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Comments: 148 +- Science: Computer-Aided ESP Transmits Binary Numbers, Slowly on Saturday October 10, @03:50PM
Posted
by
timothy
on Saturday October 10, @03:50PM
from the can't-be-sensory-and-extra-sensory dept.
from the can't-be-sensory-and-extra-sensory dept.
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science
High-C writes "Dr. Christopher James of the University of Southampton has demonstrated what is being termed 'Brain to Brain' communication. In binary, no less. In essence, one person imagined a binary number, which was picked up by an EEG and transmitted via the net to another PC. The received signal was displayed on LEDs flashing at two different frequencies. The receiver's EEG correctly deciphered the string, resulting in a 1:1 transmission of binary data via thought. The throughput isn't great so far, at .14 bits per second, but it's an incredibly geeky proof-of-concept all the same."
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Submission: Computer-aided ESP by Anonymous Coward
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NOT BRAIN TO BRAIN (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the same technology... (Score:2, Informative)
Capt Christopher Pike used to communicate.
Re:NOT BRAIN TO BRAIN (Score:5, Insightful)
Sombody is failing to understand the "Extra Sensory" part of "ESP", ie. you're not allowed to use any of the five senses.
Besides ... if you have a radio link then why not just give them bluetooth headsets and let them talk to each other?
Parent
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Maybe you just described unassisted ESP.
I wonder if these guys have a claim to win the Amazing Randi's bogus prize.
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And my post doesn't look like me. Your point?
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Every 2bit moron wants to add his unintelligible opinion.
Indeed.
Not ESP (Score:2, Insightful)
ESP stands for Extra Sensorial Experience, but this rig used equipment with electrical sensors. It's as much ESP as a radio that receives electromagnetic waves and plays the result in a loudspeaker.
Re:Not ESP (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
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This is pretty silly.
Re:Not ESP (Score:5, Funny)
As a kid I always thought ESP stood for Extra Special Powers. My ability to touch my tongue to my nose counted of course.
Parent
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Future applications (Score:2, Insightful)
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Re:Future applications (Score:5, Interesting)
How about mental slashdot comment submission. You hear voices of other commenters in your mind, and you think what you want to say, it automatically appears in the site, and echoes in other commenters' minds.
Just be careful not to think "first post"
Slashdotters tend to frown on that sort of thing.
That'd require a high degree of mental discipline, to the point of being able to control both the content of your thoughts and their timing. That kind of discipline is sorely lacking in the general population, unfortunately. The way I often put it is that most people do not govern their thoughts and view them as a tool like any other; instead, most people are governed by their thoughts and can hardly imagine experiencing life apart from them. I am mostly talking here about when you "think to yourself" in your native language, and the problem with that is that when you experience all of life this way, you lose much of your ability to directly apprehend new realizations and must instead to go through the proxy of symbolic language for everything you experience.
Most people have a constant and endless supply of somewhat random thoughts that continuously pop into and out of their heads and could hardly sustain complete mental silence (i.e. a form of meditation) for even a few seconds, let alone selectively shut out unwanted thoughts with ease to effortlessly emphasize any particular one. This wouldn't be such a problem for relatively simple controls like "move this mouse cursor to the place I am thinking of" but would be a big problem for anyone intending to mentally dictate sentences and paragraphs and complex lines of reasoning without having to constantly make corrections.
What interests me is whether machines that accept this kind of input would lead to this kind of mental discipline becoming more common, as most seem to find no adventure in exploring their capabilities and fine-tuning their minds and therefore would balk at the effort without some externally imposed reason. It's a shame it has to be that way, that many need to have a fire of some kind lit under their asses before they will challenge their own limits. However, I still imagine that a society of more effective and capable thinkers would be radically different from the one that we know today and could only be an improvement. It would definitely be better than the widespread ignorance (of learning how to learn) that, whether you believe they encourage it or not, is definitely politically convenient for the powers-that-be.
Parent
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The problem has already been solved by the brain. Although we have all sorts of thoughts going on all the time, we only act on a few of them.
You'll have the problem anew if you come up with machines that interpret mental activity. A mouse and keyboard, after all, need to be acted upon. A machine that takes brainwaves for input is an input device with no such constraints.
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What is sad is that so many people wouldn't even understand what you just said. Self-discipline is rare in modern times, exceedingly so when there is no external motivation. Internal mental discipline is both useful and rewarding, but nobody else is going to care. Yet.
Regarding the article, this is a thin wedge opening a path to much more interesting work. In this case their method relies on subconscious visual processing. Extra-sensory doesn't necessarily mean some mysterious sixth sense, just that inform
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Just be careful not to think "first post"
Or "frost piss".
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Or "frost piss".
Not so much for the mental slashdot submission, more because that might cause an unfortunate collaboration between your toilet and freezer.
Snow crash? (Score:2)
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It is easy to mess with the internals of a brain by pulsing lights at the right frequency. 8 to 12 Hz [wikipedia.org] is a key danger area. And guess what frequency bicycle tail lights flash at? Pulsing light sources are well known to cause seizures.
Mind-Machine Interfaces (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Mind-Machine Interfaces (Score:4, Insightful)
I just read your comment as:
Just imagine how useful these could be to disable people.
...and there we have the evil flipside of the coin.
Sorry...
Parent
Don't tell the RIAA (Score:2)
Binary I/O from humans. Please, hide this story and the research, don't let the RIAA or MPAA find out, or they will use this to find a way to plug "the analogue hole".
Unpossible! (Score:2)
Do you realise (or even realize) that some words are spelled differently in British English than in American English? Analog and Analogue are much closer than mere homonyms, they are synonyms as well.
bah, that's nothing (Score:5, Insightful)
and transmits them to the second user's brain through flashing an LED lamp
Bah, that's nothing. When I talk to my wife, I transmit my brain impulses through air, simply by flapping my tongue, and it is transmitted to her brain via vibrations in thin air! Isn't it amazing? ESP and all?
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When I talk to my wife,
Who are you and how did you sneak past the mind-reading entrance guards?
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Bah, that's nothing. When I talk to my wife, I transmit my brain impulses through air, simply by flapping my tongue, and it is transmitted to her brain via vibrations in thin air! Isn't it amazing? ESP and all?
Wife, flapping tongue, vibrations... Man that's way too much for us simple slashdotters to handle in one sentence. We prefer flashing LEDs mind you!
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IETF RFC? (Score:5, Funny)
Well, until the IETF issues an RFC on this technology, it will be a non-starter.
"IP over ESP" . . . usually seen around the 1st of April.
Can we increase the bandwidth, by meth'ing up the subject?
Not ESP, since human isn't doing the sensing (Score:2)
It's not extra-sensory perception unless the human us sensing things outside the normal perception channels. From the article, it sounds like this is just another input device for a computer to be controlled by a human.
And the title of the article, "Communicating person to person through the power of thought alone", is false, since this thing wouldn't work without electricity. By the same logic, I'm communicating with Slashdot readers right now by the power of thought alone, well of course with the help o
Hold on a momment (Score:2)
01100110011011110110111101100100001000000110...
F...o...o..d......b...o...w..l.......e..m...p...t...y
The rights was to do it would be with TMS (Score:2)
Like many posts above, i agree that this is NOT telepathy. It is "communication through thought" (from TFA) in the sense that no one spoke or wrote anything down. In TFA they do not use the term ESP, that was added by the OP.
The easy *correct* experiment would be to ask the sender to think of right vs. left and then read that thought with EEG and then activate the receivers brain with transcranial magnetic stimulation over left vs. right visual cortex (TMS [wikipedia.org])
The much cooler and much harder experiment would
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Most real-world claimed cases of telepathy are usually subconscious (workers returning to a work site after having a hunch that one of their mates was trapped, or family members turning up spontanously to a house when somebody was unconscious or ill).
The use of a LED does detract from this experiment - they should have put person A under some kind of stress and monitored person B to see if their EEG recordings were different in some way.
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Re:Not to rain on their parade.. (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Not to rain on their parade.. (Score:5, Funny)
Why not just plain, old telepathy?
Many people have a tendency to overthink simple problems.
Parent
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Well, this is just useless. EEG has been used as input for decades.
Yeah, but the concept is good. Just think, maybe some day instead of having to listen to mindless cell phone yakking on the subway, people will carry on their conversations silently in their heads.
It's going to make administering tests a lot harder though, when anyone can Google any answer without moving a muscle.
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>>Yeah, but the concept is good. Just think, maybe some day instead of having to listen to mindless cell phone yakking on the subway, people will carry on their conversations silently in their heads.
At .14 bps, people had better get able to do Huffman encoding in their heads real fast.
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Because god knows new technological applications never get any faster than they do at conception.
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>>Because god knows new technological applications never get any faster than they do at conception.
God also knows that technologies making little LED lights blink will probably never be able to sustain a real time voice communication.
Re:Useless. (Score:4, Insightful)
God also knows that new technology never stretches beyond it's original setup as it matures in age.
Parent
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It's going to make administering tests a lot harder though, when anyone can Google any answer without moving a muscle.
And those tests will be useless. However, I believe that people will find a way to make better tests (say, ones that actually test the ability to solve problems rather than just the ability to memorize data. Because if you can google the answer any time then there is no point in memorizing it.
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It's going to make administering tests a lot harder though, when anyone can Google any answer without moving a muscle.
But in a world where it is that easy to Google, does it make sense to test knowledge that can be Googled?
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Why not?