks well. I've Loved 
the Children unfailingly. One day the Hatred I've 
experienced as "reward" for the work I've done... one 
day it's just going to break my heart. No one seems to 
care. "Curious". If this's is the way things have got to 
be, then so be it. The work must be done. It's just so 
midnight hilarious, though. Sorry about "all this". One 
of my obligations... the =only= one... is to Truth. 
Whether or not Truth will be served in time to save my 
breaking heart, Truth must still be promulgated. 
Humanity's =only= Hope exists in Truth. Truth is my wish 
for Humanity.) K. P. Collins