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Surfing The Net With Brain Waves?
deepfry writes: "Today's Wired News is running a story on the "Attention Trainer." The
$899 helmet-type device is supposed to help children improve their concentration by monitoring their brain signals as they play games. Does any one know how this technology works?"
If this system works like previous attempts at treating ADD/ADHD and other attentional problems via EEG biofeedback, it works by monitoring the ratio between the patient's beta and theta activity levels. An attentive state is typically characterized by a beta/theta ratio of less than one. Such systems typically produced visual output (graphs for adults, a simple video game for children), and over time the patient learns how to produce the desired ratio. A decade ago, I was a subject in a semi-experimental setup like this. After a few weeks, I had some limited success in consciously adjusting on-screen graphs.
There's a big problem with it, however: it doesn't really work very well. The beta/theta ratio is characteristic of concentration, but it isn't itself concentration. While the patients can learn to manipulate this ratio, they're only learning to ape the symptoms of being attentive.
... Apparently you have to think in Russian.
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I would be a paid subscriber if Taco and Hemos weren't such cunts
Check out www.peakachievement.com for a better scientifc explanation. NeuroTech is trying for patents on a device that can detect when your mind is focusing so they must be serious.
- Take 1024 9-year old prodigies,
- fit them all with this helmet,
- sit them in front of Saddams 2000 PlayStationS2's,
- boot the consoles with Linux,
- wire them together in a Beowolf cluster,
all of this to play the perfect game of Pitfall 2.
Not confused enough? http://translate.google.com/translate?u=www.slashdot.jp&hl=en&ie=UTF8&sl=ja&tl=en
And the gamma band (25-40 Hz)?? What about the gamma band ??
The one really invoked in attention ??
Truly, claims that anyone understands if or how a toy like this might work are mere pie in the sky. We'd need to understand how attention worked before we could train it using EEG waves that demonstrate at best a very weak noisy reflection of SOME but certainly not MOST brain events,
In animal experiments people recorded EEG in the 1930s and 1940s as soon as amplifier technology began being applied to Neuroscience. Then in 1943 a researcher named Galambos (famous for co-discovering echo-location in bats) saw that using very small electrode tip exposures allowed recording from single neurons.
This breakthrough led the animal researchers to all but throw away EEG as a useful tool, although there are tons of human data still. But the problems with the EEG are several. First, it only reflects a vector averaging of many million neurons and synaptic currents. And it only reflects the dot product of that average with a radial vector.
Researchers estimate about 100 neurons in one area of the brain would be sufficient to carry the information in a percept, with perhaps 5, possilby as many as 10, brain areas involved. Such things are immeasurable by EEG. The things that are measurable are the oscillating features of brain processing, which could for all we know be epiphenomenonological. Or not. We really don't know yet. But the studies of the signals carried by single neurons clearly bear close relation to brain processing, and have been very difficult to relate to EEG-type monitoring.
if you watch almost every multiplayer game on the net, there's a sizable minority of players that wouldn't even register on an EEG.
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
For freakish reasons I was admitted to the intensive-care unit at the local hospital while I was a freshman in college, and my thoughtful roommates brought me some flowers conveniently wrapped in a "vase" made up of a rolled-up issue of Penthouse. Sitting in the hospital all day is pretty boring, and I was repeatedly tempted to open up the magazine and start, um, you know, reading the articles. But somehow the knowledge that electrocardiogram equipment was transmitting my heartbeat in real time to the nurses' station outside my door presented a bit of a hurdle to my plans for entertaining myself: Every time I contemplated leafing through the magazine, I started wondering how the nurses would react if they suddenly saw my heart rate jump from maybe 60 beats per minute to 120 or so. I had visions of a klaxon going off and a whole team of doctors and nurses rushing in to man the crash cart, only to realize that the "Code Blue" was actually just me checking out some blue pictures. Of course, I know that crash carts are generally used when your heart *stops*, but that minor detail didn't do much to reduce the sensation that I was indeed attached to a Porn Alarm(TM).
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
I did some work with similar technology doing postgraduate work at USU. Here's how it works.
When the brain is active, it gives out tiny amounts of charged particles known as bosuns. The harder a part of the brain is working, the more concentrated the bosuns. So what you do is you take a nice, non-conductive material like a plastic helmet and the you coat it with silicone (watch out, that stuff is carcinogenic) Then you dope the silicone with an acidic mixture of carbonated water, concentrated orange juice, citric acid, apartame, potassium benzoate, citrus pectin, potassium citrate, caffeine, gum arabic, natural flavors, brominated vegetable oil, yellow number 5 and erythorbic acid. Then you place a zinc and a copper electrode in each of the doped patches. IBM did a lot of the heavy lifting on this and they call it a silicone on insulator, plastic grid array. When a bosun interacts with a part this network, it generates a small electrical charge that can be measured. If you use a fine enough network and a little uzbekistanium (to reduce signal leak) you can determine the location and intensity of brainwave activity. This has a lot of potential.
--Shoeboy
It's probably monitoring EM waves radiated by your brain.
Unfortunately, you probably can't get much information out of it - it mostly looks like noise. Interpreting it would be at least as difficult as building a TEMPEST device - that is, if we had complete design schematics of the brain. Otherwise it's orders of magnitude harder.
However, there are some interesting things you can do, using Fourier analysis. Studies have shown that the predominant frequency of waves coming off can reflect the state of mind of the wearer:
The two common ways to explore these mind states are meditation and drugs, although often a combination of both.
This helmet could be an incredibly useful tool for amateur psychonauts/meditators for monitoring meditation and/or drug experiences. You could also build a biofeedback device to help you reach the lower states with it, or a lucid dreaming device.
Sounds like a great toy for a hacker with an interest in the mind!