Slashdot Mirror
Brain-Controlled (Inflatable) Shark Attack
the_newsbeagle writes: This is a parlor trick, not neuroscience," writes this DIY brain hacker — but it sure is a nifty trick. The hacker put electrodes on his scalp, fed the resulting EEG data into a specialized processor that makes sense of brain signals, and modified the remote control for a helium-filled shark balloon. Soon, he and his buddies were steering the shark around the room. Why did it take his buddies, too? "EEG interpretation is not easy because, to be technical, EEG signals are a crazy mess. EEG recordings are a jumble of the signatures of many brain processes. Detecting conscious thoughts like “Shark, please swim forward” is way beyond even state-of-the-art equipment. The electrical signature of a single thought is lost in the furious chatter of 100 billion neurons." So builder Chip Audette settled on the simplest control system he could, and divvied up the actual controls (left, right, forward, etc.) among several users, so each one's brain signals could be interpreted separately.
No deal.
It seems that he and his buddies were drift compatible.
" Detecting conscious thoughts like “Shark, please swim forward” is way beyond even state-of-the-art equipment. The electrical signature of a single thought is lost in the furious chatter of 100 billion neurons."
This is wrong. The key change that must be made is that electrodes must move. Then you obtain data from different spatiotemporal locations which can be cross compared, teased apart and greater resolution provided. From here, you can then employ the same techniques as energy disaggregation to decode single thought patterns.
If you want to get really deep, you can use confined radio beams of different frequencies in motion and gain a higher resolution non-invasive system that can theoretically at least work from several hundred KM away.
Then I read that he split up the control over a couple people. Ok, folks. That's been done. If I had known that this was /. frontpage material, I'd probably even have violated the NDA I'm under.
While detecting conscious thought may be tricky (though I don't know for sure, since it isn't the scope of my research in this field), detecting the conscious will to move something (or, more specific, want a change to happen) is well within the reach of hobbyists. What IS hard again is that after a while of doing this, the brain changes the way it "thinks" about a specific "want to change". My guess so far is that this has to do with learning and moving the newly learned trick from the "I'm learning" to the "I'm remembering" parts of the brain. The hard part is that there is no "hard" transition. It happens gradually. You're getting a lot of conflicting data that you can't even reproduce sensibly because you can't roll a brain back to the yesterday position.
Generally a very rewarding field. And a damn lot of room to work in. We know so little about this so fascinating biological computation device.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
So anybody intending to use such a system for practical purposes, say for a paraplegic to move using an exoskeleton, would have to be trained to think counterintuitively.
... including readily available toys.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
If it is on wikipedia, it is not news, and there is absolutely nothing different from controlling a ball (1 D) and controlling 1 D of the motion of a toy shark. There are even more complex mindflex games out there that suggest that one could probably rewire one to allow a single person to control the shark. There is a mind controlled UFO (drone) on the market already that is probably much cooler, except oh wait! It isn't an inflatable shark!
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
https://xkcd.com/585/