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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."
When this becomes a standard human input device...I don't want it. How will you explain when your browser suddenly navigates to your favourite porn site.
It's hardly "non-invasive".. they have to open your skull to implant it.
How we know is more important than what we know.
How much longer till we can figure out how our brain "codes" things then exploit it for our own benefit? Just think about it, custom-made drugs to make it seem like you are flying, fighting a dragon, more epic than any video game imaginable, all while being perfectly controlled with little to no side effects. Or take a pill and have the entire library of congress memorized. I wonder how much longer this will take.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
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.
I hope you don't twitch under extreme pain. Could end up in some kind of endlessly recursive feedback loop. Which would hurt. Muchly.
I liked the other thing you were going to say much better.
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 that scalp electrodes, uses a grid of electrodes placed directly on the surface of the brain to monitor electrical activity
Awesome! They developed an implant which is less invasive than implants!
Next up, a duck that quacks louder than a duck!
Laying an electrocorticogram array (that's what they're using -- it's not new) on the surface of the brain requires removing a section of the scalp, skull and dura mater. There's nothing about it that's not invasive as well as dangerous. Single cortical or deep electrodes can be put in through very small drilled holes. The former requires a full neurosurgical suite/team. The latter can be done in a clinic visit if localization isn't critical, or else in a CT or MR scanner with no more invasive electrode technology than the clinic version. The draw back to implanted electrodes is that inserting them into proximity of the neurons of interest can cause them to die off immediately, and will cause them to die off eventually.
Both are unnecessary for the application. In 1994 a researcher working at Radford University with Karl Pribram developed an EEG analysis program that could recognize various shapes, sizes and colors (various combinations thereof) of objects both seen and only internally visualized, with a 95% accuracy. Such accuracy among the many permutations of possible signals could very easily translate into control signals sent to another device. Fully designed but not built around this technology was such a control device intended to run an 8 stepper motor robotic arm using a standard parallel printer port. Since it rests on the scalp, an EEG electrode such as we used here is not invasive in the least. Well, the sticky glue electrode paste necessary to keep the electrode on and conducting for several hours tend to pull out hair, but that's annoying and slightly painful, but not invasive.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
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