Playing Games With One's Brainwaves

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."

Comments

beware

[Tumbleweed]

Make sure your developers aren't Russian, else you'll need to think in Russian to fire your weapons, and that'd suck.

How do you say 'railgun' in Russian, anyway?

Re:beware

[wakejagr]

why'd you go and mention Russia?

now, the "In Soviet Union..." jokes will start. an article about using thoughts to control games makes this just too easy.

then, some clever person will point out that Russia != Soviet Union, and will get moded funny.

you've started something bad, my friend.

Isn't this story VERY old?

[bersl2]

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.

Emotions

[Gary Destruction]

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

invasive is the key (and problem)

[blunte]

it's much easier to do invasively than non-invasively, as they state. in this article they sort of market invasive as being superior, but that depends on your perspective. it is superior in its ease of understanding signals, but it is inferior to those who object to direct tinkering with the brain.

ideally we could accurately decipher signals non-invasively to get the same result. invasive is inherently more dangerous, and certainly more complicated from a medical point of view.

Found something to back me up

[bersl2]

This seems to have been done many times before. This article from August 2002 says:

The next step gets scary. EEG (electroencephalogram) measures brain activity. So far in early experiments, NASA has been able to get volunteers to move a cursor on the screen merely by thinking left or right, up or down. This goes beyond bio feedback, Wheeler was quick to add.

What I saw was one dimensional, and I think I saw it on the Discovery Channel back in the day, as in 2001 or before.

The Other 90%?

[tchuladdiass]

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.

Re:Great news for RSI suffering gamers!

[Kozar_The_Malignant]

>so I can play Far Cry, Half Life 2, etc. without worrying about pain.

I'm thinking that by the time you can control the game with brain waves, the game will send your brain pain signals when you get shot. No need to check a visual for your damage count, you'll feel it.

Read the Article, And...

[Ieshan]

If you read the article, you'll note that the researchers aren't using EEG, which is part of the reference you include in your seperate post.

The difference between an EEG and the technique they use in this study is invasiveness - EEGs are Non-Invasive, that is, they don't need to stick anything into your head (they attach electrodes at various points on the skull corresponding to lobes of the brain) - this study uses the ECoG, a more invasive technique for monitoring brain activity.

Note that the "breakthrough" was in acquisition of the task. This increased acquisition level may lead to much faster experimentation. Of course, the acquisition comes at a cost - invasive surgery.

Just thought I'd keep you up to article, there. =)

Been there, done that

[Colazar]

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).