Brain Controlled Tightrope Video Game Shown

Bob Sherpowski writes "According to CBBC News, they have come up with a 'game' that you control directly with your brain waves. University College Dublin researchers have designed a game where you are trying to get a monster to walk across a tightrope - if he leans one way or the other you have to concentrate on a box on either side of the tightrope to make him tip the other way. It's still in research and it's not for sale yet but it's the first step. "

Comments

Concentrating on images inside the brain

[kjba]

Although this seems to be a promising field, I don't see yet how it can help people that are completely paralysed. The user has to concentrate on certain external images. This means that the user must still be able to move his eyes. For those people that can still move their eyes, better alternatives involving very precise eye-movement sensors exist.

I would be much more impressed if they could tell from my brainwaves wether I am thinking of a car or a dog.

Applications?

[Killjoy_NL]

I think this is great research, it could give paraplegics (sp?) etc the possibility to walk again with mechanical limbs.

Or am I wrong ??

We had those in the 1970s...

[Punk Walrus]

When I was growing up, there were a lot of "ESP Kits" that had crude monitors that supposedly measured brain waves for a new-age fad called "Biofeedback." Mostly they were for helping you get into a medictate trance, but one of them claimed to run a race car slot track based on Alpha Waves (state of relaxed brain activity in mediation), so the the excitiment of winning made you go slower, and not giving a crap whether you won or not made you win. Seemed like a pretty odd balance. That might have been good to learn "the ultimate poker face."

Having never owned one of those biofeedback devices, I can't say if they ever worked, but I saw lots of ads for them in the mid-late 1970s in magazines like Omni and Popular Mechanics.

Hell, I did this 20 years ago...

[TheVidiot]

I simply interfaced to my VCS.

Re:"The Game"

[Ayaress]

That's what they thought, and why it was so easy for people to try the game. But the game was more than just an audiovisual game, it directly effected their brains, releasing a powerful surge of pleasure (complete with suddenly relaxing muscles, dialating pupils, and a heavy sigh - sort of an electronic orgasm, the way the actors portrayed it) when you got the disk things into the wierd conical wormlike things.

If you've read Richter 10, or The Terminal Man, or even read about the experiments with hooking the pleasure centers of a rat's brain up to a button, you'd know the addictive power that that can have.

A rat hooked up to the aforementioned device will eventuall stop eating, drinking, and will ignore receptive female rats to push the button repeatedly, because the electrical jolt to the brain's pleasure centers produces a far stronger pleasure than any normal stimulus ever can.

In The Terminal Man, the guy's brain eventually learned to manufacture false seizures to trigger the same sort of electrical impulses from his implant.

In Richter 10, many people became endophin addicts when their bodies learned to produce headaches on demand to trigger endorphin rushes from their anti-migraine implants.

The Game was the same sort of thing, while holodecks were just glorified video games - they certainly produced pleasure, and anything that produces pleasure can prove addictive, and the people in Star Trek clearly have to have a level of self control to prevent that; but The Game operated directly on the brain, and could produce far greater feelings of pleasure than is possible normally, and thus far harder to resist.