Mind Over Machine

broKenfoLd writes "Monkeys moving robotic arms by manipulating a cursor on a computer screen, simply by thinking about it? Mice who cause their water tube to dispense some refreshing H2O just by wishing it? Signal processing and decoding has long been a dream of Matrix fans and lazy system administrators for years, and science is amazingly keeping up! Popular Science's Carl Zimmer has written a fascinating piece documenting recent progress in decoding brain signals and interpreting commands issued from thoughts alone. If you heard a single violin playing Beethoven's 5th, you would be able to tell what piece of music was being played even though the rest of the orchestra was not heard. In the same way, by monitoring a relatively few neurons, computers can recognize patterns and allow programming based on these patterns to say, know if a mouse is thinking about pushing his water lever. You can pass the time waiting for Matrix-style video games and motionless system adminstration/utilization by reading the full article."

Comments

Shoulda seen this

[Anonymous Coward]

Brain-Computer Interfaces for Communication and Control at the society for neuroscience annual meeting. There are already paralyzed people using this type of technology (electrode and even EEG(!)) on an experimental basis.

Re:Just don't forget one thing!

[Bendebecker]

No, its a refernce to the SCi-fi classic Forbidden Planet. A highly species known as the Krell develope a machine that allows manipulation without instrumentation - all they had to do was think about it and the machine would create whatever they thought about right there. But the Krell forgot one thing: the monsters of the subconcious mind. The Krell had become so highly advanced that they had forgotten that deep down buried in their minds, the primitive savage still existed - a savage that still wanted to kill and destroy and in building the machine the Krell had given those monsters nearly infinite power. As a result, the Krell were destroyed by their own minds.

Mind Wide Open

[CleverDan]

NPR has an interesting interview with Steven Johnson, author of Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life . One segment talks about manipulating on-screen animations with Alpha brainwaves, to retrain people with ADD how to focus.