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.

Comments

For a moment, I was excited

[Opportunist]

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.

Brainwave hijacking

[Crowd Computing]

It's quite impressive considering the hardware. The demonstration uses a "trick" used by practically all current Brain-Computer Interfaces, which is to pick the more conspicuous brain wave patterns and use them, rather than abstract thoughts of movement, to steer the machine:

Instead of looking for specific thoughts, I looked for an EEG signature that would be naturally easy to detect and that I could use to signal intent. The easiest such signal occurs whenever you close your eyes: For most people, when the eyes are closed, a strong 10-hertz brain wave begins across the back of the head, where the brain’s visual processing centers are located.

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.