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Comments: 156 +- Science: Device Reads Messages From Surface of the Brain on Wednesday June 03 2009, @06:07PM
Posted
by
samzenpus
on Wednesday June 03 2009, @06:07PM
from the I-want-to-know-what-you're-thinking dept.
from the I-want-to-know-what-you're-thinking dept.
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technology
Al writes "Technology Review has a story about a start-up company that has developed a more-accurate and less-invasive way to read a patient's thoughts. Neurolutions, based in St Louis, has developed a small implanted device that translates signals recorded from the surface of the brain into computer commands. The device, which is less invasive than implants and more accurate than scalp electrodes, uses a grid of electrodes placed directly on the surface of the brain to monitor electrical activity. This technology is currently used to find the origin of seizures in patients with uncontrolled epilepsy before surgery. But the company says it could also help paralyzed patients control a computer and perhaps prosthetic limbs using their thoughts. Tests involving more than 20 patients have shown that people can quickly learn to move a cursor on a computer screen using their brain activity."
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Submission: Device Reads Messages From Surface of the Brain by Anonymous Coward
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Killer App (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
"Focus-follows-brain" will hopefully be followed by "do what I meant, not what I said" ;)
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"Focus-follows-brain" will hopefully be followed by "do what I meant, not what I said"
or the your mouse pointer crashing through the side of your monitor as you try and catch a glimpse of the new post-doc . . .
Re:Killer App (Score:5, Funny)
I hope you don't twitch under extreme pain. Could end up in some kind of endlessly recursive feedback loop. Which would hurt. Muchly.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
You know, this makes sense to me. The same way we can control a car by having the brain control the limbs which drive it, it would be possible to develop new pathways that would make the devices attached to the electrode network actually act just like limbs. Only thing need would be some kind of feedback system to instruct the brain that something is ok or not such as if we clicked on pr0n when we shouldn't be.
Looking forward to using an extra 5% of my under-used brain. The only problem is that electrode on
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
If computers can be controlled by thoughts, why is a cursor needed at all?
Surely it's possible to interact with the controls directly through thought.
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I'm pretty sure people are working on cursors that follow your eyes, but the crazy bastards I heard about were just using cameras pointed at the eyes.
Get the message (Score:2, Insightful)
For a lot of Internet uses it'd just read a one word message.
"Vacant".
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Cool (Score:3, Funny)
More stories like this please.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Don't worry, this is Slashdot. It'll be reposted once this month, again 5 months from now, and again 3 years from now :)
Re:Cool (Score:5, Informative)
ex. Hi~
Hm~~~~~
The origin is Japanese where a double vowel word like konpyuutaa is written as konpyu~ta~ (written in japanese character of course). Written to drag it out you would write one really long tilde but since the advent of computers generally people use a chain of them together. Also of note that you might be interested in from japanese culture. Japanese people often end sentences with a
Parent
Input device (Score:5, Funny)
When this becomes a standard human input device...I don't want it. How will you explain when your browser suddenly navigates to your favourite porn site.
Other uses can't be far (Score:3, Insightful)
We can already let blind people see by connecting cameras to their tongues. If this sort of technique becomes easier/safer, it could be used for any sort of human/machine interface. Prosthetic limbs are only the beginning...
I hope this does not have nasty side effects like increased chances of tumors...
Re: (Score:2)
Scientist1: We've developed a new technique to send camera data directly to the human brain.
Scientist2: Brilliant! Blind people around the world will be singing songs of your greatness.
Scientist1: Of course there will be some difficulty mounting it to their tongue...
Scientist2: O________o..... I didn't know you were THAT kind of scientist... though I should have been tipped off when I heard you were getting sharks for some new experiment.
Re:Other uses can't be far (Score:4, Informative)
"connecting cameras to their tongues" WTF?
The original ScienceNews article from 2001 is now subscriber only:
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/1946/title/The_Seeing_Tongue [sciencenews.org]
But you can read a copy of it at:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1200/is_9_160/ai_78681631/ [findarticles.com]
Parent
Nothing new, but is it efficient? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Nothing new, but is it efficient? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's hardly "non-invasive".. they have to open your skull to implant it.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Don't worry about Lamarr, she's been debeaked and is completely harmless!
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Ya, I think the biggest problem is that the researchers are still in the "look, we can interface!" stage of development.. next comes the "yes, but how good can we make it?" stage, this is the stage that cochlear implants is up to.. until DNI gets to that we'll continue to see "move the cursor" bullshit.
Re:Nothing new, but is it efficient? (Score:5, Informative)
That said, this is not really a new technology, merely a new application of electrocorticography [wikipedia.org]. Non-invasive it is not, since it involves opening up the skull. It's only "less invasive" compared with poking an electrode deep into the brain.
Parent
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How much... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
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We have already begun to do this. For example, understanding the binocular cues for depth perception have given us 3D movies that provide us with the illusion of depth. Providing input to the the brain directly may eventually be more efficient than presenting sensory information through our sensory apparatus, but probably not for a long time. For providing fictional experiences I think it's still goi
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I'm impressed that you came up with a list of applications and NONE of them included any combination of "sex" or "supermodels".
Re:How much... (Score:5, Interesting)
The way the brain works makes such experiences nearly impossible to encode and certainly impossible with drugs, as another poster pointed out. If we take "drugs" to include "nanomachines targeting the brain and disguised as a pill" then we enter the realm of the merely highly improbable. The machines would have to collectively be smart enough to override signals from and to the body while simultaneously generating the desired experience.
Another possibility would be a single device at the top of the spinal column and networked with lots of processing power, like a wireless Matrix or the Vertebrane system [marshallbrain.com] from Manna. This too requires advanced nanotech to implant, as it must splice every nerve in the spinal column plus the optic and aural nerves, and so is also highly improbable to occur at all, and certainly not for nearly a hundred years unless the Singularity frea--er, folks are right.
Given all that, the experiences you speak of (flying, fighting a dragon) could happen, but doing the "I know kung-fu!" thing is impossible due to the nature of consciousness. If you want to learn something, you're going to have to spend the time to learn it. Reshaping synapse connections and brainwave patterns to implant memories requires godlike knowledge of the individual's brain state and history. Let's not forget that we are messy meat machines (if machines we are) whose sense of self and memory is only infinitesimally less mysterious now as it has always been. Faking an external world and letting the brain experience it, hard as it is, is orders of magnitude simpler than fabricating a past experience, especially an intellectual one such as memorizing the LOC, out of whole cloth.
Sorry I'm such a party pooper =(
Parent
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Strange Days, dude. I suppose it will be up to the CIA to get the squid to send. Then the technology will leak same as LSD.
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Just think about it, custom-made drugs to make it seem like you are flying, fighting a dragon, more epic than any video game imaginable, all while being perfectly controlled with little to no side effects.
There are a lot of drugs out there that don't get a user physically addicted, but the user instead develops a psychological addiction. The high they get is so good that, compared to normal life, they think they can't be happy without it.
We already have clinics up and running for curing internet addiction, and we just have LCDs & CRTs. When we develop total-immersion technology, why would people bother ever returning to their cold, lonely, boring real lives, except when they run out of money to fuel thei
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For an example (yeah, I know it's fictional, but still)
But still, it's fictional. Using a fictional character as anecdotal evidence to prove a point is three steps and a light breeze away from crazy. Don't do it.
That said, I agree with you. I think Scott Adams said "the holodeck will be mankind's last invention".
"More-accurate and less-invasive"? Not so much... (Score:5, Informative)
"More-accurate and less-invasive" is misleading, since the thing that it is "more accurate" than is not the same thing it is "less invasive" than. It is more accurate than the minimally-invasive electrodes-on-the-scalp method, and less-invasive than the more accurate electrodes-implanted-into-the-brain method.
It is, likewise, less accurate than the electrodes-in-the-brain method, and more invasive than the electrodes-on-the-scalp method, so it would be as accurate (and as hyperbolic, in the opposite direction) as TFS to call it a "less-accurate and more-invasive" method as it was to call it a "more-accurate and less-invasive" method (simply switching which existing method it was compared to for accuracy and which it was compared to for invasiveness.)
It would be most accurate (and not at all hyperbolic) to call it a method which is intermediate between two existing methods in terms of both accuracy and invasiveness.
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I also had trouble parsing this:
To Implant or not to implant... (Score:3, Informative)
Quote:
developed a small implanted device that translates signals recorded from the surface of the brain into computer commands. The device, which is less invasive than implants
How's that again?
I suppose I could break down read TFA.....
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Groundbreaking news! (Score:5, Funny)
Neurolutions, based in St Louis has developed a small implanted device that translates signals recorded from the surface of the brain into computer commands. The device, which is less invasive than implants and more accurate that scalp electrodes, uses a grid of electrodes placed directly on the surface of the brain to monitor electrical activity
Awesome! They developed an implant which is less invasive than implants!
Next up, a duck that quacks louder than a duck!
Re: (Score:2)
Thankfully I'm not the only person to have noticed that... I was beginning to lose faith in humanity, scrolling through the comments and not seeing anything about an implant less invasive than an implant...
Caps (Score:2)
This makes me think of the capped people in the Tripods trilogy.
In the books, aliens had taken over earth and used these caps that melded a mesh into the head that would render people docile and subservient so they could be used as slaves.
Is this really a good idea? (Score:2)
Ok Unrelated but (Score:2, Offtopic)
Am I the only one see truncated green border around the posts? I see this on my MAC and Linux machines. It started happening about a week ago.
Re: (Score:2)
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No, but using FF 3 on Linux, there is no background for the titles.
Makes it damned hard to see what the post is about without highlighting the header with a click-drag with the mouse.
(sigh)
Wouldn't it be nice if Slashdot editors used the O/S that they promote?
how is this less invasive? (Score:2)
The device, which is less invasive than implants and more accurate that scalp electrodes, uses a grid of electrodes placed directly on the surface of the brain to monitor electrical activity.
How is having to put an entire grid of electrodes on the surface of the brain less invasive than an implant?
"Less Invasive"? (Score:5, Interesting)
Laying an electrocorticogram array (that's what they're using -- it's not new) on the surface of the brain requires removing a section of the scalp, skull and dura mater. There's nothing about it that's not invasive as well as dangerous. Single cortical or deep electrodes can be put in through very small drilled holes. The former requires a full neurosurgical suite/team. The latter can be done in a clinic visit if localization isn't critical, or else in a CT or MR scanner with no more invasive electrode technology than the clinic version. The draw back to implanted electrodes is that inserting them into proximity of the neurons of interest can cause them to die off immediately, and will cause them to die off eventually.
Both are unnecessary for the application. In 1994 a researcher working at Radford University with Karl Pribram developed an EEG analysis program that could recognize various shapes, sizes and colors (various combinations thereof) of objects both seen and only internally visualized, with a 95% accuracy. Such accuracy among the many permutations of possible signals could very easily translate into control signals sent to another device. Fully designed but not built around this technology was such a control device intended to run an 8 stepper motor robotic arm using a standard parallel printer port. Since it rests on the scalp, an EEG electrode such as we used here is not invasive in the least. Well, the sticky glue electrode paste necessary to keep the electrode on and conducting for several hours tend to pull out hair, but that's annoying and slightly painful, but not invasive.
The surface of the brain is pretty damned invasive (Score:2)
I mean, really.
Re:The surface of the brain is pretty damned invas (Score:2)
There's nothing wrong with this. Just ask the Borg.
I tried this once (Score:2)
I tried this device one time. The only message it could read from the surface of my brain was "Squiggle"
Damn self-repair mechanisms (Score:2)
As I understand it, the main problem with implants that receive signals is that a layer of defensive glial cells forms around electrodes left in the brain. These cells act as electrical insulators and decrease the strength of the signal that can be picked up. How does this grid system mitigate this problem?
Re:ohh (Score:5, Funny)
I liked the other thing you were going to say much better.
Parent
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Damn You,
Now my Cheney Corp Stock is worthless. The CEO was all over the national news promoting it before the IPO. I was banking on the big future demand for waterboarding and electroshock I haven't had such bad news since they asked for my AIG bonuses back. Well I still got my futures in Mustard Gas and shares in Blackwater.