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Device Reads Messages From Surface of the Brain
Al writes "Technology Review has a story about a start-up company that has developed a more-accurate and less-invasive way to read a patient's thoughts. Neurolutions, based in St Louis, has developed a small implanted device that translates signals recorded from the surface of the brain into computer commands. The device, which is less invasive than implants and more accurate than scalp electrodes, uses a grid of electrodes placed directly on the surface of the brain to monitor electrical activity. This technology is currently used to find the origin of seizures in patients with uncontrolled epilepsy before surgery. But the company says it could also help paralyzed patients control a computer and perhaps prosthetic limbs using their thoughts. Tests involving more than 20 patients have shown that people can quickly learn to move a cursor on a computer screen using their brain activity."
The signals in that video are recorded from the scalp. Basically when you filter the electrical signals from the brain through the skull you lose a lot of spatial resolution. Given that spatial maps are one important way the brain encodes information having the electrodes actually on the surface of the brain makes a huge difference in the amount of information you have access to.
That said, this is not really a new technology, merely a new application of electrocorticography. Non-invasive it is not, since it involves opening up the skull. It's only "less invasive" compared with poking an electrode deep into the brain.
"More-accurate and less-invasive" is misleading, since the thing that it is "more accurate" than is not the same thing it is "less invasive" than. It is more accurate than the minimally-invasive electrodes-on-the-scalp method, and less-invasive than the more accurate electrodes-implanted-into-the-brain method.
It is, likewise, less accurate than the electrodes-in-the-brain method, and more invasive than the electrodes-on-the-scalp method, so it would be as accurate (and as hyperbolic, in the opposite direction) as TFS to call it a "less-accurate and more-invasive" method as it was to call it a "more-accurate and less-invasive" method (simply switching which existing method it was compared to for accuracy and which it was compared to for invasiveness.)
It would be most accurate (and not at all hyperbolic) to call it a method which is intermediate between two existing methods in terms of both accuracy and invasiveness.
Offtopic: You know ~ is already in use to elongate words. Or make them sound more musical.
;; or even shorter ; to represent a type of sadness or confusion( ;_; is a sad emoticon in japan and ^^;; is confusion (sweat drops)), this is possible since the semicolon doesn't exist in Japanese. As well some people use ^ at the end of a line for happiness (from ^_^). And // for.... ughh or you are an idiot (from -_-//). There are other various sentence endings that take part of the emoticon and attach it to the end to refer to different things. And japan has hundreds of different kaomoji(emoticons) unlike the 10 we might use. And so you don't need to ask, there isn't to my knowledge a line ending for sarcasm. I think it'd defeat the purpose of being sarcastic anyways :P
ex. Hi~
Hm~~~~~
The origin is Japanese where a double vowel word like konpyuutaa is written as konpyu~ta~ (written in japanese character of course). Written to drag it out you would write one really long tilde but since the advent of computers generally people use a chain of them together. Also of note that you might be interested in from japanese culture. Japanese people often end sentences with a
"connecting cameras to their tongues" WTF?
The original ScienceNews article from 2001 is now subscriber only:
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/1946/title/The_Seeing_Tongue
But you can read a copy of it at:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1200/is_9_160/ai_78681631/