That's Using Your Head 303
broKenfoLd writes "In an earlier post, we looked at the future of Matrix-esque control over computers. In that article, monkeys got to play the games. Today at UW in Madison, WI, it's the humans who are playing video games just by thinking about it. While this is cool for us power gamers, it has many more impressive applications, including limb replacement."
Significant Development? (Score:3, Informative)
The final comment was "This is a significant development", but in what way?
What's new? (Score:2, Informative)
Brain Controlled Computing a Reality [slashdot.org]
Playing Games With One's Brainwaves [slashdot.org]
Brain Chip Approved For Paralysis Research [slashdot.org]
Brain Controlled Tightrope Video Game Shown [slashdot.org]
So "what's new"? Is it a new technique this time, has major progress been made? If so, what's the big difference compared to the previous articles?
Re:I don't mean to be a hypocrite... (Score:4, Informative)
Basically how this works is the brain adapts to the implanted electrodes, learning how to activate neurons in the right way such that a computer can detect the changes in electrical potential at the electrodes. The computer can't interpret the signals at all; it just reads potentials from the electrodes. What makes this interesting is that the brain is quite adaptable, and if the signals are used to control the inputs to a device the brain can learn to use the device much like an extra limb.
It remains to be seen just how fine and complex the control can be and how much adaptation the brain can do; but I think the medical community has been way too conservative about this so far, and I am optimistic that once we learn the right places to put the electrodes and the right way to process the brain's signals, controlling mice/keyboards/game controllers/robot limbs will be a matter of a few implants and a year or two of training. The benefit to quadriplegics will be immesurable. For the rest of us, this technology is probably not very useful. Getting the implants and doing the training will be quite an ordeal, not something you'd do to get an edge in Counter-Strike (if it even would give you an edge at all).
Re:The next step (Score:2, Informative)
BrainPort (Score:3, Informative)
It isn't entirely input from a computer, but I don't see why the signals couldn't be generated artificially and sent to a device like this.
Re:Children of Zion Can't Jack In (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Significant Development? (Score:4, Informative)
I think the key difference is that the Brown electrodes were places IN the brain, while the UW electrodes were placed ON the brain, so it was less invasive.
Gibson's story (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I don't mean to be a hypocrite... (Score:3, Informative)
If it didn't require brain surgery and only took a few months to learn, though, I could definitely see it taking off. Also, if it turns out that people can enhance their performance at certain tasks by extreme amounts (which I am not at all convinced of), it could become somewhat common in those fields.
Unlikely (Score:3, Informative)
First, maintaining entangled particles is rather difficult in practice. Entanglement happens when the properties of two particles are interrelated, although the specific values are not. For example, the decay of a radioactive atom might release two photons with correlated polarizations, though you don't know which way each photon is polarized. You can then perform certain operations to change the photon's polarization, and those changes will be reflected in the entangled photon's polarization, and when you measure the polarization of one, the other's is guaranteed to correspond, based on how they were emitted.
However, once you measure the polarization, and know both values, the two photons are no longer entangled and any changes to one's polarization will no longer affect the other. There are also any number of other operations that will cause the particles to no longer be entangled with one another, such as giving a new, known value to the entangled property. For instance, if you have two particles whose spin is correlated (say they're both equal), and take one and cause it to have spin +1/2, that doesn't necessarily cause the other particle to have spin +1/2. You need to do things like changing +1/2 to -1/2, and vice versa, which don't collapse the uncertainty of the system.
The actual class of operations that preserves entanglement is relatively limited compared to the total number of operations possible (I believe the ones that can preserve entanglement are unitary reversible operators, or some such, which are of specific interest to quantum computing, which makes lots of use of entanglement).
In other words, the probability that two particles at either end of your fingernail would be entangled is pretty small, let alone in two separate human beings. There are two many other particles to bump into, and that tends to destroy entanglement.
Furthermore, I'd add that even in the quantum teleportation case, where correlated states change instantaneously, to decipher the instantaneously transferred state requires that the people communicating transmit information to one another that must be sent at the speed of light or less. It works like this:
So even though information is theoretically transferred faster than light, that information cannot be deciphered without sending other information slower than/at the speed of light, so in practice you cannot transmit data faster than the speed of light would allow.
I realize my explanations may have been confusing, but unfortunately I struggle with some of the concepts myself, so it's difficult for me to explain them. However, if you learn a little more about quantum mechanics, I think it'll become clear that a lot of the ideas in your post aren't really possible (at least, as far as our current understanding of quantum mechanics goes).