Slashdot Mirror
The Computer That Can Read Your Mind
magacious writes "Gtec has showcased a computer that can read your mind over at the CeBIT trade show in Germany. Designed primarily to help those who can't write or speak, the system makes use of a skull cap and wireless technology to transform brain waves into letters. It's the first patient-ready computer-brain interface, according to its Austrian makers. It takes around 30 seconds per letter for the computer to recognise what you're saying the first time you use it, according to Gtec, but this improves vastly with practice. '"One second per letter is very tough," Gtec's Engelbert Grunbacher said, adding users can usually easily get to five or 10 letters per minute. "You learn to be relaxed, focused. You improve."' It might look quite wacky (pictures here) and at €9,000 the system is not cheap, but it could help enhance the lives of many people who have a great deal to say but no real way of saying it."
As I've understood, mind reading comes down to recognizing certain patterns in the brain. Given improvement in the processing speed and database of patterns, could it be possible to draw a complete picture of what you are thinking? And if yes, would sleeping interfere with such?
It would be great if you could save your dreams and watch them later, especially as they're usually really great entertainment in sleep but you forget them really quick. There's basically three dreams I still remember. First one when I was on first or second grade about a girl I liked then. Second one about a girl in my high school - interestingly, I didn't have feelings for her before this dream where I slept next to her. And third dream about some brazilian I had sex with (a sex dream, and I accidentally cummed on side of my girlfriend back then). But saving all those dreams would be great. Wonder what RIAA would think if everyone started watching their own interesting dreams instead of movies though...
I wonder if it'll work as a TV remote.
I am sure he will be one of the first to use it.
So now if people are thinking about their passwords while typing it in, it could be picked up by this ?
No, no, no, you're doing it wrong, you fools! Petite Japanese girls in school uniforms demo futuristic tech products not large bearded Austrians (with three layers of clothing on, no less). And the demo messages shouldn't be "HELLO IT PRO" but instead something like "OH HAI, SUPER FANTASTIC HAPPY FRIENDS!" Jesus, haven't you ever been to E3?
My work here is dung.
screw it, it already knows what I'm going to say.
What we really need is a computer for people that can't think!
If they think it can read minds, they've obviously never tested it on a woman!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
it worrk pretty good
at cebut show rite now
babe at booth acros th isle
gawd shes hot
2 bad im wearin ths goofy hat
But can it run Linux?
TMI! Too Much Information!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Stephen Hawking would be looking into this.
And my friends called me an idealist.
It's called 20q and I bought it at in the Seattle Science Center gift ship for $15. the box in came in clearly says it can 'read your mind'. One time I thought of 'playstation' and it got the answer after 9 questions. Then I thought 'this thing is pretty dumb' and it got the answer after 3 questions!
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
Hot cylon chicks can't be far behind!
Best Slashdot Co
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0401383/
But probably more useful for locked in syndrome
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locked_in_syndrome
More music, fewer hits
Wouldn't something like this be an amazing tool for dislexic people?
Perhaps they can figure out exactly what's going wrong with their brain wiring if a computer can have direct access to the signals it's giving out and actually understand them.
I can imagine the first output would be
"KILLME"
I have a friend who has ALS (same disease as Hawking) and we haven't gotten a proper message from him in more than 2 years. I can't imagine how lonely that is. These types of systems really pay off in the quality of life they can create for disabled patients and such. Color me excited.
I do, however, hope the price drops significantly.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
to think in Russian.
Wouldn't it be a lot faster and cheaper to integrate eye-tracking technology into Dasher?
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/
G - e - t - - - m - e - - - a - - - b - e - e - r - - - P - L - Z
Certainly would have made writing his memoirs much faster. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diving_Bell_and_the_Butterfly This was a very interesting movie, I would definitely recommend it!
The kind of mind reading that this article implies, and what some posters are worried about (is it 1984 again?) is a long, long way off, about "50 years" in scientific terms.
I worked with a student on a similar Brain-Computer-Interface to what appears to be shown here. In actuality, the interface barely reads your mind at all, the grid of letters you see flashes while you focus on the letter you want to type. When that letter flashes, your brain registers this, and your 'surprise' at seeing the flash is what's measured. Knowing the time that this happened, it is possible to eventually deduce what letter on the grid the patient is focusing on.
So as you can see, "Computer that can read your mind" is a rather sensationalist article title to say the least. It's also a massive pain in the ass to try to use a device like this, you literally have to focus on the letter you want to type and absolutely nothing else, or it'll take longer and longer to determine what letter you are 'typing'.
I would hope this has to go through the same clinical trials that introducing a drug would. The fact that you can "learn to be relaxed, focused. You improve." means that you're changing the frequency and wavelength of your brain's electrical output to comply with the requirements of this device.
Me, I'd want to be damned sure that wasn't going to introduce long-term side effects before using it.
This is just another tired P300 system. Yes, it works, eventually, with practice, and with a messy setup. But the signal was discovered in 1965, and this is far from the first implementation of it, or even the first mass-market computerized commercial one (which I think was IntendiX, though that was pretty recently).
S .. E.. N.. D.. A.. M.. A.. S.. S.. I.. V.. E..
B..O..T..N..E..T.. T..O.. The Nexus Of Office LACK Of Producitivity.
Thanks In Advance.
Yours In Tashkent,
Kilgore Trout
Wouldn't that be a better world? Posts would be short. And insightful. Like this one.
According to the more detailed description of how this works, lights go across the letters and each time it passes a letter you want to add you need to concentrate. So it basically has a brain activity meter and can tell if you're thinking hard or not, it's not like you concentrate on the letter A and the machine reads it from your mind. I think your thoughts are quite safe for a long time to come.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Belanger shrugged. "If what you say is right, I'm kind of sorry for the guy."
Weill nodded sadly. "I'm sorry for all of them. Through the years, I've found out one thing. It's their business; making people happy. Other people".
Dreaming is a private thing
Free Martian Whores!
Is this thing really trying to recognize and distinguish twenty or thirty different brain patterns each associated with a particular letter, number or mark? It seems setting it up to read morse code or some other binary coded system would make it faster and easier on the user. You could even put the letters and codes up on the screen. Too bad the article doesn't have more info.
Geek #1: At my cousin's bar-mitzvah they had this enormous LAN party where everyone was wearing a mind reading computer, which was really sweet, but no one wanted to play with me and everyone was talking in some funny language.
Geek #2: That wasn't a LAN party, you idiot, that was a synagogue.
At last, someone implemented DWIM.
At the bottom of the
After several years of practical use, they will come up with a dvorak version.
We already have this. I think it's called emacs.
See, slashdotters - somebody cares about you.
At the bottom of the
So I guess it will be some time before one will be able to get a frosty piss that way.
I built something like this last fall using a NeuroSky dry EEG from the Star Wars force trainer ($90), hacked the serial bus from the NeuroSky chip into an Arduino ($35) with an asyncLabs WiFi shield ($60), then from there to my G1 dream where I had a 2-set-selection visual interface that minimized the expected number of selections needed to choose the word based on a dictionary with associated word freqeuencies. 30 seconds per letter or less is probably about right. 3 weeks of on-and-off evenings. How does this cost 9kEuros?
Vocalizing a sound is a mechanical activity directed by your brain.
Deciphering those directions to your vocal mechanics is a long way from deciphering the underlying representational system which you used to decide what to communicate. No one has a clue about that system or its logic.
So, you're dreams are safe.
Unless you twitter them away.
meow meow/meow meow,meow meow/meow meow,
meow meow/meow meow/meow meow/meow meow.
postcomment compression filter can kiss my butt.
Nurse: Is there anything you need?
Patient: H.......E.......A.......D
Nurse: Hmph. [Storms out of the room]
Patient: ......^H.......T
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Does this thing really measure brain neuron electrical signals, or does it measure scalp muscle electrical signals (electromyograph)?
And with 30second/letter times, using cellphone like assisted writting could be useful (and there you need "keys" to select which offered word anyway), or like this in a desktop environment.
Damn five letters a minute.
In fact, it doesn't read minds. It merely interprets certain kinds of brain activity. Not the same thing. Not nearly the same thing. In the same way your mind has to tell your brain to move your finger to type on your keyboard, your mind has to tell your brain to activate certain neuron groups to provide inputs to this device. It's just a fancy keyboard that you don't have to touch.
Real mind reading can't happen until we first understand how the brain creates the mind. Therefore, don't believe it when you see articles that say that some computer interface can read minds... no one has a clue, yet, how to get past that first step.
Exactly, although the way it works is quite clever, it's definitely orders of magnitude away from actual mind reading.
-No Doc, I'm from the future. I came here in a time machine that you invented. I need your help to get back to the year 1985. .It means that this damn thing doesn't work at all!!!
-My God. Do you know what this means?
The technology of the Cray computer can now sit on a pager, (that is already obsolete). For those who say it will take years to actually work, this translates to: it will work. Get a clue. Technology is not a barrier - it is a speed bump. Computers will read minds. Just like today, laws will trail behind technolgy. Your own thoughts, or maybe our own children's thoughts, will not be private. And to the primeval "what do I have to hide" crowd: just try going through one day tracking what your thoughts are as you talk to your wife -your dress looks great, your kids - I really love your project, your boss - your idea is fantastic, your best friend - I'd love to go but I have to..., And that's just conversational. Also consider your thoughts during every human contact, walking into the elevator next to an overwight blind person, or an attractive member of the opposite sex, the police officer who pulled you over, the checkout clerk at the grocery store missing a tooth. Finally, consider every thought you have in private, taken from you, recorded stored and filed. While those of you who actually try to track your thoughts, you will quickly discover the sheer agony of total transparency. Do not take solace in the shortcoming of technololgy, for in the blink of an eye, technology will evolve, and it will happen.
I can imagine it now....
Arm pick up the ball.
Arm pick up the ball.
Arm pick up THE BALL!!
ARM PICK UP THE BALL!!
I worked with a student on a similar Brain-Computer-Interface to what appears to be shown here. In actuality, the interface barely reads your mind at all, the grid of letters you see flashes while you focus on the letter you want to type. When that letter flashes, your brain registers this, and your 'surprise' at seeing the flash is what's measured. Knowing the time that this happened, it is possible to eventually deduce what letter on the grid the patient is focusing on.
If you have to stare at a grid of letters, wouldn't an eye tracker be much faster, more effective, and cheaper?
I don't think so. No computer in the world can read our mind. It is next to impossible. http://ezinearticles.com/?The-Weider-X-Factor-Review&id=3860999
It was called "Until The End Of The World", by Wim Wenders. They developed the dream recording machine and everyone became completely obsessed with it and stopped everything else they were doing, and the world more or less went nuts and collapsed. It was actually a really good film.
Is it different from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FMRI
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga
I haven't a clue, as I said in my original post, I deduced the way the device appeared to work by images taken of it in action and from my experience with a similar device. It might work differently.
Would an eye tracker be able to detect such small movements in the eye and accurately translate them to a point on a grid?
I'll speak my mind now, thumb me down I don't care: That last line from the post kicks ass. :-P
Something uncommon for the godless Slashdot community.
Proves not all of you are bad
An eye tracker would be quicker. The article might not mention it but the core audience for these types of devices is people in a state similar to late stage amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. The concept is that even when voluntary muscular control of the eyes fails, so long as the letter grid remains visible the flash creates the P300 'suprise' event in EEG.
50 years is a long time. I mean, 50 years ago in the field of brain science we were using electro shock therapy. There wasn't an ethics commitee for psychiatric experimentation (which resulted in shrinks torturing people). We had just recently discovered DNA. We just completed our first integrated circuit. And our technology increases exponentially (thus far) not linearly.
Really, if governments cared about technology or perhaps a tech-race started.. Then we'd see this stuff fairly quickly (ability to read the jist of what you are thinking). As in 15years rather than the 30 it might take now.
The problem with this type of technology is that the group that will really benefit from it is very small. Sure, you can produce a few letters a minute, and that is a huge improvement for people with Locked- in syndromw (the final stage of ALS a.k.a. Lou Gehrig's disease). However, this technology often gets promoted to help quadriplegics and other people with severe but not total movement impairments. It does not really help them: the reliable information throughput of these systems is less than you could obtain with voluntary control of a few (facial) muscles. If you can have accurate control of a 2D (or 3D) cursor in real time, that might be an achievement, but it looks like that will require invasive procedures. It may look impressive when people play pong with EEG, but it only requires gross 1-dimensional input. see ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain%E2%80%93computer_interface ) for more on invasive and noninvasive Brain Computer Interfacing.
Let's put the genes back in Genesis.
Isn't this forum for nerds? Since when did nerds have girlfriends?