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Scientists Demonstrate Thought-Controlled Computer
Da Massive writes with a link to ComputerWorld coverage of a unique gadget shown at this past week's CeBit show. The company g.tec was showing off a brain/computer interface (BCI) in one corner of the trade hall. The rig, once placed on your head, detects the brain's voltage fluctuations and can respond appropriately. This requires training, where "the subject responds to commands on a computer screen, thinking 'left' and 'right' when they are instructed to do so ... Another test involves looking at a series of blinking letters, and thinking of a letter when it appears." Once the system is trained, you can think letters at the machine and 'type' via your thoughts. Likewise, by thinking directions you can move objects around onscreen. The article provides some background on the history of g.tec's BCI, and suggests possible uses for the technology in the near future.
Now when you think about composing a nasty hate letter to your evil ex-girlfriend, it actually happens!
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I'm a self-modifying sig virus
Once the system is trained, you can think letters at the machine and 'type' via your thoughts.
That sounds rather cool, but wouldn't thinking words be faster?
When I think when I type I think the entire words and my hands type them without spelling the words out. (Kind of like playing the piano)
Of course I suppose this requires training the computer for several thousands words, but it would be having to think the actual spelling out of words at least speed wise.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
I want this for when I'm too lazy to type or use a mouse.
How long before someone patents the idea of using this for a video game controller? Imagine how cool it would be for your kids and their friends to sit in front of the TV wearing helmets and playing a video game without using their hands!
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
Do you have to think in Russian?
...Rob
The American Dream isn't an SUV and a house in the suburbs; it's Don't Tread On Me.
So they can get even fatter? Wasn't part of the idea of the Wii controller to combat this sort of thing?
Starting at 26,000 US, this might appeal to PS3 buyers, but most will find this too pricey.
I SEX typed SEX this SEX using SEX my SEX own SEX BCI-controlled SEX computer. SEX It SEX really SEX works SEX great!
Simpsons did it
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I'm a self-modifying sig virus
I believe there is, or was, already a game that used your thoughts or it may have measured galvanic skin response, it was called Mind Bowling.
*Fred temporarily switches to root in order to edit an /etc file. John comes by to talk.
John: Hey Fred, have you heard that new indie band called R.M. SPACE STAR ENTER?
Fred: What? No! Why did you make me think that?! Now all my files are being deleted!
Stephen Hawking will now take over the world!
Beware those of you who dared park in handicap spaces!
Sugapablo
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all.
I, for one, welcome our mind reading overloards!
Really, doing anything at all just by thinking it would be very, very cool, but it would be even better to use it to control some large machinery. Maybe a car, or a backhoe. Imagine reaching out with the backhoe and lifting a boulder!
A man sits silently staring at a screen, programming structures appearing and shifting before his eyes, snapping between UI and code development. Little error icons and text appear momentarily as he rapidly alters the program to eliminate them.
Suddenly, he stops. He cringes, and hissingly says to no one in particular "Aag! Brain cramp. Third time today."
He goes to the doctor, who mandates he take a day of medical leave while he confers with another doctor. He gets the result: Mental Tunnel Syndrome. Over-use of particular over-grown nerve pathways and signals the mental signaling equipment relies upon to interpret his intent. He'll have to learn to work with new mental commands to his programming interface, which should dramatically slow down his development in the near-term, a setback many programmers don't recover from.
"I was afraid this would happen. That's what happens when you make your entire programming interface out of [censored sexual reference] thoughts - I mean, it was fun at first, and it DID help me get interested in pursuing a career in development, but damn... I just don't know if I'll be able to work in another mental framework now."
The moral of the story: When establishing your first neural language interface, be somewhat careful which thoughts you pick as a baseline.
So what happens if someone with ADHD tries to program in C with this? Can you enter the result in the Obfuscated C Code Contest?
/tinfoil hat on
Now that a machine can translate thoughts into words, how long before it's used in interrogations? What about sensitivity becoming good enough to work from a few meters? Inconspicuous guy passes by. Next thing you know, you love big brother.
Everything old is new again?
Initiate snu-snu!
A computer to control our thoughts.
What?
Could some informed person tell me why they forced people to move objects by thinking "left" and "right" rather than reading the neural impulse to move your hand or something?
Is it more difficult than reading words? Do disabled people forget the neural impulses needed to move their limbs?
IIRC, something similar was done in 1985.
Great, now I have a sudden desire to buy things.
A-And I need to call my mother.
If that technology gets on a super-exo-suit, warfare as we know would change drastically.
I for one welcome our computer enhanced...
...I'm sorry folks I just couldn't bring myself to finish the meme. I have to admit that I've been the sole perpetrator of this plague. I'm sorry. I've been doing it as a desperate attempt to get mod points because my mommy didn't give me enough attention as a child. I tried many catch phrases like "Hey! Wha' Happend?", and "I can't do wo-o-o-k", hell I even tried "bucka bucka" and "woozle wuzzle", all to no avail. Once I found one that worked I stuck with it. I'm sorry, I'll never do it again.
This is in no way new technology. Neurofeedback has been studied since the twenties. I studied this about 10 years ago, and my professor was active in the field, so I got to learn about all kinds of cool stuff they were doing. Basically (probably starting around the 70s or 80s), researchers could wire you up to an EEG biofeedback machine and put you in front of a monitor with several bars or other graphics on it. They would then tell you something like, "Make the third bar grow higher." This would be done by, for example, increasing your brain's beta waves, but you had to figure out on your own how to do that by concentrating until the screen did what you wanted it to do. For children, they made it into a game: A plane is flying along the horizon and you need to make it rise and fall to avoid obstacles. Some very cool stuff with fantastic real world applications: Teaching epileptics how to alter teir brain wave patterns to stop a seizure before it starts, methods of fighting depression without drugs, etc. the list goes on.
It's fascinating stuff, and definitely recommended reading if you can find any material on it.
Oops, here's the correct url.
(I must be lame cuz I can't figure out how to edit my own ^#%$* post)
If it's as accurate I can't wait to fly in a plane that's controlled this way. I am extremely skeptical of getting any accuracy from this setup. The state-of-the-art in speech recognition software is about the same as it was a decade ago, and machines are 50 times as fast with 8 times as much memory. Yet, quality has failed to improve measurably, and by "measurably" I mean the amount of time I have to spend cleaning up the text in a word processor after the speech has been "recognized". For that matter, does any OCR software - which has been around even longer than speech recognition software - work well enough that you don't have to spend a minute per page cleaning up after it?
This is a promising field, no doubt, and I hope researchers continue to work on it. But if past is prologue, I'm not holding my breath until it's really, really useful technology.
Why is my screen blank?
mod parent up
Is there some kind of cosmic constant that depicts if ever there is anything interesting in the news no photograph or video of the subject should be made viewable?
Serioously.. WHERES THE VIDEO?
While you're at it I want the pictures of the frozen Mammoth and the gigantic Ape creature too.
Thanxabunch
Don't worry, you're not lame. Posts can't be edited on Slashdot.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
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This is very old tech. A lot of people have tried to use this sort of thing to control a cursor or whatever. It's hard to make the idea really work though. You could be trying to learn to control it but instead all you learn to do is move your scalp muscles and the resulting signals would make the cursor move. Cool but not sustainable since the muscles would tire out.
I hope some day they get it working (minus the brain reading parts) but this article doesn't talk about whether or not these guys have done anything new unfortunately.
If they can get the "typing" speed up to something reasonable, this system could allow for those who've suffered from tendonitis or carpal-tunnel syndrome to keep working.
A friend of mine is on disability and working only part time due to severe tendonitis caused by typing, and I know he'd jump at the chance to use this if it meant that he could go back to working full time. (Getting disability payments in California is like pulling teeth every month, and you definately have to "lawyer-up" to get them.)
We apologize for the inconvenience.
Just what we needed- another common, practically effortless idea being patented for profit via monopoly.
Otherwise, yes, I agree, this would make an interesting game controller. But honestly, I'd be surprised if the technology was able to evolve to the point that it would be feasible as a good replacement for regular, hand-held controllers. At least, by the time -my- kids would be here. Although, that's not to say a somewhat primitive version of the technology might not work in small-to-medium doses- eq the Wii controller.
Our wealth breeds emptiness
A few years ago I attended a party that someone had brought a brain wave scanner. The device attached to the head via some suction cups as I recall. The box measured the frequencies of the mind for both the left side and the right side and indicated the relative strength on a scale of 0-10 (using Leds) for each frequency band (about 20 bands).
We had a lot of fun playing with it. For instance, when meditating... decreases in the Beta ranges and increases the Alpha ranges would occur and that kind of thing. Each person had their own uniques readings where some were mainly right brained and others were left and usually just in the beta ranges causing those corresponding Leds to illuminate.
When they asked me to try it, All 10 Leds for every frequencies band for both the left side and the right side illuminated. It was like the whole board lit up. Every single Led was lit which was approximately 400 or so.
Everyone looked at me a little weirdly and actually took a step backwards.
It would be interesting to see if other slashdotters also use all of their brain all of the time.
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make
Current research papers put a EEG-based BCI throughput limit at about 30bpm. This is bits per minute. 18bpm has actually been achieved. This is because it is rather hard to alter one's beta waves : one need to concentrate for about 2s or more to make a change (flip a bit) reliably. EEG is what the linked article talks about.
With this kind of throughput one can compose no more than a couple of sentences a day. Clearly this is not going to replace typing for most people anytime soon. Even if one is severely impaired by some brain damage (e.g. a stroke) even a little bit of retained mobility is better. There was for instance this man who manage to write a whole book (the diving bell and the butterfly) through his fluttering eyelid.
However different techniques are being developed. The best in terms of throughput and quality of data make use of f-MRI and other advanced techniques, or are very invasive (actual electrodes in the brain), and clearly this is not going to be possible as a usable tool for most people anytime soon either.
Check back in a few years. Right now BCI is definitely pie-in-the-sky, although it does sound cool.
According to the current research, the average middle class person actually only uses a vocabulary of 1251. An "impoverished" individual uses an average vocabulary of 615 words. A professional uses an average vocabulary of 2,153 words.
An idea for research would be to use a Statistical Language Model, with the Hidden Markov Modelling against "Brainwave Models", as opposed to "Acoustic Models", to create a system that does not need training. I'm thinking something like "Sphinx 4" - only for brainwaves, not soundwaves.
Been there, Done that, Sold the t-shirt to the next idiot in line
Very awesome news for quadriplegics or those suffering full blown paralysis.
Because my link about the failed MS demo joke isn't as funny as this:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=KyLqUf4cdwc
My son laid out just such an idea for a fourth-grade project. That was 1.5 years ago. So, if someone tries just such an obvious move - remember this comment and let me know. We'll get it nullified real quick.
Been there, Done that, Sold the t-shirt to the next idiot in line
I think you mean:
http://www.other90.com/
It's been around for a long time, butnever took off, still not sure what to think of that...
Cmon folks! Games are already way to attractive to kids. We should be doing things to get them a bit more active.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I'm curious to see what the user data would yield in terms of people's innate mental differences. For example, let's take a simple two dimensional movement program using this technology. One person would control it by concentrating with his eyes, while someone else would do it by concentrating on the word, while others may have other ways of doing it. The fact that this is both recorded by a computer and able to be verbalized by the user makes for interesting stuff, no?
I saw this exact device in action at the Annual Society for Neuroscience meeting last October in Atlanta Georgia. I spent about an hour talking to the group that were displaying the device. It uses EEG technology to detect voltage potentials across the skin (caused by inputs into layer 4 of the cortex). The tech who explained the device to me told me that current EEG analysis is not good enough to detect what a person is thinking about, rather it can detect IF a person is thinking.
The device does not recognize thoughts about specific letters, rather it recognizes general thought. The person has a grid of electrodes on the scalp that are measuring the voltage. The person then looks at a computer screen that displays groups of letters.
A band like "A D T E R K" is displayed and the person is instructed to count every band that appears that contains the desired letter. So if the person wants to type an "S" then upon seeing the band "S T V W K N" they would register having seen the S and the process of counting produces a large enough EEG signal that it is logged by the computer. The computer then displays separate bands that contain no more then one letter from the first band. Bands like " T D E I M" or "S B C X Z" might appear and as the second band contains an S the person would count it and produce the EEG signal. The computer then looks for the common elements between the bands and as S is the only common element the letter S is typed.
So again the computer isn't reading specific thoughts, rather just general thinking. The subject doesn't think "K" and then K is typed rather the computer displays a K and the person confirms the choice by thinking.
This display process is very fast (about 1 band a second) but it is rather a slow process to write. It takes around 5 or 6 minutes to write a sentence. It isn't as great as the article makes it seem, but it certainly is a step in the right direction.
Add an optical tracking device to record where your looking, read the Lord of The Rings eBook while the computer records your brainwaves for every word you look at and Viola! your computers vocabulary is ready to using full word recognition.
I am sure its not that easy but you get the idea.
Sam "to lazy to register" Look
I just thought to make this posting and here it is on the screen, using a brain-computer interface called my hands and a keyboard.
I'm more concerned about someone patenting "thought" as a "proprietary interface".
http://www.coderoshi.com/
And to think that we couldn't get our porn fast enough.....
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
Build your own eeg machine, or buy a kit, and use open source software with it. Help the project out: http://openeeg.sourceforge.net/doc/.
I read someone's reply about using the neural impulses of actually moving your hand instead of saying "left" and "right", and this got me thinking - wouldn't it be easier still to move your hand as if you were moving a mouse, it would read the signals and move the cursor on the screen. Of cause, some people may feel more comfortable actually holding a mouse when moving their hand.
..also have a guy bring a toy that would make a women's clothes jump five feet to the right? you know, with a warm cup of coffee?
you go, you!
CS majors know the time/space tradeoff, but they never get taught the 3rd, crucial, tradeoff of the set: comprehension!
What, like this?
I saw these guys at GDC. Then I saw another company with a similar product. Then I was handed a business card by a third company doing the same thing. And now there's this company doing it too.
I'm hoping the technology is mature enough by now to not become vaporware because it really does look neat.
They must have hired ex-atari engineers to get his higly advanced 1970's tech
http://www.atarihq.com/museum/2678/mindlink.html
Isn't it obvious that once a computer can read our minds, and see how messy it really is up there, they'll have all the they need to justify taking over "to protect us from ourselves"
We Are the Borg. Prepare to be assimilated.
Resistance is useless.
echo YOUR_OPINION >
This sounds incredible and is just the direction I think hardware development, especially for games, needs to be moving. It is my belief that the biggest revolution that needs to happen for gaming needs to come in the form of more interactive I/O, since I think the pinnacle of a game experience is probably the HoloDeck from Star Trek. The BCI is great because it is a step in the right direction. Very exciting times, indeed!
Future indie game developer of America (and possibly Canada)
If one can be trained to type using this method, with connections being made between the language center and the part of the brain that controls this, this could lead to some interesting research. I wonder if this process would become automatic, not requiring conscious thought to route language to the new location.
If so, what would we see by putting one of these devices on a trained subject who was asleep? Might one be able to read what text is occuring in their dreams? This could open up a whole new field of research. Of course it might be linked closer to motor neurons, which are mostly disengaged during sleep, making any such study infeasible.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Emotiv - Project Epoc. www.emotiv.com
I think Clint Eastwood would read this topic and think: "As long as i don't have to launch an item in Firefox in Russian!"
In soviet Russia letter writes you!!!
So how long until we put this technology in vehicles? Then when someone cuts you off you really will ram them... lol.
No words of wisedom here.
wake me up when it's nanodots injected into my skull. This is early 90's tech, and you've been able to buy it off-the-shelf for a couple thousand dollars for years.
http://www.ibva.com/
IBVA brain-scan images featured in Macross Plus and available to power your MIDI synthesizer now.
Josh
gigantino.tv - Heavy but weighs nothing.
very little usable progress has been made since then, for some very obvious reasons. If you're not talking about an invasive system, in which you have electrodes surgically implanted into your brain, then you're limited to relying on electric currents that are detectable on the skin surface. But guess what, your thought processes are not actually visible from outside your skull. So systems that use this technology are characterized by extremely low resolution and low bandwidth, i.e. you can't exercise fine control and you can't communicate quickly. You can't use it to play anything but the simplest games, for example, and you certainly can't use it to do anything critical.
And none of this will change, short of a sci-fi style breakthrough that can read better signals through your skull -- which any physicist will tell you is a tall order, at best. If you really want to control things with your mind, you're going to have to get an implant.
Do you have any references to that research? I find that very difficult to believe. I have been studying Spanish for some years now and have a vocabulary of between 4000 and 5000 words (as shown by my stack of index cards), and I am nowhere even close to being fluent. I am estimating that I have at least twice as many words to go before I can have real conversations with people or read a newspaper. I have to assume English cannot be so different. I had heard that somewhere between 3000 and 5000 core words were necessary for day to day speech in most languages, but it certainly has not worked out that way for me.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
The most obvious use would seem to be to supply one to Stephen Hawking. He's slowing down on the clicker he's used with the two fingers that still work (and boy must those fingers be magic, he managed to divorce and re-marry), all a device like this would have to do is let him "click" without having to move. Everything else is set up for him already, though there will probably be room for improvement over the existing system. Still, I bet even a return to "as good as it used to be" would be a real boon for him.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
FROM THE ARTICLE 'Five years ago the system was too bulky to be transported easily, and now the various parts can fit in a shoebox. In 10 years it could be fast and accurate enough to commercialize in home PCs or games consoles, according to Guber'
This is not new. This company has had it for five years. It is inaccurate and can only parse 18 characters a minute, that's not quite 4/wpm. I don't know about you but in without thought typing I type at about 60/wpm. He hopes it will be good enough to use in homes 10 years from now.
How about we see this story again in 10 years instead of seeing the same not to be available this decade interfaces every 6 months or so.
Are you counting irregular conjugated verb forms?
01101001 01100001 01101101 01101110 01101111 01110100 01100001 01101100 01100001 01110111 01111001 01100101 01110010
Don't give them any ideas.
FC Closer
I wouldn't be so sure about that...
"It's all in the name of science. Weird Science."
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090305/
My other SIG is a Sauer.
Does no one remember the Craysoft "Thought-Pulse" joystick? This article reads just like the one printed in UK "Your Sinclair" in about 1987, announcing this exact same technology. Is it the 1st of April??? ;)
CheShA: Manchester Breakcore / Drill and Bass Yes I'm a s
The term we should use for this technology is Psionics. Avionics is flight technology, this is mind technology. Plus it just sounds cooler than BCI. D&D fans will recognize the term as referring to telekinesis, telepathy etc. Those should actually be called Psychogenics. So, when can i use this to fly my veritech?
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yeah sure making Borgs out of your kids is the way of the future
A better way to control my armored battle suit...
Every try using a mouse inside one of those things? I thought not.
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
Try this on yourself: speak a sentence out loud. Then speak it again, but without actually saying it. Say it in your head, loudly. I believe that the brain moves through similar patterns in both trials. I agree that typing words probably triggers a similar response, and thus phoneme recognition might work. Imagine speech recognition without having to speak!
I really wonder how gaming will be in 5 or 10 years.
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Been there, Done that, Sold the t-shirt to the next idiot in line
No. I usually memorize verb conjugations without index cards. Nor am I counting the many words which are the same in both languages. At first I did actually write the same word on both sides of an index card, but this exercise quickly lost its appeal. 4000 words is nothing. The problem is most people who are really gifted with languages (IOW not me) never count. And in my experience, if asked, they will consistently underestimate their working vocabulary. A thousand words is enough to, say, rent a hotel room in Mexico, but nowhere near enough to have an actual, in-depth conversation. Considering how many words are actually in even the smallest dictionaries (typically at least 50,000), this should not be surprising to anyone.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
since the invention of keyboards. Does this mean in the future slashdotters will have bad typing skills? are we going to think too much and fail on using a keyboard when we need to?
In this field no matter how much you know, You still don't know anything.