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Playing Games With One's Brainwaves

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the controller-unnecessary dept.

PolloDiablo writes "Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have reported success with recording the signals a brain sends out to the other parts of the body and using them to play a game. The subjects had to move a cursor towards a target in a one-dimensional environment without using any bodypart, just pure brainpower. One subject had a success rate of 100%. This could prove a breakthrough in the use of prosthetics. The next step is repeating the same test in a 2-dimensional environment. Similar tests have been done with monkeys before but never with humans."

7 of 90 comments (clear)

  1. Isn't this story VERY old? by bersl2 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I seem to remember seeing pictures demonstrating one-dimensional cursor movement using the human mind years ago. I'm confident that I'm not imagining things.

  2. Emotions by Gary+Destruction · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Maybe emotions could be used to help provide movement as well. An intense emotion such as anger has been known to motivate people.

  3. The Other 90%? by tchuladdiass · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I remember picking up something back a while ago, from a company called "The Other 90% Technologies" that used an electrode you attach to a finger to control the games. It was basically a downhill slalom skiing game. You had to "think hard right" and "relax left" in order to move the playing piece. I couldn't quite get the hang of it, and ended up giving the thing away. Cost was around $30 or so.

  4. Been there, done that by Colazar · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Back in 88, I saw a demo in a graduate level EE class done by an engineering student who was also a musician. He had put together a system where he could change the speaker that the music he played came out of by thinking directionally, and he could change the synthesizer instrument setting by thinking of a particular color (red = trumpet, white = flute, for instance).

    --
    He decided to just watch the government, and kind of scale it down to size, and run his life that way. --Laurie Anderson
  5. My experience by jakek101 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I've actually played a rudimentery version of this. It was a skiing game where you thought "center" to center yourself and left or right to move left and right. I also once played a Pacman game where the more of a certain type of brain wave you had the faster Pacman went. I became quite good at this.

    1. Re:My experience by yRabbit · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I believe it was on The Learning Channel (or Discovery), one show they had was about a woman who was practicing for a luge. The luge went up too high and she hit her head on part of the track.
      After that, she had seizures sometimes.. I guess her brainwaves were somehow messed up.
      Anyways, using a game in which there were three rockets, with her only control being her brain, she had to make one rocket go forward but not the other two. It helped her train her brain to use certain waves more. It eventually stopped her seizures.
      (I think. I might be misremembering something here, or forgetting some detail.)

  6. Even older stuff by FuzzyDustBall · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I saw something like this in the 80s at the local Amiga store (Yes we had a local Amiga store!). They had a game that came with a head strap. The game consisted of bubbles that floated from the bottom of the screen to the top the more relaxed you became the bubbles would sink the more tense the bubbles would rise and pop. I saw some one play for about 15 minutes he thought he had it down to a science.... when he left the guys running the store said "hey this head set thing needs bateries that guys been watching a demo" I guess this is why it never realy took off.