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Sending Messages With Your Brain Via EEG
An anonymous reader writes "From a University of Wisconsin-Madison announcement: 'In early April, Adam Wilson posted a status update on the social networking Web site Twitter — just by thinking about it. Just 23 characters long, his message, 'using EEG to send tweet,' demonstrates a natural, manageable way in which "locked-in" patients can couple brain-computer interface technologies with modern communication tools. A University of Wisconsin-Madison biomedical engineering doctoral student, Wilson is among a growing group of researchers worldwide who aim to perfect a communication system for users whose bodies do not work, but whose brains function normally.' A brief rundown of the system: Users focus on a monitor displaying a keyboard; the interface measures electrical impulses in the brain to print the chosen letters one by one. Wilson compares the learning curve to texting, calling it 'kind of a slow process at first.' But even practice doesn't bring it quite up to texting speed: 'I've seen people do up to eight characters per minute,' says Wilson. See video of the system in action."
Will this work on zombies?
Is this anything like TCMP?
I got a catholic block.
That a brain was involved in the process of Tweeting.
It may not be as quick as texting yet, but as the interfaces and the technology gets better, I don't see why it couldn't be.
For this to be possible at all with this preliminary technology, it shows the future iterations could be amazing.
"I don't have to think. I only have to do it. The results are always perfect, but that's old news." - Meat Puppets
This sounds like we're getting that much closer to a human computer interface. How long till we go a little more invasive and have implants that let us "jack in" ala matrix, or andromeda, or any other Sci-Fi show or movie, and start interacting merely by thinking. In the next few hundred years we could turn ourselves into fat unmoving beings plugged from birth to death into computers. Till solar flares overload the system and kill us all at least... Either way, very interesting to see where this line of research takes us as a species.
The musings of just another geek and his junk.
In related news (to TFA): This kind of interface was on "House" the other week.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Think how much more Stephen Hawking could gives us with this device.
:-)
I know he's in the hossie at the moment and I hope he recovers fully, enough to try this device.
Send one to him. Now!
If I had an Ass, I'd call it Fanny Bottom, then I could slap my Ass; Fanny Bottom, on the Arse.
If this relies on a screen why not just use the screen and use pupil tracking to determine what letter people want to "type" instead of thinking about it which seems so far slow.
...can be found here:
http://nitrolab.engr.wisc.edu/
Carousel is a lie!
So, when the letter being focused on flashes, the EEG picks it up and figures out which row and column are desired...
So it wouldn't work very well for the blind and its not pulling the letters out of the brain, its just a more sophisticated eye tracking device, similar to the goggles in apache helicopters? Why not just fit patients with those for a faster input method?
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
d a m n t h i s t h i n g i s s l o w
As this technology gets better isn't there going to be a big chance for really bad Fruedian slips? XD
Princess Leia: The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers
Instead of flickering one row or column at a time, flicker ALL the letters simultaneously in different patterns. The brainwave trace should follow the one you're watching and the wait for it to be identified and confirmed will be much shorter.
= = = =
How is this better than eye tracking?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
"The interface consists, essentially, of a keyboard displayed on a computer screen. "The way this works is that all the letters come up, and each one of them flashes individually," says Williams. "And what your brain does is, if you're looking at the 'R' on the screen and all the other letters are flashing, nothing happens. But when the 'R' flashes, your brain says, 'Hey, wait a minute. Something's different about what I was just paying attention to.' And you see a momentary change in brain activity."
Their "cognitive click from flash recognition" interface sounds an awful lot like the retrace timing system used for the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NES_Zapper.
I'm curious what kind of language optimization has been added, if any. Do they use predictive text of some sort?
Also, it seems a waste to limit the input to a display of a static keyboard (other than ease of use for people who know where to look for certain letters.) Why not have a dynamic interface, something alongs the lines of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dasher/?
Kif Kroker: One beep for yes, two beeps for no. ... [Fry beeps twice]
[Fry beeps once]
Captain Zapp Brannigan: Double yes. Guilty.
All he would need to pick up with the EEG is "up" or "down" signals, and it could be used to type very quickly with Dasher
http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/04/single-finger_text_input_1.html
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/Demonstrations.html
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
P R O N
in 30 seconds, without tying up my hands..
When will Hawking get one?
Speaking of Hawking, they should change this so that it is full words. It is probably easier to get the comp to recognize the difference between left or right than A,B,C,D,.... Use the interface that Hawking has on his computer, where it just narrows down the word groups.
This system has been around for a while; I've seen it demonstrated live twice, and it didn't work at all either time. In my opinion, even in best conditions (bald patient, shit-tons of electrodes, professional setup, well-trained subject) it doesn't work well enough to fuel science-fiction fantasies, and probably never well. For locked-in patients, who can do nothing but move their eyes, though, it's an awesome technology. They made a movie recently about such a patient who spent years using it to write a novel: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0401383/.
Here's how it works - metal electrodes on the brain (EEG) pick up an analog signal, and *any* stimulus which is particularly salient to a subject creates a spike in the signal 300ms after that stimulus appears (this spike is called the P300, there's a good wiki article on it). If you have a dude staring at a grid of letters, you can tell which one he's looking at by hunting for the big spikes 300 ms after the right letter flashes. The only problem is the signal-to-noise ratio, which is notoriously terrible in EEG, though of course there are people out there working on improving it.
I so want to do this! (Thinking really hard now...) Is it working?
Quokka bites are not a medical emergency!
I typed this message with brain waves. I did this making waves that actuated the input mechanism. The input mechanism is a complex chemical-based detector which translates the waves into physical movements, which it then translates into electrical signals using crude switches. In the article, a device is described which uses a mechanism which is different in particulars, but gives the exact same result (though slower).
Sending messages from your brain via oral vocalization! Have any of you guys heard of this new discovery....
Perfect for saying "KILL ME " over and over again.
Actually, I was sort of wondering about the quote from the summary:
Wilson compares the learning curve to texting, calling it 'kind of a slow process at first.' But even practice doesn't bring it quite up to texting speed: 'I've seen people do up to eight characters per minute,' says Wilson.
I don't know if Wilson has seen how fast people really get with texting, but it's fast. This would have to get a lot faster than 8 characters per minute to even be close to texting.
They chose this method, rather than flashing single letters in sequence and looking for the change in activity when the desired letter flashes?
A Beowulf cluster of those. I wonder if the on-screen keyboard they are using is Dvorak. The Dvorak keyboard layout is far more efficient. Qwerty was deliberately designed to slow people down. I personally switched to a Dvorak keyboard on my EEG device, and I went from 8 to 12 letters per minute and experience way less eyestrain now.
As you quoted yourself, he was comparing the learning curve to texting, not the speed or final result. It takes some time to get used to how texting works and to become good at it. Seems like he's saying this is the same, regardless of how fast the result is. It's a similar learning experience.
To use a familiar car analogy, the learning process for driving a car would be similar to learning to drive a speed boat. They both have accelerators and steering and such. They both take practice to get use to the "feel" of how they handle, etc.... and in the end, cars usually blow boats away for top speed... but cars and boats are very different vehicles in the end. The learning curve is just similar since they are both vehicles that move forward at high speed and steer.
Same with this. Texting, and neural interface (sort of). A similar process is involved in learning to use either and they are both input devices. But very different technologies targeted at different people and devices... just like cars vs. boats.
I'd also compare this to learning to touch type on a keyboard. Which is again very different (and much faster!) than texting in the end... but it's a comparable learning curve. Which is what Wilson was trying to articulate.
Think about growing a new arm...or a new anything. It might be an appendage you've never previously imagined before. "Thought" is not the same as motor control. I don't think my fingers into typing this post at 60wpmish. If I had to think about it it would take forever to type.
Now think about if you had a third arm growing out of your chest. How would you control it? Without the motor control that has been learned over several years of childhood and adolescence, what good will it do you? A good question is whether or not adults will ever even be able to master this technology.
It's my understanding that cochlear implants are useless for anyone born without hearing that hasn't had them installed by, say, age 5 or 6 or so. The reason being is that the brain must develop its auditory region during childhood and becomes incapable of making such a "major upgrade" after early childhood.
If this is the case, you may see young children doing amazing and unheard of things with these new interfaces, but us, the old man wannabes are just gonna be shit outta luck on this one. We may be stuck with the klugey manner of thinking of a flashing R while our children are growing new "arms" to control the world with.
Damnit, now I've made myself jealous. On a thought provoking side note finish: Right around now is when the generation that will have no idea WTF a dial tone is begins...
I think I can, I think I cam!
Maybe they should inlude the any key, u know for those special people.....
http://entrainer.sourceforge.net
Looks like this program is in the process of adding EEG input via the OCZ NIA. Interesting stuff...
He already knows what the keyboard looks like. He should have made it where he thinks of the character and it appears rather than focusing the eyes on a keyboard. The problem with the keyboard approach is that think of a key on the keyboard. In a sense you think of a image of the area round that key. Say the H key, but in reality you visualize the keys around it as well.
Now you know the shapes of letters. Think of an L and that's about it.
It would be cool if you could think entire words as well, but it's more likely that we visualize many words IE Apple or Orange, but if you visualize the words it's like the keyboard problem again, you're visualizing the characters around it and that brings up interference.
Hell, I text that fast, and I suck at it.
Hell, I actually type, with no predictive stuff, that fast, on a cell phone numeric pad.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
I'd have to say that this is kind of the wrong way to go about expressing yourself directly from your brain. The brain doesn't naturally think in language. Language is manmade and is a "higher level protocol" if you will, so something that directly accesses brainwaves (via EEG) and tries to output English or another language is kind of dumb IMHO.
Why not make something that expresses emotion (happy/sad/mad/regretful/passionate) first? It'd probably be way easier to get directly from the ole noggin.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
TWATTER, Arsebook, Tuesday — A direct neural interface to post on Twitter has been created by Adam Wilson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
"We originally hooked it to the brain," said Wilson, "but only a very limited selection of messages came out, that appeared to be coming from somewhere else. So we've just gone directly to the penis without the middleman."
Male humans suffer from having functional bodies trapped with almost completely paralysed minds. The penis is an organ used by male humans primarily for thinking and making important decisions. It is also used as an outlet for useless bodily excreta, such as sperm.
The messages -- or "twats" -- cover the whole range of human experience in 140 characters, from "ANOTHER PINT WHAT AN EXCELLENT IDEA" to "DYING FOR A SLASH" to "GDAY LUV NICE TITS" to "WOOHOO GOT A GOER HERE" to "OH DEAR GOD WOKE UP DEAD WTF IS THAT MUST CHEW ARM OFF."
"The next stage is a feedback loop for at-replies," said Wilson. "We're hoping to create the dream of every internet user: a response system that will send five hundred volts through someone's pants when they say something unbelievably stupid."
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Fortunately someone posted the video on youtube so one doesn't have to be able to play .mov videos..
.mov doesn't have sound?
No sound, but maybe the original
Link
Connection closed by foreign host.
Seems to me I remember reading in Ted Nelson's "Computer Lib and Dream Machines" about a working prototype headband and software where a a cursor continually scanned across the alphabet (on a screen) and when the student caused the correct pattern the the letter currently over the cursor would be added to the output. The student could write a sentence this way. Now of course what this article describes is more sophisticated but of course it's also about 35 years later too...
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
Shouldn't this be under the Borg icon instead of the old phone? After all this is the very basics of Borg communication... Ahh but we used that icon for Bill, right?