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Science

Type with your Mind 50

Posted by CmdrTaco from the future-of-computing? dept.
Benedict Wright writes "Another nugget from the BBC... Researchers led by a German scientist have developed non-invasive brainwave sensors that enable totally paralysed people to type messages on a computer. Previous attempts required risky surgery to implant electrodes into the brain. The new electrodes just sit on top of the head."
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Type with your Mind More

Type with your Mind

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  • Brains are scary (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    One of the biologists at our institute reported from the last cnoference he was on about a weird experiment some have been doing on a rat.

    The rat could get water for drinking by pressing a lever. It had a an electrode array planted in the motor cortex, and they recorded the patterns to find the ones corresponding to pressing the lever.

    Then they let the water come if the right pattern was there instead of when the lever was pressed. Pretty soon the rat "smelled a rat". It would get its water just by putting the paw on the lever and omitting the pressing. And finally it did not even bother putting its paw anywhere, it just got its water when it wanted it without involving the paw at all.

    It had astonishingly fast (few weeks IIRC) learned to controlledly use the specific pattern in the motor cortex just for getting water, nothing else.

    Makes you wonder where the info in the brain is located at, how, and how arbitrary, if mere laziness lets even rats rearrange their brain at will.
  • Well, I'd think that Stephen Hawking ought to be
    happy about this one; I hear that ALS would
    eventually break down his ability to move that
    last finger or direct his eyes.

    At least he won't get cut off. That always struck
    me as being really horrifying; to have so much to
    say and no way to say it....

    ----

  • Posted by Stephen "The Carp" Carpenter:

    I have seen primitive versions of this before
    in a PBS show. They used seonsors on the
    outside of the head (3 on the forhead was one
    of them) hooked up to an amplifier...

    Actually saw a man use one to steer a boat.
    Also...the USAF has been developing similar technology for fighter piolets.

    I am interested myself in playing with it...
    just wondering how crude of a device
    can be used? ANyon ehave refs?

    All I would need is 1 or 2 brainwave peaks
    (ie a total of about 1 to 2 bits of input)
    Could be cool for some applications ;)
  • Posted by sunilg:

    The article doesn't mention it, but Dr. Birbaumer's team is using Mindset [aquathought.com] from AquaThought Labs [aquathought.com] as the instrument for acquiring the signals for this experiment. Currently, it supports Windows, but I have a sidelined project to write a Linux driver for it. If there's enough interest, I'll go ahead and complete it.
  • Posted by The guy in the next cubicle:

    Dr Taub recognises that a system based solely on either-or choices will always be limited.

    Yeah. A binary-based system? Could never happen. It's a pipe dream.

    Seriously, all we need to do is teach them ASCII, and, assuming they can learn to output seven bits per second, get them typing 10 words per minute. Not entirely a bad pace.

  • Posted by K8_Fan:

    That was my first thought when reading this too - what a boon for Hawking. Of course he's not using a "one letter at a time" system either. Instead it flashes between two screens of choices, and he picks one, (and so one) and it suggests often used phrases.

    Actually, a mind controlled system is more likely to use pictographs than text. Our brains can "see" more than our hands can write, and to limit the brain to the ability of the hand is silly.

  • Posted by Stephen "The Carp" Carpenter:

    While it would need to be more generic for
    everyone else.... it oculd still be used for him.
    The people who are already expending effort for
    him could integrate this with his current system.

    I have to wonder if someone like him would learn
    to use the system faster than someone else.

  • I want one, but I think I can wait a bit for them to get the speed up.

    I think it is great for the handycapped who can't communicate otherways. And there are science fiction about comunicating with 'others' that take up to a week to formulat a sentence (or understand one of yours). I can deal with others who are that slow if I need to, but I prefer to be faster myself.

  • Wouldn't this be a lot more efficeint if they used something that tracked the users' eyes rather than brainwaves? I would assume that these patients have at least some control over their eyes since they're probably looking at a computer screen at some point in this. So why not work out a binary code where a wink in one eye is 0 and the other eye is 1? Or if they can't control blinking (?) looking to the left is a 0 and looking to the right is a 1. OK, so I guess the brainwave thing would be useful if they were paralyzed and blind, but tracking the eyes sounds like it could be a lot quicker than 1 sentence in 30 minutes.

  • SQUID - superconducting quantum interference device. These little suckers can directly measure the em fields associated with a single electron moving very small distances (on the range of milimeters). Use of an array of SQUIDS over ones head (what a great image that is, ha!) could directly measure brain activity with amazing resolution. I'm sure someone is doing this somewhere...

    Most, if not all, technologies in stories such as this rely on measuring secondary electrical signals that are induced on the scalp as a result of electrical activity in the brain. And of course, the lights, local radio station, your monitor, Grandpa's pacemaker all contribute to such induced signals on anyones scalp who's nearby. Trying to measure a specific signal in such a mess and use it for something is like trying to determine the nationality of a couple of people having sex in a rowboat a few miles off-shore during a hail storm- just by watching the waves hit the shore.

    Its been awhile since I read anything on this subject, but the hard part about dealing with SQUIDS on ones head is the fact that they gotta be rather cold to operate, like about 70 Kelvin.
    I have seen a superconductor work (Meisner effect) at about 50 Celcius, but the material degraded in just a few minutes after processing. So, maybe someone will develop a useful high-temp superconductor someday soon. If so, then all you lazy folks that don't want to have to type or use the mouse to play Quake won't have to keep bottles of liquid nitrogen...

  • There's a link to a short bit about the IBM wearables on the same page. Not much info but a few interesting tidbits. Computer the size of a pound coin, heads up with 17" @ 25" display.
  • I used to work in Human Services with folks who had Cerebral Palsy, helping the consumers to interface with the computers (w95/w31 pc's and apple IIgs) to play games and do simple text editing. In so doing, I learned 2 important things:

    1. Interfacing a person with CP to a computer via a single switch interface is almost always possible, but rarely as simple as one would imagine, given the variables of muscular spasticity, inflexibility, switch mounting and rigidity, durability, etc.

    2. The degree of flexibility (input-wise)attainable with a single-switch 'either/or' interface is all but astounding. Coupled with an ability to direct a mouse cursor, possibilities are almost limitless.

    Though the idea of taking 15 minutes to type out a simple sentense may give most of us shivers, the degree of autonomity it gives to someone without our degree of physical ability is well-nigh trancendental.

    Mechanical devices have sufficed 'til now, but the day I can slap a couple of non-invasive electrodes on a client's head and say "Get busy!" will be a good one indeed.

    (Of course I no longer work in HS, after installing Linux on a secret partition of the company computer, and hacking after hours, I eventually landed myself a swell corporate job. I don't miss the management, but I *really* miss the clients. Sigh.)
  • *yawn*

    Non-invasive brain input has been about for years...

    The BBC triumphs again.
    It's a wonder we even have electricity in Britain. Perhaps soon, the BBC will announce that someone has "invented" the alternator or something...
  • When I was a post-doctoral fellow during the late 1980's at the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco, a scientist named Erich sutter had already developed and employed a on-invasive evoked potential system to allow communication in a completely paralyzed patient. It used nonlinear analysis of the evoked potential to determine where the patient was fixating on a computer screen (which contained an array of words), then fed the selected words into a speech synthesizer.
  • I remember reading that the internal versions of this were so difficult to use they caused strokes in some people... I wonder how different this technology is.
  • This reminds me an awful lot of how characters in Gibson's short stories and novels wear tiara of 'trodes in order to "see" a common, quasi-hallucinatory visual representation of cyberspace. Granted, this trial application is for input rather than output, but it's interesting to think about the far-out ramifications. Finally I can have that fling with Morgan Fairchild...

  • YES! (Score:1)

    by oostendo ( 5530 )
    Now I can move even fewer muscles to communicate with my computer! I'm that much closer to just being a brain in a box with an IP!
  • Greets!
    This is cool and all, but the British sure are
    years behind us. There's a company down in
    Connecticut called IBVA that makes a set of 'trodes
    that let you push around a cursor with your brain.
    Also, I've seen similar tech on a Scientific American
    Frontiers show. It featured a guy sailing his boat
    and a prototype cockpit for fighter aircraft, all
    piloted by brain waves. IBVA has a site at www.ibva.com [ibva.com]
    The basic headset is around $1200, which is a little
    steep, but it's got years of development behind it.
    J05H
  • I want the matrix (seek Gibson if you don't know)... and I want it now. =)

    /Andrew
  • I see comments about Gibson farther down... I coincidentally read Neuromancer right before I saw Strange Days, and I saw a lot of parallels. More than the 'trode net, that is. Anyone else notice anything?
  • Certainly the general areas of the brain are platform independent. I suspect it's like voice; similar in general, differing in details. But when you concentrate on remembering something, or moving a specific body part, etc, the same areas of the brain get increased blood flow.

    --
  • what does ALS stand for again? i know it's some kind of disease... but i forgot what it was..
  • There's a technology called Slashdot that lets people type without even having a mind.
  • To see it from a different point of view, it lends weight to Minsky's theory of K-lines, where one replays the action in a "memory context" (a subshell, if you will) as if it were being performed fresh. The rat wasn't rearranging its brain, it was very likely remembering how it got its water and the electrodes picked up the patterns appropriately.
  • Er, to qualify my last post, I'm not really qualified to be advancing that theory over the one the original poster was suggesting. I only mean to say that if the K-line theory was in fact being demonstrated in truth, then it would explain those results.
  • Don't forget the nine billion names of Microsoft.
  • Man, if I could write code as fast as I could visualize it in my mind I would be one productive MF.
    Now we just need Linux drivers for those brain wave receptors...
  • I am using a prototype panties of this system right now. Although panties it certianly ummmmmmmm nachos is convienant nipple I beleve there are still some kinks leather woman hurt bad rubber boy that will prevent its panties adoption for general puroposes.


  • But then someone would start a flame-war, and my brain would explode ;-)

  • Music (Score:1)

    by Krelle ( 11801 )
    It could be cool, if I could make music with my brain without having to write/track it down the old way. I have tried something like that once, but I didn't have control over the music. The computer just made some music out of my brain ;-) But it was great fun.
  • I'd be able to play quake without moving any muscles :)
  • My roommate in college worked on a similar project called EagleEyes. The device consisted of four electrodes placed on the head which measure changes in magnetic fields generated by moving your eyes. So then you could control a mouse pointer with your eyes.

    Then they would measure a "click" as when you pause on the screen.

    Of course, there are problems. But if you were to harness the movement of EagleEyes with the binary ability of this (for "click"s), that would be really powerful, I think.

    /will
  • I bought one of the 'cheesy' units to read brain waves from Circuit Cellar INK mag a few years ago and hacked it up to work as a joystick and though it took some practice it was usable (and fairly cheap) so I don't think this is so krad. I love the idea but I'd be more impressed w/ something that could be worn in a hat band or something and use what I call 'mind macros' to do things. I always wanted to hook mine up to my tv/vcr remote and never did, maybe I should.

  • That's just what I need...people in IRC really knowing what I think of them and lie detector tests I can't beat.

    Would be cool to be able to print out the scripts of my dreams. I have crazy ones every night and can rarely remember more than a few bits.

    M

  • I'm not "in the field" but what you're saying makes a lot of sense. It's very much like the handwriting recognition of today's PDAs, or speach recognition in Dragon Dictate... Instead of the computer asking you to pronounce a particular sound, it would ask you to think a particular letter, or pattern, or command.

    From what I remember of my AI course work, it sounds like a perfect opportunity for a... (oh say it with me) A NEURAL NETWORK. ;)
  • Well, as the article said, it's not very fast (at least for beginners). Perhaps with further training and practice, we could become adept mind typers. :)

    Hopefully the technology improves. This could be a new revolution.
  • About 5 years ago, I remember seeing something like this on tv, alebeit a bit more primitive. They had a rubber skull cap with bazillions of electrodes in it (I don't think you needed to shave your head...). It listened to brain waves, or whatever they are, and through a process of learning both by the human and the computer, after a couple hours, the person could fairly smoothly move a mouse-like cursor to any corner of the screen. I don't doubt that, with a little work, this could have been made into a full blown brain-mouse.
  • This reminds me of another technology, called Mind Drive. You stick your finger in a gadget and it measures your brain waves, and responds accordingly. If you think "up" it goes "up". They actually have a bunch of games that they've been testing it on. I personally tried it out, and it worked but was somewhat inconsistent (it takes practice).

    Check it out [other90.com] for yourself.

    Unfortunately, I don't think there is a port for linux yet..

    glh

  • I can type with my tongue...i'm almost there.

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