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Reached Via a Mind-Reading Device, Deeply Paralyzed Patients Say They Want to Live (technologyreview.com)
Neuroscientists have designed a brain-reading device to hold simple conversations with "locked-in" patients that promises to transform the lives of people who are too disabled to communicate. Details of four patients who were able to communicate using what is being touted as a groundbreaking system were made public this week. From a report on MIT Technology Review: Now researchers in Europe say they've found out the answer after using a brain-computer interface to communicate with four people completely locked in after losing all voluntary movement due to Lou Gehrig's disease, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. In response to the statement "I love to live" three of the four replied yes. They also said yes when asked "Are you happy?" Designed by neuroscientist Niels Birbaumer, now at the Wyss Center for Bio and Neuroengineering in Geneva, the brain-computer interface fits on a person's head like a swimming cap and measures changes in electrical waves emanating from the brain and also blood flow using a technique known as near-infrared spectroscopy. To verify the four could communicate, Birbaumer's team asked patients, over the course of about 10 days of testing, to respond yes or no to statements such as "You were born in Berlin" or "Paris is the capital of Germany" by modulating their thoughts and altering the blood-flow pattern. The answers relayed through the system were consistent about 70 percent of the time, substantially better than chance.
70% doesn't seem high enough to make any decisions.
And how was this controlled for confirmation bias, like has been discredited for other techniques where the person that reads the results also knows the answers, like e.g. dog training and lie detectors?
Without doing double blinds, 70% seems like a horribly bad result, and no more than what would be expected from confirmation bias.
"Paris is the capital of Germany" -- some people will legitly not know the answer. And besides France and Germany are both white-man countries in Western Europe that are very close to each other; someone not fully alert could easily confuse the two.
"You were born in Berlin" -- people with varying degrees of amnesia or repression forget their personal details, but still retain general knowledge of the world. For instance, "Do Birds Fly?" or "Is ice hotter than the Sun?" are questions that even full-on amnesiacs can answer correctly.
Also, 70% seems like a pretty horrible accuracy rate. For yes/no answers to such super-simple questions, the success rate should be 100% or close to it.
Why use disabled people for testing? Use healthy ones, this is how you will know if it is working right or not.
But there's always the possibility remote sensing will soon allow you to cruise around in a robot body, visit trade shows, and grab p.... uh, packet analyzers.
Experimental direct-brain hookups already look promising.
Being paralyzed itself is not what scares me; it's being bored if I cannot interact with anyone or read books or rant about stupid web GUI (non) standards on slashdot, etc. The interaction being remote is good enough. After all, my mom's basement wasn't so bad.
Table-ized A.I.
I read once in the local paper an interview with a patient who had some sort of paralysis, (maybe coma?) that they unexpectedly recovered from.
The only thing I remember about the article was her description that:
It was just like dreaming when I was asleep. But when I woke up, I was originally scared, and afraid, and once I accepted it, my imagination started to take over. After a while, I was able to picture myself doing everything I wanted. Everything felt like a dream. And then one day, when I wasn't being busy, I was just relaxing, doing nothing, when I heard a faint ringing sound. And I just started to focus on my inner self. And then I realised that the body I identified with, wasn't my physical body, and that everything I was experiencing was inside my body, expanding and contracting, and like when you realise you're dreaming and you wake up; what I saw and felt around me started to dissolve, as I could feel parts of the world around me, my hearing waking up from it's own generations to taking the sounds of the world outside. And then, I slowly woke up. And like a dream, many bits I could remember simply started to disappear. And then I realised that that body I was used to the past few months, was in a lot better state than how this one's become.
From that account, it really pushed into me the notion that in such a state, like those good at visualizatoin, or meditation -- You basically just learn to re-create your own full reality. Hyper-real lucid dreaming. Better than reality, and more connected, as you realise that your perception of reality is all self-generated in your head, taking into advisement the pulses of electromagic radiation hitting our senses, make it into a pulse, and we create our own personal reality.
The "only thing" you remember is a word-for-word paragraph-long account of waking up?
Sorry to be the skeptic, but 70% of the time isn't really that high
That would be a pathetic result in machine learning.
I wonder if it was double-blind.
I wonder if 50% of the test questions were 'yes' and 50% 'no'.
I wonder whether the test questions were presented in random order.
I wonder if it requires a human interpretor.
I wonder if other researchers can duplicate the results.
Sounds like someone is trying to apply a lie detector to unconscious people.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade