
Scientists Closer to Reading Words From Your Brain - jamesbritt
http://singularityhub.com/2010/09/08/scientists-closer-to-reading-words-from-your-brain/
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enjo
I really do believe the next big disruptor (on the scale of something like
space travel or the internet) is going to be in our ability to harness brain
power to directly manipulate our world.

There is so much research going on and a lot of it is quite advanced. Some day
we'll put it all together and the results are going to be amazing. Not only in
curing disease, but in fundamentally changing how we interact with our
machines.

I can't wait.

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bh42
_I really do believe the next big disruptor (on the scale of something like
space travel or the internet) is going to be in our ability to harness brain
power to directly manipulate our world._

Can't we already do that? I mean, you might have to work a huge machine using
a joystick or something, but would eliminating the joystick be _that_ much
better?

I see it more as way to prevent carpal tunnel syndrome for programmers.

What's much more interesting for me is the ability to take a full image of
someone's brain. It would be an interesting type of backup...

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swah
Do you feel that is possible?

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bh42
50 +/- 50 or so years from now, maybe.

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treeface
That's some interesting research they're doing. I'd be be more interested to
see if somebody can translate it to an electroencephalographic device. I
suspect that placing electrodes directly onto the surface of the brain would
be a dealbreaker for those of us without an immediate need to have our
thoughts processed by a computer in real time (however cool that concept might
be).

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sp332
There's an external headset that "unwrinkles" your brain algorithmically and
gets very accurate readings without requiring direct contact with your brain.
[http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/tan_le_a_headset_that_read...](http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/tan_le_a_headset_that_reads_your_brainwaves.html)

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frisco
Hi, neuroscientist here. The stuff about it "unwrinkling" the brain is
nonsense. Emotiv is a running joke in the scientific community, unfortunately.
EEG has some fundamental problems as a control mechanism, and isn't
interesting from a brain-machine interfacing perspective. It's unfortunate
because we all want to see neural interfaces, but it will either have to be
invasive or come from a major Nobel-worthy innovation.

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ramanujan
Hmmm, their demos look good. Are you saying the headset doesn't work at all,
or not well enough, or not for a broad range of tasks?

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frisco
EEG measures mass synchrony between different areas of the brain. That's
_extremely_ hard to control consciously and takes a lot of practice. Even when
you can do it, it's a 1-dimensional signal. It's not even clear you _want_ to
control it consciously; EEG therapy is used in psychiatry every now and then
for treatment of a few disorders, and can lead to personality changes. The
"inverse EEG" problem, which relates to the distortion caused by the skull, is
basically computationally intractable (which is why ECoG is used). EEG is also
totally drowned out by EMG (muscles) if you aren't careful, and it's nearly
impossible to tell EMG and EOG (eye movements) apart from "real" EEG.

In Emotiv's specific case, though, these fundamentals are the least of their
problems. They're three (four?) years behind schedule without anything really
shipping even now, and the units that I _have_ seen in the wild are of low
build quality.

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greenlblue
What if you don't think in words? What if your natural mode of thinking is in
terms of fuzzy images and funky metaphors? Looks like I'll have lots of
gainful employment in the new dystopian future.

