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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.
If we knew where each phoneme was stored in the brain and we could stimulate the computer via activity in this area all we would have to do is think about speaking the word. But things like allophones and the ranges of phonemes in different dialects would throw this off. No matter how dumb people may think southern speech is, it is actually hardwired into their nervous system via language acquisition and would have to be accounted for physiologically. It would probably be easier to have the nodes hooked up to the part of our brains that's responsible for controlling our fingers when we type, the amount of variability found in dialects gets reduced quite a bit just by removing the vocal element of language, even if you're Cletus.
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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.