

Brain Waves Lift Me Higher - melvinmt
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/24/fashion/the-ascent-levitating-in-brooklyn.html?hpw&pagewanted=all

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david927
This is a fun gimmick. (Calling it "latest frontier of neurological thrill-
seeking" is just hyperbole.)

EEG hardware and software is getting so cheap that it's going to inspire fun
things like this, more and more.

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siculars
"EEG technology is a crucial diagnostic tool, but the electrical impulses it
detects are faint. Commercial headsets like the one I wore were more likely,
he suspected, to be reading the muscles just below the skin."

That is called muscle artifact. In order to get really valuable EEG data, like
medical grade, you need many electrodes professionally placed on the scalp.
Beyond that, I have seen recordings with subcutaneous (implanted) electrodes
recording data on 128 channels at 30khz. That produces a ton of data to parse.
The equipment used here are simple toys.

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jenius
Yeah this is a pretty common artifact in EEG studies - it seems like subjects
were encouraged to keep their eyes closed for this exhibit, but blink
artifacts are often pretty clear.

The plus side is that (it least in my experience) when there was a muscle
artifact, it was super clear in the data, as the impulses appear much larger
than the brain activity and they are easy to filter out, even interactively as
the data comes in. You do end up losing that short piece of data though, which
is sad.

Definitely note that the number of electrodes you use is not a direct
correlation to the quality of the data. Using more electrodes will give you
better spatial resolution if that's what you're going for. But for many
studies and for exhibits like this, spatial resolution makes no difference at
all - they are trying to measure overall activity. I have worked with an eeg
cap that had 128+ electrodes though - it was cool, took a long time to set up
and had lower data quality per electrode.

I have produced research grade EEG data which is being published, and
subcutaneous electrodes are probably more than you need. I got the data I
needed with 10 electrodes, although it did take about a half hour to set up
each subject, apply the electrode gel, move hair out of the way, and make sure
the data was coming in clean.

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Paul_S
Log in to read the article.

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redwood
1) copy URL 2) ctrl-shift-N to open incognito window in Chrome 3) paste URL,
hit enter 4) read

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Paul_S
I'm interested to know why and how does this work. Can you please tell me?

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espeed
The NYT limits you to ~10 articles per month. Incognito mode is anonymous so
it bypasses your maxed-out quota.

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Paul_S
Thanks. I never read an article there because I always hit that page and
assumed it was a pay wall. I don't accept cookies by default so maybe that's
why I was never getting through. Do I feel the fool.

