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Computer-Aided ESP Transmits Binary Numbers, Slowly
High-C writes "Dr. Christopher James of the University of Southampton has demonstrated what is being termed 'Brain to Brain' communication. In binary, no less. In essence, one person imagined a binary number, which was picked up by an EEG and transmitted via the net to another PC. The received signal was displayed on LEDs flashing at two different frequencies. The receiver's EEG correctly deciphered the string, resulting in a 1:1 transmission of binary data via thought. The throughput isn't great so far, at .14 bits per second, but it's an incredibly geeky proof-of-concept all the same."
There's a friggin LED in the middle.
ESP stands for Extra Sensorial Experience, but this rig used equipment with electrical sensors. It's as much ESP as a radio that receives electromagnetic waves and plays the result in a loudspeaker.
Well, this is just useless. EEG has been used as input for decades.
..but from the way I understand TFA, the receiving person isn't even aware of the value of the received bit, it's only picked up subconsciously.
I give this 5 years before we start turning appliances on with our minds. MMM I want some coffee = BAM coffee starts being made!
This sounds a lot like Snow Crash to me - making brains respond automatically to perceived binary input. I wonder if it would be possible to use a sequence of flashing lights to stimulate the brain in the correct manner to produce useful perceptual data within the target brain?
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.
Just imagine how useful these could be to disabled people.
Binary I/O from humans. Please, hide this story and the research, don't let the RIAA or MPAA find out, or they will use this to find a way to plug "the analogue hole".
Take Nobody's Word For It.
Capt Christopher Pike used to communicate.
and transmits them to the second user's brain through flashing an LED lamp
Bah, that's nothing. When I talk to my wife, I transmit my brain impulses through air, simply by flapping my tongue, and it is transmitted to her brain via vibrations in thin air! Isn't it amazing? ESP and all?
Well, until the IETF issues an RFC on this technology, it will be a non-starter.
"IP over ESP" . . . usually seen around the 1st of April.
Can we increase the bandwidth, by meth'ing up the subject?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Reminds me of that clip from The Big Bang Theory where the dudes control stuff in their house by sending a signal around the world. Not horribly hard to do, but definitely ups the geek cred.
Linky: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kzjqBacF1k
It's not extra-sensory perception unless the human us sensing things outside the normal perception channels. From the article, it sounds like this is just another input device for a computer to be controlled by a human.
And the title of the article, "Communicating person to person through the power of thought alone", is false, since this thing wouldn't work without electricity. By the same logic, I'm communicating with Slashdot readers right now by the power of thought alone, well of course with the help of food energy, muscles, a keyboard, the Internet, etc.
Hold on a momment guys, my cat is sending me binary telepathic messages.
01100110011011110110111101100100001000000110...
F...o...o..d......b...o...w..l.......e..m...p...t...y
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Like many posts above, i agree that this is NOT telepathy. It is "communication through thought" (from TFA) in the sense that no one spoke or wrote anything down. In TFA they do not use the term ESP, that was added by the OP.
The easy *correct* experiment would be to ask the sender to think of right vs. left and then read that thought with EEG and then activate the receivers brain with transcranial magnetic stimulation over left vs. right visual cortex (TMS)
The much cooler and much harder experiment would be where the sender (with EEG) would see a zener card and the receiver would "attend" to the TMS experience and would have to guess
whether it was a circle, star, wave etc. After each guess the receiver would see the card so he could learn to interpret the TMS signals. That would be computer-aided ESP.
and YIAA neuroscientist.
1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144 233 377 610 987 1597 2584 4181 6765
Don't get the guy started.
Next thing you know they'll be saying this qualifies as public oversight of electronic vote tabulation devices. Which is utter garbage.
Instead of a neural readout, I trained my brain to send signals directly to my jaw, lips, and larynx -- and the people around me correctly decipher the generated audio signals around 95% of the time (plus or minus 1.5%). Bandwidth fairly good, although some poorly-encoded messages cause ballistic sideband feedback from women.
Wheres the obvious futurama reference?
Do you realise (or even realize) that some words are spelled differently in British English than in American English? Analog and Analogue are much closer than mere homonyms, they are synonyms as well.
Ahh - My eye!
The doctor said I'm not supposed to get Slashdot in it!
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The more the article told me about the experiment, the less I cared. ~
Invenio via vel creo
Neurosky's brain computer interface hardware/software would work much more effectively for this.
this is from (http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/05/pentagon-preps-soldier-telepathy-push) "...$4 million for a program named Silent Talk, which aims to "allow user-to-user communication on the battlefield without the use of vocalized speech through analysis of neural signals.""
Ere many generations pass, our machinery will be driven by a power obtainable at any point of the universe. - Nikola Tes
Among the "where's my flying car" genre of scientific wet-dreams, interfacing digital technology with the brain, I think, is far more achievable than most people have come to realize. TFA is not a very good example of this at all, but it brings our attention back to something that not enough people are focused on.
Anyone who has been keeping an eye out for this type of research (translation: too lazy find a ton of links just now) will recall the recent set of Slashdot articles on the vibrating compass belts and anklets created by a number of different groups and individuals? These, in effect, amount to the addition of a new, digital organ, capable of sensing magnetic north, and providing this new sense information to the brain via existing neuronal pathways (nerves in the skin). People who have used these report that after prolonged use, they don't really even notice the devices. There's also the research being done into sensory substition, like the cameras that attach to electrodes on the tongue (or the back -- google 'tongue vision'), enabling those who have gone blind to regain some vision as their brains learn to process the camera's signals as (admittedly, extremely low resolution) visual information. These examples amount to taking analog and digital data and presenting it to the brain in a protocol that it can learn to use. Why is nobody making a big deal out of this? We're talking about a digital computer communicating more directly with a biological computer than has ever been accomplished before.
The brain is a sophisticated structure that we have only begun to understand. But it is smarter than we are! It can learn to quickly interpret complex patterns of data, if provided to it in a framework comparable to ones it already knows.
Imagine an array of electrodes covering a subject's back, controlled by a computer. The computer runs a program presenting the subject with a series of paragraphs read aloud and written out in text in time with the audio. The readings given to the subject are peppered with a list of 250 basic vocabulary words in increasing frequency. Every time a vocabulary word is read, a specific impulse is sent to the electrode array on the subject's back. Over time, the vocabulary words most often presented to the subject are omitted from the audio and the text on screen, but the impulse is still sent to the electrodes on the subject's back. In a final phase, the playback stops at every vocabulary word, sending the impulse and requiring the subject to type in the respective word.
Imagine this program presented to a child as it learns to speak, or read and write.
Would this not be enough to create a digital link to pre-established circuits in the brain? Systems such as this, learned from shortly after birth, could very quickly open new communications pathways, in addition to our visual and aural senses.
This is all just about afferent nerves, though. Getting output from the brain is certainly more difficult, but I don't think it is too far behind. Yeah, so we can read EEGs to play Pong, and that alone doesn't really sound too impressive. But how far could we really train our brains for this kind of output? Imagine another simple computer program: a series of games that use signals from a subject's EEG to raise a ball off the ground to specific heights. Each centimeter on the scale the ball can be raised on is linked to an impulse sent to the electrodes on the subject's back, giving the subject sensory feedback as he moves the ball on the screen.
Now imagine a similar experiment for a subject fluent in manipulating the previous experiment, where each centimeter the ball is raised to represents one the vocabulary words from the first example. Instead of typing in the words at the prompt in the final phase, the subject has to raise and hold the ball at the point on screen/on his back that corresponds. Yes, this binary up/down word seeking (not unlike the kind used in some computer interfaces for the disabled, operating on eye movements) is cumbersome and la
When I was younger and more flexible I could touch my tongue to my ......
Rubbish, sir! Women don't ever talk to us!
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
The communication is there, so now all we need is a way to snoop. Logical progression for a security geek.
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
Forrest M. Mims III built one in 1975! From Radio Shack catalog parts!
(But probably not in a cave.)
...is that it's slower than this technique, and by a mere .14 bps.
RIAA lawyer: someone invented a new p2p data sharing scheme? And it's even computer-aided? Surely it could be used to share music... Sue the bastards to hell, rape their wives and daughters, and profit!!!11!!
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
"You must think in Russian. Slowly..."
If you are able to sort through your thoughts, and only act on the reasonable ones. You have become a Zen master.
I dare you to monitor your thoughts for a full week, and take note, preferably in writing, what you are thinking, and what you are acting. What comes first you think? The thought, or the act?
You'll quickly realize how big an illusion your "control" really is. Mind is constantly seeking gratification and self-confirmation, otherwise it wouldn't exist! And that is our greatest fear, the truth, something in the direction as EInstein said it:
"A human being is a part of a whole, called by us 'universe', a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."
But Einstein, like every other genius like him, was open to other schools of thought, and studied all kinds of traditions with an open mind. Not like the dogmatism of science today which too prematurely dismiss what can't be logically proven.
Now after that, try different diets, and see what effect they have on your thoughts. But I doubt the focus is there in most everyone today, even for a day. But yogis in the past, and in the present, are able to to this and many things more (most of those things being mere tricks though).
Maybe not everything is needed to be proven by science. When you die, you will easily experience yourself, or if you have an out of body experience, you will know that mind and body are two separate units - which have been connected while we live. But mind lives on, with its karma (actions) here on earth, and will in time attract new bodies and experiences, to accomodate further evolution..
Mind can easily have sensory experience without the body, but it either requires extreme fatigue / near death, or a trained and relaxed mind, like a yogi. The thing is, we are usually so wrapped up in thoughts and "worldly affairs". Since we have no chance to "think" ourselves out of our body (not that it's necessarily a goal in itself to have such experiences either..), we have lost every clue on how to do such things - or that it is even possible!
People from every culture in every part of the world describes similar experiences and states of mind (seeing deceased loved ones, "angels", near-death, out of body, the tunnel, relaxing light, healing, etc.). Just on that alone, with an open mind, a scientist with a heart and belief in humans, if not the personal experience herself, should be able to deduce there must be something real in all of these phenomena. Or else, why would all corners of the world share what is essentially the same experiences, wrapped in different words and metaphors? To add to this, the chakra system (India), the kabballa (Israel), the egyptian system and the peruanian (South America) system are all describing essentially the same system of subtle energy centers in the body, where you can translate from one system to the other, almost 100% 1-1. If these systems had no grounding in reality, they would not have such mapping. But since they all are based on ancient, but forgotten, and often unpracticed, science, they have such mapping. Because the energy system is the same in all humans.
What comes first? The experience, or the scientifical proof? Why must the whole universe fit into the scientific square peg-hole of biased scientists?
Of course, science have done wonders for us lately, and the eradication of superstition and illiteracy is also a very welcome improvement whever it happens. However, the success of science may very well be the shortcoming also, when it comes to fully describe the human experience. It's a bit "stuck in the head" so to speak, but in the coming years, will probably have to open up to some deeper truths about life in general in order to be able to evolve further.
But don't just take my word for it. Try reading some books on out of body experiences and reincarnation, like Many Lives Many Masters and others. It's not so far out there as many would like to believe, it is in fact, very much basic to our existence.
There are only 10 types of people:
Those who "get" binary and those who don't.
Would someone mind explaining this? The summary makes it sound like telepathy (with a computer encoding and decoding the signals).
As far as I understand it, the person imagines lifting one of their arms. This is picked up and sent over the Internet. At the other end, a light flashes the EEG readings, and the other person's subconscious observes this, which is picked up by their EEG device, and translated into a "left-arm raise" or "right-arm raise", which is then translated into a zero or one.
Frankly, I'm at a loss for any kind of usefulness. It seems like the kind of experiment done just because they can. ("Yes, but it goes over the Internet!!") Wouldn't it just be easier to translate the EEG and turn on or off the light right then and there?
the person thinks about moving an arm and the EEG picks up that signal.
the signal is sent over the net and that causes an LED to flash.
the flashing LED is picked up by the "recipient's" visual cortex but it's subliminal. the flashing of the LED is literally not consciously perceptable but the electrical activity of the brain is picked up by the recipients EEG.
so freaking what?
Um, the brain remains externally read-only. Nothing to see here.
See, the critical flaw in this experiment is that the transmitted information was evidently taken back OUT of the recipient for decoding. The information presented to the recipient was in a garbage format - flashing LEDs at a certain frequency. The interface on the other side is a PC that decodes the visual information and presents a 0 or a 1 - on the screen. While the sender may be thinking "1", the recipient only sees "1" and has to process it themselves.
Sadly, this proves nothing. This is only using the brain as a medium for transmission... the recipient still doesn't get the sender's thoughts placed into their mind. The recipient may as well be just reading the screen that says "1" or "0".
Otherwise, it would make relaying my point so much easier, wouldn't it?
to see slashdot trolling its users. on an unrelated note, please fix the tab order for the posting form, thanks!
All of you, PLEASE you're driving me INSANE with your rattling on about how Idle is pants. I know that. And I know what you think about CmdrTaco, I just don't care. And no, I don't want to join the GNAA so STOP ASKING. And I'm allergic to grits. Oh god, did you have to tell us that about yourself? I can't even make sense of this any more, must be a Microsoft Patch Tuesday submission in the firehose.
MAKE IT STOP, I beg of you.
This is cool. But I thought the layman's version of ESP meant communicating via one's thoughts to another person. In this experiment, the recipient of the binary digits doesn't even consciously know what he received. Rather, a computer attached to EEG must decode the received digits from reading areas of the recipient's cortex.
And although the LEDs which flash are not perceptible by humans, they are sending a signal which gets picked up by the recipient's eyes for this to work.
Because of those two things, this experiment is not what people typically think of as ESP. And more so, because it uses the recipient's eyes to communicate the signal to the recipient's brain without the recipient knowing, I still consider that a use of the recipient's senses. So I don't think this is ESP at all.
But with all of that being said, what is the point of this?
I dont know why this is called brain-to-brain.. It goes from brain to computer, to LED, to the visual sight of person #2, to the brain of person #2.. Thats not brain-to-brain, thats brain-to-computer-to-led-to-eye-to-brain.. Brain-to-brain would be.. Person #1: "I'm thinking of a number" --> Person #2: "The number is .."