Microsoft Wants To Read Your Brain

Simon Night writes "Microsoft has entered the realm of brain machine interfaces, attempting to patent a method of classifying brain states from EEG input. 'Human beings are often poor reporters of their own actions,' the patent application notes, so reading directly from your brain is a preferred option."

Comments

Re:Brains and thoughts

[ILongForDarkness]

It would be interesting if they would be liable if there was a bug that left the system easy to hack. I mean your wife finding out your thoughts about her friend, are can't wait for our date this Friday, probably wouldn't go over too well. And the user could agrue they made personal information available that they didn't wish to disclose. Damages: ~50% of life time salary, ouch.

Re:Hrmmmm.... I don't think so.

[Otter]

I liked their use of that highly technical term: "too squiggly".

But the thing here is that there is no science behind using these signals to interpret what one is thinking even with the invocation of Bayesian networks.

It sounds like they were using this method to optimize the complexity of interfaces depending on the user's level of "confusion". (E.g., when the user is in a state of panic, the graph wizard in Excel could offer three or four styles of graph, instead of 12. One of the Linux makers with Microsoft patent licensing could adapt it to look at such a user and decide "Y'know, you probably don't need the GIMP...") I doubt they've tried anything as ambitious as knowing what the user is thinking.

Microsoft-think

[Spy der Mann]

Human beings are often poor reporters of their own actions

I find it very interesting that this reflects Microsoft's thinking. "You say no to this update, when you really mean yes", "You don't know what's best for you", "You don't need that feature, trust us".

What is creepier is that this patent application will grant Microsoft the exclusive right to read your brain... at least in the way the patent describes.

Re:Brains and thoughts

[rolfwind]

What it doesn't say is that humans are also great at altering their own memories -- false memories -- I have experienced this myself where, say I remember someone like a Highschool friend doing something at my 18th birthday party and then when I view the tape and he wasn't even there!

I don't know about others, but I certainly don't put a lot of stock in human memory past a certain point. It's like an analog signal and everytime we re-remember something, we write a new record down that may introduce random errors (perhaps associations) that shouldn't be there.

Umbrella corporation

[jonfr]

Microsoft is this world Umbrella corporation. It is a extinction for our species. The clue, why do they want to mess with peoples brain to start with.

Precision

[DrYak]

One must keep into account that :
- EEG only records surface activity (you only "see" what's visible on the "outside". Deep structures that also play important roles in the way the brain works, mostly by working as filters and first step analysis are not visible on the EEG)
- No matter how much different tracks you analyse, what you read is an overall tendency (you only "see" blurred image. You can get very high resolution, but it's still a high resolution of a blurred out-of-focus image).

The only advantage of EEG is its speed : you can measure those variations in the millisecond range.

There are stuff for witch EEG is a good tool : epilepsy is an example (in epilepsies, instead of having a lot of tiny different activities which just read as noise because of the blurred/surface characteristic, suddenly the whole or at least a significant part of the brain start to fire up signals in a synchronous manner, those "electrical signal spasms" add up nicely and their net result can be seen on the EEG).

But EEG is completely useless because it lacks the fine resolution (it only measures a global effect) that other techniques like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) provide.
(And fMRI is far from perfect too : it measures the increased blood flow of brain regions that are working and are needing oxygen. It's much more precise than EEG but its much slower. At best you have a temporal resolution around several seconds)

The gold standard would be inserting electrodes directly into the brain but that's completely out of question for the purpose that Microsoft want (it can be used in some complex neurosurgery to help predict the potential function loss in case of tumor removal)

So EEG is useless for mood prediction.
They only problem I see with this patent, is Microsoft coming after some obscure small research group that try to develop a tool to assist clinician in diagnosis and Microsoft attacking them on ground of infringing a technology that automatically reads and interprets EEGs (for example to try to push contracts for machines with windows licenses for potential buyers of the technology). i.e.: once again restricting development.