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?"

Comments

iabcot

[alephnull42]

- 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.

Re:It'll be an EEG type device

[blakestah]

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.

But...

[Flounder]

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.

It'll be an EEG type device

[sam_vilain]

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:

• "Beta" activity - 12 to 15 Hz, normal awake state
• "Alpha" activity - 7 to 9 Hz, which is the state you are in whilst daydreaming, and for a lot of the night sleeping. A very powerful mind state, as memory is greatly enhanced. It is possible to train your mind to enter this state at will, al la _The Silva Mind Control Method_ by Jose Silva, or just about any non-Western religion.
• "Theta" activity - 3 to 5 Hz, which is a very deep meditative state. Most people cannot enter this state without losing conciousness, which is largely because by this stage you have lost many of your external senses, and your trains of thought stop working so rationally. Hence you don't remember the experience, which is what you experience as losing conciousness. There are some people that argue that the human mind is never actually unconcious. If you can enter this mind state and still see, you can see the portions of the UV spectrum that auras exist in.
• "Delta" activity - 1 to 2 Hz - deep sleep. If you can remember anything from this state, you're either a meditation guru, or having a religious experience.
• "REM" state - very erratic activity, this is what you are in when you are dreaming. Your body is in "sleep paralysis", which is how you can try to move about in your dream and not have your meat thrash about. "Awareness during sleep paralysis" is when you realise you are dreaming, and become aware of it. An ultra-cool experience, sometimes called "startrekking" because of it's similarity to being in the holodeck in Star Trek, other times "Lucid Dreaming". In fact, it's better than the holodeck - you don't have to address the computer to change things, just think it and it is done.
• "Super-beta" activity - 15 to 30 Hz - quite rare and not very well studied. Your mind probably would not be functioning very stably at this point; you'd be scatterbrained and unable to hold detailed trains of thought. Not mentioned often.
• "K-Complex" spikes - anything up to 150Hz; very rare, short lived spikes thought by some to be linked to moments of profound insight. Virtually unheard of.

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!