High-Tech Glasses Help Improve Memory

unassimilatible writes "MIT will reportedly announce new high-tech glasses which they claim will improve memory by up to 50%. The spectacles are implanted with a CPU that sends messages in the form of light to a mini TV screen on the glasses. The messages - like someone's name, or a word like keys or medicine - flash before your eyes at 180th of a second. Pardon me, but I'll wait for the reviews, since I am still smarting from buying those X-ray glasses in the back of magazines." These "memory glasses" were also discussed at the recent International Symposium on Wearable Computers.

Was on nova months ago

Really facinating shtuff. The HUD was wired to a wearble pc setup, so it could display other things, but whenever you looked at someone wearing a namebadge with an IR transmitter (sorry, no facial recog), it would flash their info on your screen, too fast to consiously notice it, but enough to subconciously trigger recall.

People IDing

Another reason to implant RFID tags in people.

Killer app: once RFID tags are in garments in stores, this could indicate all the ones that would fit you. Shoppers at sales would love this.

Re:Was on nova months ago

So it has been shown that subliminal messages work now? I thought it was proven they don't.

No, all that was actually proven was that James Vicary, the guy who claimed to have improved popcorn and coke sales with subliminal images at a movie theater, was a liar. In reality, a "subliminal image" of a bag of popcorn on a movie screen has a very minimal effect on your desire for popcorn compared to the sight and smell of actual popcorn when you walk through the lobby. The notion was that the "subliminal image" had a disproportionately greater effect on your desire for the product than the magnitude of the stimulus could account for. This notion was a crock of shit.

Now these glasses, on the other hand, aren't trying to sell you popcorn. They're passing off information our brains are already looking for, which does work to some degree. The debunking of subliminal messages never addressed whether or not we could see and register the images, only that they had no effect on our desire to buy the product.

"Failed Subliminal Programming"

Er, well, no.

"Flash Subliminal Programming", as you call it, isn't a completely failed research area - assuming you're talking about subliminal priming. Priming is the term used to refer to an experience or procedure that brings a particular concept to mind (see Kunda, 1999, Social Cognition).

There have been many studies which demonstrate the effects of subliminal priming - in a particularly nice one, subjects were shown either 0, 20, or 80% "hostile" prime words - each for 50 ms - followed by a line of Xs to mask the prime. A control group identified less than 1% of the words. Yet, when asked to rate the behavior of a character in a story, people who saw more Hostile Primes rated the actions as more hostile or aggressive (Bargh and Pietromonaco, 1982).

Mere Exposure experiments have been done (Bornstein and D'Agostino) with durations as little as 5 ms. Mere exposure is another interesting phenom - that familiarity breeds liking (see Bornstein 1989 or Zajonc 1968 for reviews).

I just thought I'd babble for a few. :)

So...

So what happens if I forget my glasses?

Re:So...

You can't. The glasses won't let you.

Subliminal messaging viruses

Imagine hacking someones glasses to say "Kill your boss....kill your boss" Or, Kill yourself". Of course, you could have it the other way to say positive things that would help you out Psychologically .

Re:Subliminal messaging viruses

"Of course, you could have it the other way to say positive things that would help you out Psychologically"

Such as... "Kill your boss"?

Re:Subliminal messaging viruses

Imagine hacking someones glasses to say "Kill your boss....kill your boss" Or, Kill yourself".

Yeah, I tried these glasses on once, and all of a sudden I could remember the lyrics to every song by Judas Priest...

Made by MicroOptical

and like everything made by MicroOptical they're "not on the market yet". Vapour.

In other news...

In other news, beer glasses have been found to reduce your memory retention by more than 50%...

subliminal glasses

"The messages -- like someone's name, or a word like keys or medicine -- flash before your eyes at 180th of a second. It's too fast for the eyes to notice, but not the brain."

Drat, i cant find a good link about about these glasses, i saw them before at skool and they help you remember what people said!

Could this be learned for generalized learning?

Could this be learned for generalized learning? Could I load "Mathematical Ecology I" into the device controlling the glasses and learn something from it? Perhaps equations? Probably not learn, but memorize, drill?

Basing off of what little I know about the way human being learn, I can't imagine these could be used for learning of a subject not already known, but I bet they could be used for review or memorization. Neato.

Great for large meetings

Looks like another Media Lab project; you can link to the project homepage here [mit.edu].

Personally I'd find it great if they could add voice recognition to it. One of my biggest weaknesses is remembering new names, especially when I'm introduced to a whole bunch of people one after the other. (I remember a job interview where I was taken on a tour of the building, and met around 10 people in 15 minutes. Then near the end of the tour, one of those people joined us for the rest of the interview, and I was trying desperately to remember which one he was :) ). Being able to have it dynamically associate people's faces with names and display a prompt would be a huge assist.

Bart to Milhouse

"How can someone with glasses that thick be so stupid?"

Subliminal Messages?

It looks like the text flashed onto the eye quickly is used as a primer to get you thinking about a certain thing and thus a memory aid.

From a Psych 101 example:

Whats a popular laundry detergent? Answer after you have read this list:
- Moon
- Ocean
- Water
- Ebb
- Beach

If you answered Tide detergent, congradulations, you may have been "primed" into answering that. Admitedly Tide has a good market share in the laundry detergent but the priming effect can be demonstrated with other non-local examples. (I belive this works best if you live in Canada)

I was under the impression that flashing text quickly so that your eye doesn't notice it was just another form of subliminal messaging...

I was also under the impression that these types of subliminal messages don't work...

So can anyone sort this out? I must be confused about something.

More than that, if TV's or some permutation of a TV in the future can do this, whats to stop companies from flashing "BUY COKE" every 180th frame.

Re:Subliminal Messages?

Actually, I thought "Bleach". You might want to remove "Beach" as a primer...

Re:Subliminal Messages?

The fact that NTSC is 29.97 frames per second?

The Science behind Priming

I was under the impression that flashing text quickly so that your eye doesn't notice it was just another form of subliminal messaging...

I was also under the impression that these types of subliminal messages don't work...

So can anyone sort this out? I must be confused about something.


Sure. What we have here in the glasses is exactly as you stated -- a prime. The idea behind priming is that if you flash a semantically related word right before certain kinds of decisions, the semantic links are strengthened, or "primed" so you are slightly more likely and slightly quicker to respond with a particular response.

If I recall correctly, 180 ms is not fast enough to be undetectable. It is, however, fast enough so that your eye won't be able to saccade over to it before it disappears. (A saccade takes approximately 200ms) This means that for all intents and purposes, you probably won't be fully aware of what it says, though you might be aware that something was flashed, if you were paying attention.

So the idea (as I understand it) is that if the glasses flash a person's name very briefly, you'll be more likely to respond with that name if you are put in a situation where you have to recall it, as the links to it have been strengthened.

As for your question about subliminal messages, I think what you're referring to is the infamous idea that if you flicker pictures of Coca Cola between the frames of a movie, people are more likely to go buy a coke. Well, it's true that this kind of strategy doesn't work -- there's a huge difference between having Coke semantically primed and carrying out the complex behavior of buying a coke (you have the time delay, first of all, which diminishes the activation, the planning required to buy a coke, etc...)

The priming effect is real, but very small, usually only detectable in terms of milliseconds or trends. All in all, recall is the type of task that priming can help in, so this may be very useful. But displaying "Buy Coke" or "kill your boss" really isn't going to do anything at all.

IMPROVE memory?

Sorry, but I don't think this will improve memory. Subliminal clues may help you when you are wearing the glasses, but I bet that when you don't wear them, you won't be able to remember at all, because you will have learned to rely on them, rather than your memory. They don't assist memory, they replace it.

Advertisers' Wet Dream Come True

Perhaps it is just me, but these seem as though they would be an obvious target for next generation marketing campaigns.

As per the article, they are triggered into action via RF. I am in Tokyo right now and the sheer magnitude of visual input from everything from neon to big screen televisions to giant posters is almost paralyzing at times. I am afraid to even contemplate how this annoyance would be compounded thru the use (and surely abuse) of this type of technology by the marketing drones of the world.

And then, there is always the conspiracy theorist angle. What if subversive powers (governmental or otherwise) tapped into this type of technology to recruit and/or spread propaganda. It would completely redefine everything from armed forces and/or terrorist recruitment all the way up to presidential elections.

Even worse, with the subliminal nature of this tech, you might not even realize at first why purchasing a copy of M$ Office 2003 seems like such a great idea all of a sudden, why you are suddenly craving some KFC only minutes after eating, or why you have completely changed your opinion of Dubya...

Scary shit if you ask me...

- n2q

sorry, advertisers can just keep dreaming

i'm one of the authors on the paper, and you should check out the section on "miscues" for why this doesn't work.

subliminal cueing works like this: let's say you teach somebody some name-and-face pairs -- "anne" and "becky". then you show them anne's face and subliminally cue with "anne", and you can improve the person's likelihood of remembering that name.

but let's say you "miscue" -- you show them anne's face but subliminally cue with the name "becky". they are *not* likelier to then type "becky" -- but they *are* likelier to correctly type "anne"! this is the really weird and interesting part of our findings.

we hypothesize that there is some of what psychologists call "spreading activation" taking place: the miscue helps you remember other things you learned in the context of the experiment, but doesn't interfere with the actual production of the correct answer.

anyway, this is why subliminal advertising doesn't work. if you see the word "coke" but what you want is "lemonade", maybe you are likelier to think about getting a drink, but you'll likely get yourself a lemonade rather than a coke.

we have some preliminary data showing that *overt* cues don't work that way. if we show the name "becky" with anne's face in a non-subliminal way, then subjects appear to type "becky" a lot of the time. this is probably why overt advertising actually does work, too.

Glasses New Must-Have Accessory

Since wearable computing and its surrounding technology is almost definately going to mature much faster than something as far off as optical implants that can do the same trick without glasses, I wonder if people will stop using lasers and contacts to fix their eyes because they will want to wear glasses as a utility. In fact people with perfect vision might even start wearing glasses.

Augmented Reality?

Personally, I'm more intrigued by their augmented reality wearable computing research. Instead of something subliminal, it displays the information next to the persons image, so that you can read it, scroll through it, etc. You could retrieve info based on past conversations, their name, their phone number, and other useful things. I personally think that has a MUCH greater chance of being picked up by the average consumer than this thing.

Does anybody have any information on affordable wearable computers (with the glasses and all) that you don't need a computer engineering degree to put together?

Tooltips on reality

For years, I've wanted tooltips on reality. You know, move the mouse over a button on the desktop, and a little yellow note will appear, telling you what happens when you press the button. That would be awesome as augmented reality. Fixing the engine of your car, and uncertain what that part does? Look at it for a few seconds, and an explanation will pop up. Trying to remember the name of an uncle you haven't seen in 15 years? Tooltip glasses to the rescue!
What's next - scrollbars on reality? Now THAT would be useful :-)

that's true more than you think.

you will think sex. At least if Pepsi has it's way, you associate sex with thier Taco Bell icons. The same thing applies to all other big companies. The two strongest urges are sex and death. Alcohol companies push themselves through self destruction, just about everyone else pushes you through sex.

The overall efect of this overstimulation is evident in divorce and suicide rates. If you have not noticed, both of those rates are at historic highs. It's sort of like bodybuilders and steroids, it's never existed before because it's not natural. You are profoundly agitated on a daily basis and it's having a very negative effect on society.

The non free version of these glasses would personalize the message. With RFID's advertisers would know exactly who you are. I can imagine them acting like sunglasses in places like the mall because 90 shops at once will want your 1/180 of a second blip-vert. We'd be better off if this would make people's head explode.