Slashdot Mirror
The Internet Meets the Neural Net
orangesquid writes "OpenEEG is a system for getting data from your brain to your computer. Recently, work was resumed on scEEG, a soundcard-based system which may one day make home EEG systems very cheap (they currently cost a few hundred US$ to put together; there are, though, some potential cheaper alternatives). But, what research is being done into getting data from your computer to your brain? There have been some systems that inject optical signals into your eyes, but, what about direct neural interfacing? It seems EMF and light are one option; playing with neurotransmitters may be another. What do /.'ers foresee coming in this field? What research have you seen being done? Particularly, is any of this to the point where homemade, low-cost systems are feasible? Where can I find out how to inject signals into my head? Combining this with openEEG might lead to some exciting new levels of Internet addiction."
New braincells are total wildcards. They can be used for anything. Put a grid of wires over a 1000X1000 patch of neurons shortly after birth. Use the grid for io, teaching the baby to use the interface. Viola, a computer finger.
Inherit the Earth by Brian Stableford had a very interesting play on this idea. Instead of creating direct neural interfaces (serial ports in your brain) why not use nanites? By allowing such nanites to create electrical pulses on/in your brain, it could be easily "confused" into thinking some sense was being triggered. That's what I'm waiting for...
Perhaps the more appropriate question is what conditioning might be involved in making existing mechanisms more efficiently related to whatever output mechanism (neural interface) is chosen to augment natural output systems.
good political satire
I saw a news article on biofeedback in treatment for ADD and ADHD - applications exist to play games for training you to behave better.
AFAIK, add + adhd kids have messed up alpha waves (please correct me if I'm wrong), and the EEG machine listens to those. When they can conciously control the patterns of the alpha wave the game rewards them. Fairly successful too I heard. When I found out about it I instantly wanted to have a thought powered mouse.
I also read something about the USAF and biofeedback flight control systems. One of the problems a fighter pilot faces is sitting down and high G turns - blood drops out of the brain and they do "the funky chicken" - then black out. Women are better pilots because they have shorter distances from heart to head. If a pilot could lie down on his back, blood would be forced to the back of the skull rather than his feet; meaning s/he won't black out. The 'joystick' worked by finding electrical twitches fired along the muscles and responding accordingly.
Personally mouse gestures in opera are pretty cool. But I can't wait till I *think* "move back a page" rather than have to move a whole half an inch.
Also, if you guys haven't read it, read FireFox by Craig Thomas, about a thought controlled plane for more ideas.
While gaming will prosper from this tech, it's important to note that gaming will also lead this technology further than any other field, because of the fierce competition in the global gaming market. The rest of the world is going to play catch-up to gamers.
On this point, I think you are wrong. Porn will lead the development of this technology whether you like it or not.
Imagine inputting porn signals directly into the brain, you could take porn from being an audio and visual experience into a full body experience. The possibilities are enormous (hopefully).
Just like the porn industry took up online credit card transactions faster than anyone else, the porn industry will lead the way in this field too.
If I point out that you are incorrect, making me a foe does not make you any more correct.
Connecting your brain to machines sounds interesting enough, but what about connecting your brain to another brain?
That would really produce some interesting results, and all in all, for the first time oneself could really know what another person thinks.
Agreed. Another entry point for infection is being created. But what if the interface didn't "break" the skin at all? We have pacemakers that operate completely inside the body. What if there was a tiny control unit placed completely under the skin and the communication with it was completey via inductance or something like that?
I'm skeptical of messing with neurotransmitters, though. That's what Prozac, et.al. do, not to mention LSD. The chemical balance of the body is very delicate. You might be attempting to load a book into your brain when you find yourself wondering where all those lizards crawling out of the walls came from.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
Point of school is to learn, right? So whats the difference if they pick it up after hours of studying, or after a few minutes of "downloading". Heck, how is that any different than people learning as they already do, at different speeds? Should we go Harrison Bergeron on everyone?
Clones are people two.
No they're not. While they are highly flexible, the nature/nurture debate points in the direction that also a baby has certain predispositions.
I share your sentiment about the potential for this. It would be a fundamental change, no doubt.
But I foresee problems with huge amounts of technical information being available to the minds of severely immature people. Schools today suck, that's my opinion based on my experience, but what I did do in school, was mature. If I had access to the programming knowledge that has taken me over a decade to amass, available in my brain when I was 17, I would have used it to wreak havoc. And that's just the programming knowledge I've acquired. I shudder to think about my military training, aikido, iaido, etc...
Interesting times ahead.
Think for yourself, destroy your television.
Of course, the parsing will be the tricky part. But once we have the hippocampal prosthesis, what's to stop us from creating other brain prostheses (other than the fact that implanting things into our brain currently constitutes major surgery)? For example, an amygdala prosthesis could help people with borderline personality disorder, since recent research seems to indicate that it is a *mis-wired* amygdala (due possibly to inadequate parenting and childhood psychological trauma) that causes the sudden rages so characteristic of this largely untreatable syndrome.
Or imagine the Anti-aphasia bridge. You'd never be stuck searching for the right word ever again. How about the enhanced cochlea? Super-hearing! And haven't you always wanted to see into the ultraviolet? No problem with the Magnetic Resonance Optical Overlay Device.
And, besides, I'm just waiting for this one:
It may be here sooner than we may think, since we know now that the parietal lobes are implicated in these experiences.
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
The reason for using frequency modulation is not just for bypassing the highpass filter on sound cards.
You wouldn't connect anything attached to mains power to your head with low impedance electrodes, would you? Do you trust the USB port of your motherboard with your life?
You need isolation. This is usually achieved with an optocoupler. An optocoupler is not so good at passing analog signals but passing a simple on/off FM signal through it is trivial. Isolating a serial digital signal is equally easy but then you need to find some way to power the ADC and microprocessor on the other side of the coupler with an isolated power supply. The voltage-to-frequency converter takes very little power so it can be easily powered by a battery. The microprocessor and digital interfaces of the ADC can also add noise to the sensitive EEG inputs.
And why are you so afraid of analog circuitry? I find if hilarious that you consider an 8-pin voltage to frequency converter with a few resistors and capacitors more complicated than an analog to digital converter, high order anti-aliasing filters, microprocessors, crystals, serial interfaces and burning ROMs. There is no demodulation circuit since it's done in software. I consider trading a few MIPS from CPU for a simpler circuit a good trade.
There are also other potential advantages for this scheme. For example, if you want to record nighttime EEG activity you can transmit the FM signal from your bed to the PC through an off-the-shelf short range stereo audio transmitter. The two channels are indeed a limitation but this is only a simple circuit that beginners can build with a mimimal chance of frying their brains in the process.
BTW, I wrote the Python frequency demodulation code for this project.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
You may laugh, but this isn't far from the procedure used to get high-quality EEG data. The stuff you get from outside the skull is generally junk.
Researchers used to piggyback on severe epilepsy patients, whose condition had gotten so bad as to require surgery to remove or alter parts of the brain that triggered the seizures. This operation required a bit of reconaissance to find the offending grey matter, so a craniotomy (skylight in the cranium) was standard diagnostic procedure, and the operation usually had a few extra minutes for experimental measurements.
Some of the more advanced people used to insert probes all the way into the brain to trigger the seizures; the whole process was guided by EEG's to gradually refine the location of the source.
One of my programs was set up to take EEG's from an 8x8 electrode array, which was laid upon the brain after the skull and membrane were removed. I almost got to attend one such procedure live, but I was scratched from the roster at the last minute - that's a lesson as to why software shouldn't be too reliable.
As far as using a soundcard, I'm not surprised at all. A soundcard is basically a two-channel A/D converter. You need a lot more channels to compete nowadays, but for the price, you can't beat the commodity hardware. The only additional hardware you need is a bank of preamps, and possibly a clock/timer board to make sure the sampling is precise. And, of course, a drill.
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
If I remember the original articles on this topic, the monkey started out with moving it's hand, to do the functions it was thinking of. Over time, it got lazy to the point of not even moving it's arm, to achieve the same results.
But now, if we all did this, how much lazier would we get. Hell, we went from an agrarian society a few hundred years ago (like, most people were all hunter/gatherers or farmers), to the industrial age where we busted ass in factories to make things to make our work easier, to today, where we sit in front of glowing screens, pushing little buttons to talk to people all over the planet. Speeds for this communication is no longer measured in the days or weeks that it would take for a letter to travel that distance, but the milliseconds it takes for the packets to travel. For me, Slashdot is 30ms from where I'm sitting, or 6 hours by car. That 340 miles would easily have been weeks for a message like this to get there not very long ago.
If adapting neural monitoring technology to this global network happens any time soon, we'll see people get fatter and lazier than they are now. Hell, how many people on here can lift 200 pounds? Ok, that's retorical, I know that all kinds of people read
But with all that said, I'd love it. I won't be one of those fatter, lazier people. I will love to be one of the first to play with neural technology when it's availble to the general public (well, us). I had looked at some of the available software/hardware before, but maybe I'll actually give building some of this a try this time.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
There are two important advantages of 3D porn:
The fact is that there is practically no realistic 3D porn and what is available is more ugly than barby porn. :) The quality of girls in 3D action/adventure games (and even 3D card demos) is much better than even in the best 3D porn games (and there are no 3D porn films to speak of).
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Have a look at this. We made an bluetooth connected EEG with a budget of $127. And it worked, too!
I work in a lab at University of maryland currently doing research into how the brain integrates audio information. For data collection we use microwire arrays hooked into a $25,000 neural Amp. The results are hard to deal with mainly because it requires about 400 insertions to draw an adequate map of the diffrent audio fields. Anyway, we are very far away from doing this in real life, let alone an opensource project. dont get me wrong, but in order to get good results you have to use the purest metal you can find, hook it into a amp that has been designed using extremely high quality parts that have an absolute minimum of signal degridation. Also, there is the problem of backround noise. we do our exparaments in a room lined with the magnetic equivalent of a faraday cage. some other promising research was posted by "new scientist" magazine. in their febuary 23 2002 edition they had an article about mind over metal and sucessful exparaments that transplanted the brainstem from rats into robots. the brain stems then allowed them to walk and do stuff. The site www.newscientist.com has an archive but you must be a member to view it. In the article they also go into remote controling a brain and the ethics of that. Though, ecause of ethics it is highly unlikely to have human trials anytime soon. However, Mr. roadkill stated on his list a dremel with a bone cutter bit. the irony of this is that we actually use such a thing when inserting implants.
...untilthen......