TELEKINESIS COMES TO MARKET
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Jan 16, 2009, 12:29:12 PM1/16/09
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MACHINE ASSISTED
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychokinesis
VIDEO
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/video/2009/jan/10/mattel-mind-flex-ces
http://www.pcworld.com/video/id,451-page,1-bid,0/video.html
AGES 8 AND UP
http://www.canada.com/topics/lifestyle/story.html?id=1152974
Breakthrough toy can read your mind, move objects
BY Vito Pilieci / January 08, 2009
Giving new meaning to the phrase mind over matter, technology that
gives people the ability to move objects by thinking will soon be
available at North American toy stores. Mattel Inc. has created a
game that can read a child's mind and use thoughts to manoeuvre a
small foam ball through a table-top obstacle course. The Mind Flex
uses technology that reads the electrical impulses (called bio-
feedback) that occur within a brain while a person is thinking.
A device that looks like a pair of headphones sits on the child's head
and tracks brain activity. Within the obstacle course are small fans
that are activated when a child thinks. The more brain activity the
child produces, the faster the fans blow. The goal is to have the
child "think" the little foam ball through the obstacle course. The
toy, to be officially revealed this week at the Consumer Electronics
Show in Las Vegas, is expected to be in stores later this year. The
Mind Flex is targeted at children eight and up and will retail for $80
U.S.
While the technology may sound straight from Star Trek, researchers
have long been working on ways to use brain activity to direct
machines. "It all goes back to neurofeedback that has been around for
50 years, where you can record activity coming from the human brain
through the scalp," said Melvyn Goodale, Canada Research Chair in
Visual Neuroscience at the University of Western Ontario. "It has the
outside look of a science-fiction theme. You are controlling things
through mind waves. But things like this have been around in various
science museums for some time."
Mr. Goodale says a museum in Sarasota, Florida, displays a similar toy
that pits two competitors against one another. Instead of floating a
ball through an obstacle course, each player tries to score a goal in
a competitor's net. The person who could create and sustain the most
brain activity would power a set of fans that pushed a foam ball into
the rival's goal.
Scientists are also delving into mind-over-matter technology, hoping
to isolate specific brain activity with the goal of allowing people to
interact with a computer or TV without a mouse, remote or a keyboard.
The technology may also be used to help people who have lost their
limbs control robotic prosthetics. "There are attempts to actually
record activity of specific parts of the brain," said Mr. Goodale. "To
use electrodes to record the activity of groups of cells of patients
with spinal cord damage to get them to control robot arms, wheel
chairs or cursors on a computer screen."
Science may be close to a breakthrough, according to Mr. Goodale. He
said several research papers detail advanced ways of capturing brain
activity and tests are already under way meaning the day when human
and machine can communicate may not be far off. "We've been working
for 20 or 30 years on this mind-borg or cyborg stuff. All of these
things are examples of new interfaces between humans and machines,"
said Steve Mann, a professor with the department of electrical and
computer engineering at the University of Toronto.
Mr. Mann himself has been called the world's first "cyborg," and is
famous for having created "wearable computers" that allow him to
interact with devices. He is working on technology called the EyeTap,
which looks like a sleek monocle and can record what a person sees. It
can also act as a display for computer-generated content. The EyeTap
also responds to its environment, automatically lowering or raising
lighting when a person walks into a room.
CONTACT
Steve Mann
http://www.eecg.toronto.edu/~mann/
http://wearcomp.org/
http://eyetap.org/
email : mann [at] eecg.toronto [dot] edu
MIND-EYE COORDINATION
http://www.physorg.com/news150781868.html
New games powered by brain waves / January 10th, 2009
An elderly Chinese woman wearing a headset concentrates intensely on a
small foam ball and it begins to rise slowly into the air. It's not
magic, but rather the latest game from toy maker Mattel, which allows
players to move a ball around an obstacle course by using just their
powers of concentration.
Focusing on the ball causes a fan in the base of the game -- called
Mind Flex -- to start up and lift the ball on a gentle stream of air.
Break your concentration and the ball descends. Once a player has the
ball in the air they need to try to weave it through hoops, towers and
other obstacles. "It's a mind-eye coordination game," said Mattel's
Tim Sheridan. "As you relax you'll find that the ball drops." Mind
Flex relies on EEG technology to measure brain wave activity through a
headset equipped with sensors for the forehead and earlobes. The game,
which will be available in September for 79.99 dollars, is being
displayed by Mattel at the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in
Las Vegas.
But Mattel is not the only toy maker tapping into the power of the
mind. In a report this week USA Today newspaper said game maker Uncle
Milton plans to release a similar game this year. Called "Force
Trainer" it is named after "The Force" powers of Yoda and Luke
Skywalker in the popular Star Wars films. The game calls for players
to lift a ball inside a transparent tube using their powers of
concentration. "It's been a fantasy everyone has had, using The
Force," the daily quoted Howard Roffman, president of Lucas Licensing,
as saying. "Force Trainer" also uses electroencephalography, or EEG,
to measure electrical activity in the brain recorded on a headset
containing sensors. A company called NeuroSky adapted the EEG
technology for both games, according to USA Today.
NEUROSKY
http://www.neurosky.com/
http://www.neurosky.com/products/
http://www.neurosky.com/for-oemodc-developers/
http://www.neurosky.com/for-oemodc-developers/partner-and-customer-market-space/
http://www.neurosky.com/for-oemodc-developers/licensing/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQWBfCg91CU
EMOTIV
http://www.emotiv.com/
http://emotiv.com/INDS_2/inds_2_3.html
http://emotiv.com/corporate/1_0/1_1.htm
http://emotiv.com/corporate/2_0/2_1.htm
http://emotiv.com/corporate/5_0/5_1.htm
COMPUTERS THAT KNOW YOU'RE LAUGHING
http://www.smh.com.au/news/innovations/new-game-gizmo-uses-mind-control/2008/05/07/1220121304851.html
New game gizmo uses mind control
BY Asher Moses / May 7, 2008
An Australian company is gearing up to release a computer headset that
allows people to control video games using only the power of their
minds. Emotiv Systems, founded by four Australian scientists in 2003,
will release the $US299 ($315) EPOC headset on the US market this
year. Featuring 16 sensors that measure electrical impulses from the
brain, the headset - which plugs into the PC's USB port - will enable
games to register facial expressions, emotions and even cognitive
thoughts, allowing players to perform in-game actions just by
visualising them.
The headset works in a similar way to voice recognition, in that it
must first be calibrated using Emotiv's software to recognise patterns
in the user's electrical brain impulses, which are used to perform 30
preset actions. When the player performs those same thoughts in the
game the software knows to associate them with the correct action,
such as rotate object or push object. "If you look at the way we
communicate with machines up to this day, it's always in a conscious
form, so whether you turn on and off the light or you program software
you always consciously tell a machine to perform a task for you,"
Emotiv CEO and co-founder Nam Do said in an interview from the
company's Pyrmont offices. "But the communication among ourselves is
much more interesting because we have non-conscious communications, so
we read body language, we read facial expressions and we also have
feelings and emotions which differentiate us from machines. Our vision
for the next generation of man-machine interface is it's not going to
be limited to just conscious [interaction]."
While the headset will work in a very limited sense with existing
titles, Do said the major game developers and publishers were
designing a number of their upcoming titles to take full advantage of
the technology. For instance, an in-game avatar would be able to mimic
the human player's facial expressions - smiles, winks, grimaces, and
so on - in real time, and other non-human characters in the game could
respond to these. "If you shoot somebody and you're smiling, the non-
player character can turn around and say to you, 'What are you
laughing at? You just killed that dude,' " Do said.
The headset could also detect the players' emotions - whether they're
bored, angry, engaged, happy, stressed, etc - and adjust difficulty
levels, in-game music and the game environment accordingly. Characters
could also react to a player's emotional cues. In horror-themed games,
enemies could intelligently select the perfect time to startle a
player based on how they feel, rather than having opponents in the
same positions every time a mission is reloaded.
But the most powerful aspect of the EPOC is its ability to detect
thoughts. Players can just think about performing actions, such as
lifting or pushing objects or making them disappear, and have the game
act accordingly without the need to push any keys or buttons. All of
these features have been publicly demonstrated to thousands at gaming
conferences using a role playing game developed by Emotiv. It will be
included for free with the headset and was trialled in Sydney by
smh.com.au.
Do, who came to Australia from Vietnam in 1995 on a university
scholarship, said his intention was not to replace the keyboard or
traditional game controller; he simple wanted to add another layer to
the experience. "You can still move around using your joystick, using
your keypad, using your mouse and keyboard, just like a normal game,
but there is a lot of activity that we take to another level by adding
a headset - such as being able to levitate an object by thinking about
it," he said.
He said that, while the company was initially focused on gaming, the
technology had applications in any situations where humans interacted
with machines, such as in medicine and robotics. Further, market
research companies and even Hollywood studios were tapping Emotiv's
technology to measure reactions from focus groups. Emotiv spent two
years developing its technology in Sydney before moving its
headquarters to San Francisco, the home of Silicon Valley, in 2005. It
employs about 50 staff - neurologists, biomedical scientists,
mathematicians, engineers - but its entire research team is still
based in Sydney.
Moving to the US, Do said, meant Emotiv was "closer to all the action,
all the [big gaming] companies, all the clients and also access to
money, because, as a start-up company, money is always one of the key
considerations". He said Emotiv had been approached by numerous
suitors keen to acquire the company, but wanted to first see how far
the technology could grow. Emotiv has also had meetings with the major
game console makers about licensing the technology to them for future
products.
In addition to Do, Emotiv was founded by 1998 Young Australian of the
Year Tan Le; Neil Weste, a neuroscientist who sold his chip
manufacturing company Radiata Communications to Cisco in 2000 for
$US295 million; and Allan Snyder, the director of the University of
Sydney's Centre for the Mind and winner of the 2001 Marconi Prize. The
four founders self-funded the initial $1 million needed to start the
company but have since raised $US14.5 million in series A funding. It
is now in the process of raising series B funding.
BRAINBALL
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5595041045553729644&hl=en
http://www.moberg.com/files/products/brainball.htm
http://www.tii.se/touchingtheinvisible/brainball.html
http://smart.tii.se/smart/projects/brainball/index_en.html
http://smart.tii.se/smart/publications/pubs/brainballInteractions.html
http://cid.nada.kth.se/pdf/CID-235.pdf
http://www.mindball.se/product.html
ATARI MINDLINK (CIRCA 1984)
http://www.atarimuseum.com/videogames/consoles/2600/mindlink.html
"Although never released, feedback from Atari engineers and people who
tested the Mindlink have commented that the time and effort put into
the Mindlink system was wasted because the controllers did not perform
well and gave people headaches from over concentration and constantly
moving their eyebrows around to control the onscreen activities."
BEYOND Wii
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19726471.600-next-generation-video-games-will-be-mental.html
Next generation of video games will be mental
BY Duncan Graham-Rowe / 13 March 2008
TWO players sit across a table from one another, staring at a small
white ball on a track between them. Both are wearing headbands and
concentrating, trying to nudge the ball towards their opponent. All
they can use is the power of thought. This is Mindball, an addictive
"mind game" in which the winning strategy is to remain as focused and
relaxed as possible in the heat of battle. The ball rolls away from
the player with the calmest mind, as measured by sensors on their
headbands.
The sensors are similar to those in an electroencephalogram (EEG),
which probes brain activity by detecting "brainwaves" - tiny
electrical currents playing across the scalp. Because EEGs are a non-
invasive and near-instantaneous way to read brain activity, they have
long been touted as potentially useful in gaming. It now looks as if
that promise will be fulfilled, and not just in Mindball.
Several companies are developing hardware and software which they
claim can detect brainwaves and use them in video games. If all goes
to plan, the first of a new generation of games with mind control as a
central feature will hit the high street this year.
Mind gaming has its roots in the way new games are tested. Since 2004,
EmSense, a company based in Monterey, California, has been using
biofeedback to help game designers evaluate new products. Testers play
a game wearing EmSense's headset, which uses an EEG to record their
brainwaves, and also measures their heart rate and the sweatiness of
their skin. EmSense then builds up a blow-by-blow profile of the
player's emotional state and levels of arousal during play so the game
can be made more engaging.
The basic technologies inside EmSense's headset are nothing new.
Neurologists have been using the EEG as a diagnostic tool for nearly a
century, while measuring heart rate with an electrocardiogram (ECG)
has an even longer pedigree. Galvanic skin response (GSR), which
measures emotional arousal via the conductivity of the skin - a proxy
for sweatiness - has been a central element of lie detectors since the
first world war.
Now, though, developers are finding ways to go beyond merely improving
traditional games, and incorporating biofeedback into the games
themselves. One of the leaders in the field is Emotiv of San
Francisco. It has developed a headset with 16 sensors that it says
allows players to control aspects of a game simply by thinking about
them: concentrating on an on-screen object, for example, might allow
their avatar to pick it up and move it around. Similarly, NeuroSky of
San Jose, California, has developed a headset which chief executive
Stanley Yang says can tell whether you are focused, challenged,
relaxed, afraid, anxious and so on using a single sensor held against
the temple.
Developers have been trying to incorporate biofeedback into gaming for
years. In 1984, Atari experimented with a headband called MindLink,
which used electromyographic (EMG) sensors to detect muscle movements,
allowing players to move an on-screen cursor with a frown or a raised
eyebrow. In 1998, AmTex developed a game called Bio Tetris for the
Nintendo 64. A heart-rate sensor clipped to the player's ear lobe
allowed players to slow the speed at which the Tetris blocks fell by
remaining calm. Neither took off.
So what's different this time? One factor is the dazzling success of
Nintendo's Wii - 20 million consoles sold and rising. It dispenses
with the traditional joystick and instead uses gestures to control the
game via a hand-held wireless motion sensor. Its success has made it
clear that people are ready for new ways to interact with games.
Another factor is that the core technology is different, though
whether it works is another matter. On the surface the claims seem
plausible. Neurologists have long known how to read emotional states
off an EEG, and Mindball apparently picks up alpha waves - a hallmark
of mental calmness. But there are also many reasons to be sceptical.
Where neurologists use as many as 120 EEG sensors all over the scalp,
gaming headsets have just a handful - or, in NeuroSky's case, just
one. The headsets don't use the sticky conductive gel that medical
EEGs need to transmit the signal from the scalp to the electrode. On
top of that, EEGs are notoriously "noisy" - prone to interference from
nearby electrical devices as well as the electrical activity produced
by muscles, especially the heart. Even blinking can play havoc with an
EEG signal.
So how do they do it? Although the firms are cagey about how exactly
their technologies work, there are a few details to go on. The number
of electrodes seems to come down to a question of resolution. Medical
and research-grade EEGs need to be sensitive enough to detect subtle
signals amid a chorus of electrical brain activity. For gaming, the
chorus itself is sufficient. "We can't achieve the same resolution as
medical EEGs, but it's enough to detect the basic brainwaves," Yang
says.
Dealing with interference is another matter and perhaps the fledgling
industry's biggest challenge. EMG signals, produced by muscle
activity, are a particular problem because they can be an order of
magnitude bigger than those produced by the brain, says Desney Tan, a
researcher at Microsoft in Redmond, Washington, who has worked on
diagnosing cognitive states using EEGs. Yang agrees that this is a
challenge, but says the trick is to develop software that can
recognise and filter out unwanted signals. "Our core technology is
filtering," he says.
In any case, it may not be necessary to filter out all EMG signals,
says Tan. Some could be turned to the developers' advantage, as there
is a strong correspondence between involuntary facial muscle
contractions and your cognitive states and emotions, he says. So EMG
signals can be used to supplement the EEG.
In fact, the companies already use other bio-information from ECGs and
GSR. Heart rate and sweating are both good measures of how physically
and mentally aroused someone is. The trick is to combine all the
measurements to get an overall sense of the player's mental and
physical state. "Each of these sensors gives us a little piece of the
picture," Tan says. Using slight variations of this approach NeuroSky
and its competitors claim to have cracked it.
But even if the technology works as advertised, there's no guarantee
of success in a competitive games market. How do these companies
intend to succeed where others failed? One answer is by following
Nintendo's example with Wii. MindLink and Bio Tetris failed in part
because they didn't make the most of their novel interface. The games
were really no different from what was already out there. "With the
Wii, Nintendo did something right in designing a suite of tailored
games," Tan says. Wii games offer features that are not possible with
a regular joystick, such as swinging the controller like a tennis
racquet or brandishing it like a sword.
The mind-game companies intend to emulate this, though without
abandoning the traditional controller altogether. Their games will
still be largely controlled by hand, with biofeedback offering
additional features. For example, Emotiv has adapted a game based on
the Harry Potter books so that players can lift boulders and throw
thunderbolts just by concentrating on making it happen.
Whatever form biofeedback games take, the world is ready for them,
says Kiel Gilleade a computer games researcher at Lancaster University
in the UK. The current market is less interested in finding new game
genres than in looking for new hardware to enhance the gaming
experience, he says.
Not everyone is convinced. Michael Zyda, director of the University of
Southern California's GamePipe Laboratory in Marina del Rey, says
biofeedback seems to work as an evaluation tool but he believes not
enough research has been done to confirm its reliability in the real
world. Hans Lee, head of technology at EmSense, agrees that more work
is needed. One outstanding problem, he says, is that the hardware and
software don't work for everyone. Reading emotional and cognitive
states reliably is difficult because of each individual's variation in
brain activity.
Even so, at least one company believes the technology is ready. Emotiv
says its headsets will be on the shelves later this year, alongside a
suite of biofeedback games developed by its partners. Biofeedback has
been talked about in video gaming for years, but the real quest for
hearts and minds begins here.
FURTHER AND FURTHUR
Electrical activity isn't the only way to read a gamer's mind / BY
Colin Barras
EEG is just one form of brain-computer interface that the games
industry is toying with. The other is optical topography, which
overcomes some of the problems with EEG.
Though EEG provides lightning-quick read-outs - perfect for fast-
reaction games - speed comes at the cost of resolution. This makes
some experts doubt its usefulness in gaming. An EEG does little more
than tell you the general area that brain activity originated in, says
John-Dylan Haynes of the Bernstein Center for Computational
Neuroscience in Berlin, Germany.
At the other end of the spectrum is functional magnetic resonance
imaging (fMRI), which provides readings accurate to down to a
millimetre. For gaming, however, fMRI has crippling disadvantages: a
price tag in the millions, bulky equipment and the fact that it takes
at least 10 seconds to collect each data point.
Optical topography offers a compromise. It relies on the fact that
oxygenated blood absorbs more infrared radiation than deoxygenated
blood. When the brain is busy, the body responds by pumping oxygen to
active regions. Optical topography uses near infrared spectroscopy
(NIRS) to monitor changes in blood oxygenation, measuring brain
activity by proxy.
Technology companies are beginning to see the advantages. Hitachi, for
example, showcased an optical topography headset in London last month.
The headset can distinguish between an active and a resting brain, and
is mobile enough to tempt game developers. "Our wireless headset can
be worn without interfering with other activities," says Atsushi Maki
of the Hitachi Advanced Research Laboratory in Hatoyama, Japan.
Maki thinks that the future might be a combination device. "Light
doesn't interfere with electric fields," he says. "You could develop a
headset that combines NIRS with EEG to give complementary readings."
BRAIN-CONTROLLED VIDEO GAMES
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=2IC5Neoq_1M
http://www.pinktentacle.com/2007/10/brain-computer-interface-for-second-life/
Brain-computer interface for Second Life / 12 Oct 2007
While recent developments in brain-computer interface (BCI) technology
have given humans the power to mentally control computers, nobody has
used the technology in conjunction with the Second Life online virtual
world — until now.
A research team led by professor Jun’ichi Ushiba of the Keio
University Biomedical Engineering Laboratory has developed a BCI
system that lets the user walk an avatar through the streets of Second
Life while relying solely on the power of thought. To control the
avatar on screen, the user simply thinks about moving various body
parts — the avatar walks forward when the user thinks about moving his/
her own feet, and it turns right and left when the user imagines
moving his/her right and left arms.
The system consists of a headpiece equipped with electrodes that
monitor activity in three areas of the motor cortex (the region of the
brain involved in controlling the movement of the arms and legs). An
EEG machine reads and graphs the data and relays it to the BCI, where
a brain wave analysis algorithm interprets the user’s imagined
movements. A keyboard emulator then converts this data into a signal
and relays it to Second Life, causing the on-screen avatar to move. In
this way, the user can exercise real-time control over the avatar in
the 3D virtual world without moving a muscle.
Future plans are to improve the BCI so that users can make Second Life
avatars perform more complex movements and gestures. The researchers
hope the mind-controlled avatar, which was created through a joint
medical engineering project involving Keio’s Department of
Rehabilitation Medicine and the Tsukigase Rehabilitation Center, will
one day help people with serious physical impairments communicate and
do business in Second Life.
BRAINLOOP
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwNUpOVZu2E
http://www.aksioma.org/brainloop/index.html
http://www.aksioma.org/brainloop/elements.html
"Brainloop utilizes a Brain Computer Interface (BCI) system which
allows a subject to operate devices merely by imagining specific motor
commands. These mentally visualized commands may be seen as the
rehearsal of a motor act without the overt motor output; a neural
synapse occurs but the actual movement is blocked at the corticospinal
level. Motor imagery such as "move left hand", "move right hand" or
"move feet" become non-muscular communication and control signals that
convey messages and commands to the external world. In Brainloop the
performer is able - without physically moving - to investigate urban
areas and rural landscapes as he globe-trots around virtual Google
Earth."
BRAINMASTER : NEURY THE TACTILE BEAR (AVAILABLE SOON!)
http://www.brainmaster.com/productinfo/misc/NeuryBear/bear02.jpg
http://www.brainmaster.com/productinfo/misc/NeuryBear/neurybear.html
"This furry friend sits with you in your neurofeedback session, to
keep you company, and help you out! He's not just any bear. This bear
rumbles and grumbles with your EEG. So when you do the right thing,
you feel the bear rumble a little louder, and when you are not
focused, and not on target, the bear gets quiet. So he's there to help
you out, and he's really great for those who can't see well, or who
don't like the visual displays. But he's a friendly bear, he gets
along great with everyone he meets."
TRAINING YOUR BRAIN
http://www.brainmaster.com/tfc/
http://www.brainmaster.com/generalinfo/eegbands/eegbands.html
The Measurement, Interpretation, and Use of EEG Frequency Bands
BY Thomas F. Collura / December 7, 1997
How brain rhythms are generated:
Populations of cells generate rhythms when they depolarize in
synchrony. This activity occurs primarily in the upper 4 layers
(about 1/4 inch thick) of the outer layers of the cerebral cortex. The
presence of an EEG rhythm indicates that there is some brain activity
occurring in terms of millions of cells acting together, in a
synchronized fashion. The exact causes of this, and what it means for
the brain and information processing, is an entire dissertation in
itself.
Overall, the observed brainwave frequencies must be thought of as
"epiphenomena," which are the byproduct of normal brain function, but
not a brain signal in themselves. The brain does not communicate, or
do its business, using the EEG. Rather, it is a secondary measure,
such as the vibration measured from an engine, or the temperature of
an electronic circuit. Therefore, the brain does not, for example,
produce alpha waves for any purpose. It produces them as a result of
certain types of brain activity, and we can learn to recognize them,
and take advantage of them, by learning what they represent, and what
happens when we work with them.
Training of EEG rhythms
Biofeedback techniques can be used to train EEG rhythms. Training
systems can use visual feedback, auditory feedback (sounds), or use a
personal trainer to provide verbal feedback, thus making the trainee
aware of which brain rhythms are present. Displays can be of many
types, and computer displays are capable of producing a wide variety
of useful displays. These can include "thermometers", video games,
and other graphic displays. Systems can be set up to train to
reinforce, or to reduce, any rhythm or combination of rhythms, or for
more complex situations such as training different locations to be
synchronized, or desynchronized, or to train different locations to
produce (or inhibit) different frequencies.
We can also train more complex, derived properties, such as brainwave
synchrony, coherence, or relationships between brain rhythms recorded
from different sites. This has been found particularly useful in
training concentration and relaxation, for peak-performance training,
and for athletics, golfers, etc. Certain EEG properties have been
found conducive to being "in the zone," which is a highly efficient
and responsive state, useful for improving performance in many
applications.
It is important to realize that, although rhythms can be trained, to
produce desired results, the production (or reduction) of the
specific rhythm is not an end in itself, and the change in the EEG may
not signify that the desired change has occurred. Rather, the desired
brain/mind changes are a byproduct of the training, independent of
changes in the EEG itself. The brain is a self-regulating system, and
may behave much like a thermostat, that tries to keep the system
stable. To use an analogy, if a window is left open in a house in the
winter, the house may not be cold, but the furnace will be working
hard, and the heating bills will be high. If the window is closed,
representing a return to normal operation, the temperature may not
rise significantly, but the furnace will work less. Thus, the brain
may achieve a desired state, even if the measured variable, the brain
rhythms, do not change significantly, in and of themselves.
Nonetheless, changes in the brain have occurred, and their benefits
may be forthcoming, even in the absence of large changes in the EEG
signal.
Summary of EEG Frequency Bands:
The basic EEG rhythms are summarized briefly as follows, with regard
to their typical distribution on the scalp, subject states, tasks,
physiological correlates, and the effects of training. This summary
should be taken as a general roadmap, not as fixed and hard rules.
Delta (0.1-3 Hz):
Distribution: generally broad or diffused, may be bilateral,
widespread
Subjective feeling states: deep, dreamless sleep, non-REM sleep,
trance, unconscious
Associated tasks & behaviors: lethargic, not moving, not attentive
Physiological correlates: not moving, low-level of arousal
Effects of Training: can induce drowsiness, trance, deeply relaxed
states
Theta (4-7 Hz):
Distribution: usually regional, may involve many lobes, can be
lateralized or diffuse;
Subjective feeling states: intuitive, creative, recall, fantasy,
imagery, creative, dreamlike, switching thoughts, drowsy; "oneness",
"knowing"
Associated tasks & behaviors: creative, intuitive; but may also be
distracted, unfocused
Physiological correlates: healing, integration of mind/body
Effects of Training: if enhanced, can induce drifting, trancelike
state if suppressed, can improve concentration, ability to focus
attention
Alpha (8-12 Hz):
Distribution: regional, usually involves entire lobe; strong
occipital w/eyes closed
Subjective feeling states: relaxed, not agitated, but not drowsy;
tranquil, conscious
Associated tasks & behaviors: meditation, no action
Physiological correlates: relaxed, healing
Effects of Training: can produce relaxation
Sub band low alpha: 8-10: inner-awareness of self, mind/body
integration, balance
Sub band high alpha: 10-12: centering, healing, mind/body connection
Beta (above 12 Hz)
The beta band has a relatively large range, and has been defined as
anything above the alpha band.
Low Beta (12-15 Hz);:
Distribution: localized by side and by lobe (frontal, occipital,
etc.)
Subjective feeling states: relaxed yet focused, integrated
Associated tasks & behaviors: Typically resting yet alert when Low
Beta is present.
Physiological correlates: Low Beta may be observed anywhere on the
cortex. When it is recorded from the motor areas (C3, C4, Cz), it is
considered to be "Sensorimotor Rhythm" or "SMR". SMR is reduced by
muscular activity, e.g. moving the arm or leg; Restraining the body
may increase SMR.
Effects of Training: increasing SMR can produce relaxed focus,
improved attentive abilities, may remediate Attention Disorders.
Midrange Beta (15-18 Hz)
Distribution: localized, over various areas. May be focused on one
electrode.
Subjective feeling states: thinking, aware of self & surroundings
Associated tasks & behaviors: mental activity
Physiological correlates: alert, active, but not agitated
Effects of Training: can increase mental ability, focus, alertness, IQ
High Beta (above 18 Hz):
Distribution: localized, may be very focused.
Subjective feeling states: alertness, agitation
Associated tasks & behaviors: mental activity, e.g. math, planning,
etc.
Physiological correlates: general activation of mind & body functions.
Effects of Training: can induce alertness, but may also produce
agitation, etc.
Gamma (40 Hz):
Distribution: very localized
Subjective feeling states: thinking; integrated thought
Associated tasks & behaviors: high-level information processing,
"binding
Physiological correlates: associated with information-rich task
processing
Effects of Training: not known
THETA WAVES
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theta_rhythm
http://www.stanford.edu/group/maciverlab/theta.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroencephalography
NEUROFEEDBACK
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurofeedback
http://www.med.harvard.edu/AANLIB/home.html
http://www.geocities.com/adriancmvd/pagefreqs.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_neurofeedback_software
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_brainwave_entrainment_software
OPEN-SOURCE EEG SOFTWARE
http://openeeg.sourceforge.net/doc/
http://pceeg.sourceforge.net/
http://biosig.sourceforge.net/download.html
http://www.teuniz.net/edfbrowser/
http://www.opencircuits.com/Programmable_Chip_EEG
http://pceeg.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page
NOISY SIGNAL
http://arstechnica.com/journals/science.ars/2008/01/03/brain-computer-interfaces-slowly-getting-better
A recent Journal of Neural Engineering article shows why progress
seems to have slowed and gives an impression of the hurdles to be
overcome. The basic premise of these systems are all the same: first,
record the electrical brain activity using a skullcap of electrodes,
then these signals are processed and fed into a genetic algorithm,
which evolves to associate particular signals as instructions to move.
This is then tested, with the result that only about 41 percent of
attempts to move are followed, and once every 12 seconds or so, the
computer decides you wanted to move when you really didn't. To put
this in perspective, imagine that you were using this interface to
control an artificial knee. Six in every ten steps would result in you
tripping and once every 12 seconds you would randomly kick someone
(actually, I can see a benefit there). Clearly, a lot of effort is
going into reducing the rate of false positives and increasing the
rate of true positives.
The problem is that the skullcap records a very generalized and quite
noisy signal, from which useful information must be extracted. The
current approach seems to be using increasingly sophisticated
filtering techniques to extract certain known signals, such as
movement-related potentials, beta rhythms, and Mu rhythms. Changes to
these signals are then compared and correlated to actual movement
events. Using these more sophisticated methods, the true positive rate
remains at about 50 percent. However, the false positive result has
been substantially reduced to about 0.1 percent.
Overall, this still isn't that good because the system doesn't pick up
true positives very well. Although I was quite enthusiastic about the
progress when this was first reported, it is becoming apparent that
there is a lot of hard engineering work to do. The pessimist in me
suggests that this approach will simply never be sensitive enough to
pick up all the intended movements while still retaining a low false
positive rate. This is because the skullcaps record a general,
unlocalized signal from the brain and, from that, try to infer
localized information.
This doesn't mean the approach will never yield good results though.
For instance, if proven safe, more invasive methods could be used to
extract a more localized signal. Or perhaps neurological studies will
allow researchers to use filtering techniques that result in localized
information. However, pure filtering and statistical association may
never yield enough specificity by itself.
{Journal of Neural Engineering, 2007, DOI: 10.1088/1741-2560/5/1/002}
HARD-WIRED MONKEY STOPS USING JOYSTICK
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-cpcoIJbOU
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/4474.php
In the initial behavioral experiments, the researchers recorded and
analyzed the output signals from the monkeys' brains as the animals
were taught to use a joystick to both position a cursor over a target
on a video screen and to grasp the joystick with a specified force.
After the animals' initial training, however, the researchers made the
cursor more than a simple display -- now incorporating into its
movement the dynamics, such as inertia and momentum, of a robot arm
functioning in another room.
While the animals' performance initially declined when the robot arm
was included in the feedback loop, they quickly learned to allow for
these dynamics and became proficient in manipulating the robot-
reflecting cursor, found the scientists. The scientists next removed
the joystick, after which the monkeys continued to move their arms in
mid-air to manipulate and 'grab' the cursor, thus controlling the
robot arm.
'The most amazing result, though, was that after only a few days of
playing with the robot in this way, the monkey suddenly realized that
she didn't need to move her arm at all,' said Nicolelis. 'Her arm
muscles went completely quiet, she kept the arm at her side and she
controlled the robot arm using only her brain and visual feedback. Our
analyses of the brain signals showed that the animal learned to
assimilate the robot arm into her brain as if it was her own arm.'
CONTACT
Miguel Nicolelis
http://www.nicolelislab.net
email : nicoleli [at] neuro.duke [dot] edu
http://scienceblogs.com/neurophilosophy/2008/01/monkeys_brain_activity_control.php
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8oAz4WS4O0
LICKING MARSHMALLOWS OFF ROBOT FINGERS
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnWSah4RD2E
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=sm2d0w87wQE
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v453/n7198/abs/nature06996.html
http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/2008/05/monkey_see_monkey_control_prosthetic_arm_with_thoughts.php
Velliste believes that the secret to the arm's success lay in making
it as natural as possible. For a start, it could freely move its head
and eyes without affecting the signals controlling the arm. It could
also move the fake arm in real time. There was only about an seventh
of a second worth of delay between a burst of brain activity and the
corresponding movement; natural arms have similar delays between
thought and deed. This nigh-instantaneous control was obvious during
one trial when the animal dropped the food and immediately stopped
moving the arm.
This natural responsiveness made it easier for the monkeys to accept
the arm as their own. They learned behaviours that had nothing to do
with the task, like licking remaining food off the fingers or using
the hand to push food into their mouths. They learned to move the arm
in arcs to avoid knocking the food off the platform while bringing it
back in a straight line. They even learned that the food (marshmallows
and grape halves) stick to the fingers so while they initially opened
the hand only when it was near their mouths, one of them figured out
that they could open the hand well before then.
CONTACT
Meel Velliste
http://motorlab.neurobio.pitt.edu/people.php?name=meel
email : mev3 [at] pitt [dot] edu
Andrew Schwartz
http://motorlab.neurobio.pitt.edu/people.php?name=andy
email : abs21 [at] pitt [dot] edu
BRAIN-COMPUTER INTERFACE (BCI) WORKAROUNDS FOR PRIMATE PARALYSIS
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/images/2008/10/15/monkeyhand.jpg
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14948
http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/21553/
http://www.nature.com/news/2008/081015/full/news.2008.1170.html
http://spectrum.ieee.org/oct08/6908
http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/17163/
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19125606.200-overcoming-paralysis-is-a-case-of-mind-over-matter.html
CONTACT
Eberhard Fetz
http://depts.washington.edu/pbiopage/
http://depts.washington.edu/pbiopage/people_fac_page.php?fac_ID=12
email : fetz [at] u.washington [dot] edu
John Donoghue
http://neuroscience.brown.edu/donoghue.html
http://donoghue.neuro.brown.edu/
email : John_Donoghue [at] Brown [dot] edu
THE LUKE ARM
http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid452319854?bctid=1576332530
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/dean_kamen_previews_a_new_prosthetic_arm.html
http://spectrum.ieee.org/feb08/5957
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Kamen
http://www.dekaresearch.com/
PEAR / PSYLERON
http://www.icrl.org/
http://www.psyleron.com/overview.aspx
http://www.psyleron.com/faq.aspx
http://www.psyleron.com/research.aspx
http://www.psyleron.com/products.aspx
http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/
http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/human_machine.html
I. Human/Machine Anomalies
The most substantial portion of the PEAR experimental program examines
anomalies arising in human/machine interactions. In these studies
human operators attempt to bias the output of a variety of mechanical,
electronic, optical, acoustical, and fluid devices to conform to pre-
stated intentions, without recourse to any known physical influences.
In unattended calibrations all of these sophisticated machines produce
strictly random data, yet the experimental results display increases
in information content that can only be attributed to the
consciousness of their human operators.
Over the [Princeton] laboratory's 27-year history, thousands of such
experiments, involving many millions of trials, have been performed by
several hundred operators. The observed effects are usually quite
small, of the order of a few parts in ten thousand on average, but
they compound to highly significant statistical deviations from chance
expectations. These results are summarized in "Correlations of Random
Binary Sequences with Pre-Stated Operator Intention" and "The PEAR
Proposition."
http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/pdfs/correlations.pdf
http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/pdfs/jse_papers/PEARproposition.pdf
A number of secondary correlations reveal other anomalous structural
features within these human/machine databases. In many instances, the
effects appear to be operator-specific in their details and the
results of given operators on widely different machines frequently
tend to be similar in character and scale. Pairs of operators with
shared intentions are found to induce further anomalies in the
experimental outputs, especially when the two individuals share an
emotional bond. The data also display significant disparities between
female and male operator performances, and consistent series position
effects are observed in individual and collective results. These
anomalies can be demonstrated with the operators located up to
thousands of miles from the laboratory, exerting their efforts many
hours before or after the actual operation of the devices.
The random devices also respond to group activities of larger numbers
of people, even when they are unaware of the presence of the machine.
Such "FieldREG" data produced in environments fostering relatively
intense or profound subjective resonance show larger deviations than
those generated in more pragmatic assemblies. (See "FieldREG II:
Consciousness Field Effects: Replications and Explorations.") Venues
that appear to be particularly conducive to such field anomalies
include small intimate groups, group rituals, sacred sites, musical
and theatrical performances, and other charismatic events. In
contrast, data generated during most academic conferences, business
meetings, or other mundane venues show less deviations than would be
expected by chance.
http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/pdfs/FR3.pdf
MIND OVER MATTER
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.04/pear_pr.html
Princeton University scientists believe that the human mind can
influence machines. Now, when is the last time you said something nice
to your computer?
By Rogier van Bakel / Apr 1995
"Come on, sweetheart, you can do it. Oh, now, show me what you're made
of. Thaaat's it!" I am alone in a room with a woman I met barely an
hour ago. She is talking softly, seductively, in a voice that is both
sweet and persuasive. Not to me, mind you. She is directing her words
- saccharine mutterings that other people might reserve for a sick
child or a particularly weak puppy - to an ugly electronic box with a
red digital display.
She is Brenda Dunne, the manager of the Princeton Engineering
Anomalies Research laboratory, and she is giving me a demonstration of
how she might "will" a random event generator (REG) to come up with
more high than low numbers. She is somehow using the power of her mind
to achieve that result. And the power of her voice. She coos. She
crows. She coaxes.
In case you were wondering: Dunne, a developmental psychologist, is
far from the mad scientist type. But she is doggedly determined to
prove what most physicists have never thought possible: that the human
mind can change the performance characteristics of machines. Mind over
matter, as it were. Sound crazy? The work at the PEAR lab has
consistently shown that "normal" volunteers - not people who purport
to have any psychic powers - can indeed influence the behavior of
micro-electronic equipment with their minds, with their consciousness.
This is done without the benefit of electrodes and wires - and without
anyone being permitted to give the machine a good whack. Nearly a
hundred volunteers have conducted 212 million REG trials during the 15
years of the lab's existence, and the research shows a tiny but
statistically significant result that is not attributable to chance.
The volunteers didn't even have to sweet-talk the machine into its
deviations the way Dunne has just done. Some of the "operators" merely
stare broodingly at the display, focusing their minds to beat the
silicon into submission. Others let their thoughts wander or read a
book. Two-thirds of the volunteers have been able to affect the REG in
the direction they had intended (to select more high or more low
numbers), while only half of them would have produced those results by
chance. A few of them have gotten results that, when expressed in a
graph, are so distinct the PEAR scientists can recognize these
volunteers' patterns at a glance. Dunne refers to such patterns as
"signatures."
The effects that the volunteers accomplish are very small, but
amazing. "The operators are roughly altering one bit in 1,000,"
explains Michael Ibison, a British mathematical physicist who has come
to work for a year at PEAR after stints at Siemens, IBM, and Agfa.
"That means if you had a coin toss, psychokinesis could affect one of
those coin tosses if you tossed a thousand times."
The metaphor is apt. The REG, in its simplest form, is nothing more
than an electronic coin flipper. It is de-signed to come up with as
many heads as tails. That is precisely what the carefully calibrated
instrument does when humans leave it alone. But sit an operator in
front of it, and more often than not, the REG obligingly produces
slightly more heads than tails - or vice versa, depending on the
operator's intentions.
If that sounds weird, consider this: you don't have to be in the same
room as the REG to get results. Or, for that matter, in the same city,
state, or country. Volunteers as far away as Hungary, Kenya, Brazil,
and India have shown they can influence Princeton's REG as if they
were sitting 3 feet away.
What's love got to do with it?
Another surprising finding occurred when Dunne and her team asked
couples to interact with the REG. The effects generated by two people
with an emotional attachment were much larger than those produced by
an "unattached" pair of operators.
And the PEAR team uses other instruments to get similar, perhaps even
more striking, results. There's the Random Mechanical Cascade known as
Murphy (after Murphy's Law), a 9-foot-high vertical contraption that
drops 9,000 small polystyrene balls from a spout onto a grid of 336
evenly spaced nylon pegs. The balls land in a horizontal row of 19
bins at the bottom, in a distribution pattern that looks like a bell-
shaped curve. Volunteers can "think left" or "think right," and a
majority of them can cause a modest but measurable shift in where the
balls land. A more recent experiment involves operators trying to
control the swing of a custom-built pendulum. In another one, they're
seated in front of a computer displaying two superimposed pictures,
and are told to try to suppress one and bring the other to the
foreground.
Skeptics have examined the lab's instruments, its data-processing
software, its protocols. Environmental, non-consciousness-related
influences such as temperature differences, passing traffic, earth
tremors, and vibrations from a nearby machine shop have been ruled out
as a cause for the anomalies. Other scientists have, by and large,
been able to replicate PEAR's experiments - just as PEAR's own work
builds on other academically sound research. But the Princeton
University lab has amassed so much scientific evidence of the
consciousness effect that, by sheer quantity of data, it has become
the foremost player in this field.
If the empirical proof seems to be strong and solid, the theoretical
part - how does it happen, and what does it mean? - is uncharted
territory. That doesn't stop Brenda Dunne from developing theories of
her own. She points to a clipping on the wall of her chaotic office.
It's a cartoon of two scientists. One says: "I actually prayed to
receive this grant money. You won't tell anyone, will you, Charles?"
After we're done laughing, Dunne strikes an earnest note. "It's human
nature to pray, to hope, to desire. Where does this fit into a
scientific world view? How can you talk about a reality that has no
place for human consciousness - the very human consciousness that
created that world view in the first place, the consciousness that
designs the models and observes the data? Where is it in the models?"
Dunne has come to believe that human consciousness establishes a
"resonance" with the physical world that can reduce some of the
randomness around us. "One form of this resonance is what we know as
love," she says, referring to the experiments with the bonded-pair
operators. "Do we dare theorize that love has a palpable influence on
random noise? I don't know. I would be willing to at least raise the
question. This emotional bond, the 'being on the same wavelength,'
somehow reduces the entropy in the world a little bit. And random
processes seem to reflect this reduction by showing a more organized
physical reality."
Heresy versus recalcitrance
It's easy to scoff at such notions - call them scientific heresy, or
New-Age drivel. And, to be sure, PEAR has a number of detractors. The
editor of a prominent scientific journal once told the lab's founder
and senior scientist, Robert Jahn, that he might consider publishing
Jahn's recent paper, provided the author would transmit it
telepathically.
Dunne has learned to deal with the barbs, she says, "without flying
off the handle, without getting angry or defensive. We welcome the
criticism, and have frequently made changes at the suggestion of other
scientists. It think it was Nietzsche who said: 'Love your enemies,
because they bring out the best in you.' Unfortunately, many of our
critics basically say: 'This is the kind of nonsense I wouldn't
believe even if it were real.' They're people who have made up their
minds that this is all hogwash, without having studied the data."
Robert Jahn agrees. "We were not fully prepared for the degree of
recalcitrance that we would encounter in otherwise learned,
professional circles," he says, somewhat testily, when I visit the lab
again two months later and mention the criticism.
Jahn is a thin, hollow-cheeked man in his 60s who is inseparable from
his baseball cap. He holds an undergraduate degree in mechanical
engineering, an MS and a PhD in physics, is a professor of aerospace
sciences at Princeton University, and holds the position of Dean
Emeritus of its School of Engineering and Applied Science. He started
the PEAR Lab in 1979, putting his reputation, if not his career, on
the line. Afraid of being lumped together with all kinds of swindlers
and charlatans who have polluted the field, Jahn avoids words like
"paranormal," "psychic," and "parapsychology" like the plague. The
phenomena he looks at are "engineering anomalies," he insists.
It was clear from the start that the subject he wanted to study was
mired in controversy. Princeton administrators did not hide their
concern over Jahn's unusual career turn. They nodded their approval
only after an ad hoc committee had been established to ensure Jahn's
research met scientific standards - a first at New Jersey's famous
powerhouse of learning.
Although that committee has since been disbanded, a Princeton
colleague, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Philip Anderson, has since
attacked PEAR's work, arguing that "if the effect of human
consciousness on machines existed, hundreds of people would be beating
the bank at Las Vegas." Anderson also believes that it is not up to
serious scholars to disprove Jahn's data, smirking that this task
should instead be handled by "those who are used to dealing in flim-
flam, such as magicians and policemen."
Jahn dismisses the Vegas comment as "a spurious red herring." The
effects PEAR has measured are much too small to have any usefulness at
the roulette table, he counters wearily. And, yes, for the same
reason, you can forget about trying to get the ATM machine to slip you
an extra twenty, or about "willing" the traffic lights on Main Street
to jump to green as you're speeding along. Your odds would be
astronomical.
Virtual zoo
Robert Jahn's office is a virtual zoo of stuffed animals, mostly given
to him by friends, colleagues, and students. In a corner, Jahn proudly
displays his collection of small carousel horses, the fruit of a one-
time subscription to the Franklin Mint's Horse of the Month Club. The
book he co-authored with Dunne, Margins of Reality (Harcourt Brace &
Co., 1987), a tome on the role of consciousness in the physical world,
is dedicated to the scientist's respective pets, "and to all our other
animal friends, who kept watch and understood it all."
He is quick to explain his fascination for animals. "I believe that
the capacity for the so-called anomalous interaction between
consciousness and the physical environment is best utilized by other-
than-human life forms. You see it in the migration capabilities of
birds and fish, and in the group consciousness that is evident in
swarming insects. It is a capacity of consciousness that we have
largely bred out of ourselves, as humans, by our preoccupation with
the development of analytical and intellectual capabilities of the
mind, leaving the intuitive aspects to whither." PEAR has never done
experiments with animal consciousness. However, scattered data from
researchers who have seem to support Jahn's notions (see "Animal
Magnetism: Chick It Out," page 84).
A flight down from his office, in the engineering school's basement,
the PEAR lab is also populated by an array of teddy bears and other
furry friends, most of whom cozily hang out on the velvet orange couch
that looks like yesterday's Salvation Army special. On a wall hangs an
official-looking certificate from a group called The Giraffe Project,
proclaiming Jahn a giraffe because he "sticks his neck out."
But perhaps more telling are the two signs over the copying machine.
One simply identifies the machine as "Baby." That's the name the
copier was given by the lab people, who are seeking its full
cooperation by using a flattering moniker. "This machine is subject to
breakdowns during periods of critical need," warns the other sign. "A
special circuit called a critical detector senses the operator's
emotional state in terms of how desperate he or she is to use the
machine. The detector then creates a malfunction proportional to the
desperation of the operator. Threatening the machine with violence
only aggravates the situation. Likewise, attempts to use another
machine also may cause it to malfunction. They belong to the same
union. Keep cool, say nice things to the machine. Nothing else seems
to work. Never let anything mechanical know you're in a hurry."
It's pretty standard office humor. Identical signs must be hanging
over thousands of computers and copiers throughout the country. But
nowhere is it more appropriate than here, where a team of scientists
ponders if "technical" glitches might not, sometimes, be the result of
operator anxiety.
"It's funny," critiques Dunne, nodding at the placard. "And on the
surface, that's all it is. But taking that kind of an attitude toward
a machine, humorous though it may be, means treating the machine as if
it were alive. To a degree, we all anthropomorphize the sophisticated
equipment we work with - our computers, our cars. "The way you treat a
machine is going to have a great deal to do with the way it behaves.
If you slam it, if you bang it, if you treat it like a thing, that
reflects an attitude. If you consider the world an extension of
yourself, it becomes a better place. Is that engineering? I don't
know. Probably, yes. At the very least, the equipment is simply going
to last longer because you take better care of it."
Murphy's Law: joke or gospel?
Some people, it seems, only have to get near a computer system and it
breaks down. And your hard drive, modern lore would have it, is most
likely to give up the ghost when you absolutely need that report you
forgot to back up last night. Is Dunne implying that Murphy's Law is
more than a whimsical piece of pseudo-science, more than a propeller
head's version of a generic urban legend? "Most people who work around
technology laugh - nervously - when they hear about such phenomena,"
she says, smiling. "They may dismiss it, but they know exactly what
you're talking about."
The sentiment is echoed by Dean Radin, a researcher in Nevada who
worked for Bell Labs in Columbus, Ohio, and later at Princeton. "In
technical circles, Murphy's Law is revered as the gospel; and on the
other hand, the same people laugh about it. I also noticed that
employees got reputations as jinxes or as people who would make
systems work. And at Bell, whenever we were under the gun for an
important demonstration to a VIP, the jinxes were not allowed to be
present, and the people who were good were almost forced to be
present. Because we figured it couldn't hurt. And I thought this was
interesting behavior for people who were otherwise highly analytical
and quite bright."
Radin, who has a master's degree in electrical engineering and a
doctorate in psychology, got his bosses to OK a study into a possible
link between operator anxiety and a machine's performance. "The reason
I was able to sell this to management was that if one of the big
telephone switching machines goes down for a second, we lose US$1
million in revenue," he explains. Tenacious attempts notwithstanding,
the link he sought to establish was elusive at best. "I did find,
however, that there is a relationship between an operator's intention
and the performance of a machine," Radin enthuses. He was able to
replicate the random generator experiments that physicist Helmut
Schmidt did at Boeing Scientific Research Labs in the '60s. In late
1993, Radin started the privately funded Consciousness Research
Laboratory through the University of Nevada. He conducts studies there
that he calls both "similar" and "complementary" to PEAR's.
Is there not even a shadow of a doubt in his mind that the mind-over-
matter effect really exists? "No. The criticism of this type of
research by other scientists is just the usual knee-jerk reaction to
unexpected data."
A psychic garage door opener
That the effects of the human/machine resonance are tiny doesn't mean
they can't be important in an exceedingly pragmatic way. For starters,
they're arguably greater than the effects of the flaw in Intel's
Pentium chip that caused such a brouhaha late last year. And small
causes can have large consequences. In the late '70s, Bob Jahn
observed how certain aerospace technology was becoming so sensitive
that it had to be protected against a passing cosmic ray. So, he told
himself, it wouldn't necessarily be a stretch to imagine some small
effect that a human operator - someone who sits in front of a delicate
machine, stares at it, and interacts with it for hours on end - might
have on that same piece of equipment.
Jahn is not much closer to the answers now than he was 15 years ago.
"We're far short of understanding the parameters. It's not at all
clear how you shield a sensitive device to ignore the cross talk
between the information processor that is our mind and the information
processor that is the machine. But we know that the cross talk exists,
under certain circumstances at least. And I still have the concern
that it is the source of some of the gremlin effects that pilots
report, and of events that occur in emergency situations where the
stress among the operational crew is bound to be very high."
PEAR may be laying the groundwork for technology that could eventually
lead to more reliable vital computer systems, such as those used in
air-traffic control or spacecraft. From the most pragmatic of
perspectives, though, how will Dunne's and Jahn's notions about the
properties of conscious-ness change the lives of average Janes and
Joes everywhere? "Given what we see in the way of volunteers'
signature patterns, a personalized switch is a definite possibility,"
Dunne muses. "It would open the garage door when you mind-beam your
request at it. If you want to get really science fictiony, you might
envision a car that's been attuned to you, and when you're very tense
and nervous, a sensor in the car is able to pick this up, and won't
allow you to drive over 40 miles an hour."
Does she believe we'll reach a point where we can interact with our
machines by the sheer force of our minds? "It's long-term, but I won't
be surprised," she allows. "We are moving in that direction, with
technology being developed for disabled people, in which they can wire
the device to brain waves or eye movements [see "Zen and the Art of
Flying a Plane," page 86]. "We already have voice-activated computers,
and voice locks that recognize the voice patterns of authorized users.
That's damn close. If you have something that you might call a psychic
signature, how different is that from a voice pattern? Not very."
Dunne also sees a medical component to PEAR's ventures into human/
machine relationships. "Our own bodies are perhaps the most complex
and sensitive of information processing machines. That raises the
question: Is it possible that some of the processes that go on in the
body - for example, random fluctuations in functions like heartbeat,
immune response, neuronal connections, and the like - might be
susceptible, or indeed might be designed to respond to the directives
of our consciousness? There are many stories about patients who refuse
to accept a diagnosis and get better in spite of every expectation. On
the other hand, there are tales of patients who refuse to get better
even though there is nothing terribly wrong. If we could get a handle
on this thing, it might make a vast difference in how we heal
ourselves. I know this is very speculative, but it's an area that is
worthy of investigation."
Cutting off your arm
The technology we use shapes our self-image, theorizes Dunne, and
therefore becomes an integral part of who we are. "When the radio was
invented, our brain was likened to a box with transmitters and
receivers. Now we're into computers, and the brain has become an
information processor, a complex computer. These technologies and
metaphors are a reflection of our self-perception, of our own
evolution; we develop them as extensions of ourselves. But how can you
detach that extension from notions of self and ideas of consciousness?
That's like cutting off your arm."
But is she serious when she recommends pampering and coochy-cooing
your com-puter equipment? Why is that smile playing on her lips? "I'm
half-serious," she insists. "I make fun of it, because yes, sometimes
it gets silly."
Dunne likes to tell a story about Danish physicist Niels Bohr, who
supposedly had a horseshoe over his barn door. During a visit, a
colleague noticed the horseshoe and inquired, "Come now Niels, you
don't believe in that nonsense, do you?" Whereupon Bohr smiled most
agreeably, and replied: "Of course not, but I am told that it works
whether you believe in it or not."
BABY CHICKS CAN DO IT
http://gerp.free.fr/rpeoch-chicks.htm
Abstract : 80 groups of 7 chicks were used to test their ability to
influence the trajectory of a robot bearing a candle as the unique
source of light in the room. The robot is driven, via telephone line,
by a random generator located 23 kilometres away. When chicks are
present, the robot moves preferentially into their direction (66.25%
out of 80 trials). This is significantly different from the non
specific displacement of the machine in the absence of chicks and
observer (p<0.00001). The random generator being the source of
movements, this result suggests that chicks are able to influence it
over a long distance.
Animal Magnetism
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.04/pear_pr.html
You can probably have some effect on the behavior of a sensitive
random device if you really try - but chances are you'll never be as
good as a cage full of chicks. In a series of experiments carried out
by René Peoc'h in collaboration with the Swiss Fondation Marcel et
Monique Odier de Psycho-Physique, a small, self-propelled robot called
a Tychoscope was allowed to wander around aimlessly in an enclosed
room. A random generator determined the lengths of the robot's
straight-line movement and angles of rotation. Left to itself, the
Tychoscope moved in entirely random patterns, and spent as much time
in the left half of the room as it did in the right half.
But when a cage filled with live chicks was placed on one side of the
room, the robot's pattern changed dramatically. On average, it spent
considerably more time in the area nearest the animals. It was as if
the birds "willed" the robot to stay close. The chicks had two reasons
for not wanting the robot to stray too far. One group had been
"imprinted" (when they hatched, the first thing they saw was the
Tychoscope, and they adopted it as their mother). Another group had
not, but the chicks seemed to respond to the lit candle that was
placed on top of the Tychoscope in the darkened room. The scientists
assume from this that the chicks didn't like the dark. By comparison,
human operators who tried to "will" the robot to stay on one side of
the room achieved much smaller and more erratic results.
Dean Radin, a researcher at the University of Nevada who is familiar
with the Odier experiments, is not surprised by what appears to be the
superior psychic aptitude of the baby chicks. "The level of motivation
that was manipulated there is much higher than what is typically
manipulated in a human experiment. For humans, such an experiment is
relatively boring. The chicks, on the other hand, reacted as if their
lives depended on it."
A second explanation could be that the birds were not hampered by
rationalizations that might affect the results of a human volunteer. A
person, no matter how open-minded, may subconsciously believe that the
experiment is strange or silly. Says Radin: "When you have subjects
who work on an instinctual level, it presumably leads to higher
motivation and more remarkable results."
FOIA BONUS
SOVIET TELEKINESIS RESEARCH
http://foia.abovetopsecret.com/ultimate_UFO/UFO_GOVT/of_Interest/paranormal_briefing.pdf
http://blog.wired.com/defense/files/SovParapsych.pdf
http://blog.wired.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/12/11/ussr_paranormal.jpg
http://blog.wired.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/12/11/us_paranormal_2.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychokinesis
VIDEO
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/video/2009/jan/10/mattel-mind-flex-ces
http://www.pcworld.com/video/id,451-page,1-bid,0/video.html
AGES 8 AND UP
http://www.canada.com/topics/lifestyle/story.html?id=1152974
Breakthrough toy can read your mind, move objects
BY Vito Pilieci / January 08, 2009
Giving new meaning to the phrase mind over matter, technology that
gives people the ability to move objects by thinking will soon be
available at North American toy stores. Mattel Inc. has created a
game that can read a child's mind and use thoughts to manoeuvre a
small foam ball through a table-top obstacle course. The Mind Flex
uses technology that reads the electrical impulses (called bio-
feedback) that occur within a brain while a person is thinking.
A device that looks like a pair of headphones sits on the child's head
and tracks brain activity. Within the obstacle course are small fans
that are activated when a child thinks. The more brain activity the
child produces, the faster the fans blow. The goal is to have the
child "think" the little foam ball through the obstacle course. The
toy, to be officially revealed this week at the Consumer Electronics
Show in Las Vegas, is expected to be in stores later this year. The
Mind Flex is targeted at children eight and up and will retail for $80
U.S.
While the technology may sound straight from Star Trek, researchers
have long been working on ways to use brain activity to direct
machines. "It all goes back to neurofeedback that has been around for
50 years, where you can record activity coming from the human brain
through the scalp," said Melvyn Goodale, Canada Research Chair in
Visual Neuroscience at the University of Western Ontario. "It has the
outside look of a science-fiction theme. You are controlling things
through mind waves. But things like this have been around in various
science museums for some time."
Mr. Goodale says a museum in Sarasota, Florida, displays a similar toy
that pits two competitors against one another. Instead of floating a
ball through an obstacle course, each player tries to score a goal in
a competitor's net. The person who could create and sustain the most
brain activity would power a set of fans that pushed a foam ball into
the rival's goal.
Scientists are also delving into mind-over-matter technology, hoping
to isolate specific brain activity with the goal of allowing people to
interact with a computer or TV without a mouse, remote or a keyboard.
The technology may also be used to help people who have lost their
limbs control robotic prosthetics. "There are attempts to actually
record activity of specific parts of the brain," said Mr. Goodale. "To
use electrodes to record the activity of groups of cells of patients
with spinal cord damage to get them to control robot arms, wheel
chairs or cursors on a computer screen."
Science may be close to a breakthrough, according to Mr. Goodale. He
said several research papers detail advanced ways of capturing brain
activity and tests are already under way meaning the day when human
and machine can communicate may not be far off. "We've been working
for 20 or 30 years on this mind-borg or cyborg stuff. All of these
things are examples of new interfaces between humans and machines,"
said Steve Mann, a professor with the department of electrical and
computer engineering at the University of Toronto.
Mr. Mann himself has been called the world's first "cyborg," and is
famous for having created "wearable computers" that allow him to
interact with devices. He is working on technology called the EyeTap,
which looks like a sleek monocle and can record what a person sees. It
can also act as a display for computer-generated content. The EyeTap
also responds to its environment, automatically lowering or raising
lighting when a person walks into a room.
CONTACT
Steve Mann
http://www.eecg.toronto.edu/~mann/
http://wearcomp.org/
http://eyetap.org/
email : mann [at] eecg.toronto [dot] edu
MIND-EYE COORDINATION
http://www.physorg.com/news150781868.html
New games powered by brain waves / January 10th, 2009
An elderly Chinese woman wearing a headset concentrates intensely on a
small foam ball and it begins to rise slowly into the air. It's not
magic, but rather the latest game from toy maker Mattel, which allows
players to move a ball around an obstacle course by using just their
powers of concentration.
Focusing on the ball causes a fan in the base of the game -- called
Mind Flex -- to start up and lift the ball on a gentle stream of air.
Break your concentration and the ball descends. Once a player has the
ball in the air they need to try to weave it through hoops, towers and
other obstacles. "It's a mind-eye coordination game," said Mattel's
Tim Sheridan. "As you relax you'll find that the ball drops." Mind
Flex relies on EEG technology to measure brain wave activity through a
headset equipped with sensors for the forehead and earlobes. The game,
which will be available in September for 79.99 dollars, is being
displayed by Mattel at the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in
Las Vegas.
But Mattel is not the only toy maker tapping into the power of the
mind. In a report this week USA Today newspaper said game maker Uncle
Milton plans to release a similar game this year. Called "Force
Trainer" it is named after "The Force" powers of Yoda and Luke
Skywalker in the popular Star Wars films. The game calls for players
to lift a ball inside a transparent tube using their powers of
concentration. "It's been a fantasy everyone has had, using The
Force," the daily quoted Howard Roffman, president of Lucas Licensing,
as saying. "Force Trainer" also uses electroencephalography, or EEG,
to measure electrical activity in the brain recorded on a headset
containing sensors. A company called NeuroSky adapted the EEG
technology for both games, according to USA Today.
NEUROSKY
http://www.neurosky.com/
http://www.neurosky.com/products/
http://www.neurosky.com/for-oemodc-developers/
http://www.neurosky.com/for-oemodc-developers/partner-and-customer-market-space/
http://www.neurosky.com/for-oemodc-developers/licensing/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQWBfCg91CU
EMOTIV
http://www.emotiv.com/
http://emotiv.com/INDS_2/inds_2_3.html
http://emotiv.com/corporate/1_0/1_1.htm
http://emotiv.com/corporate/2_0/2_1.htm
http://emotiv.com/corporate/5_0/5_1.htm
COMPUTERS THAT KNOW YOU'RE LAUGHING
http://www.smh.com.au/news/innovations/new-game-gizmo-uses-mind-control/2008/05/07/1220121304851.html
New game gizmo uses mind control
BY Asher Moses / May 7, 2008
An Australian company is gearing up to release a computer headset that
allows people to control video games using only the power of their
minds. Emotiv Systems, founded by four Australian scientists in 2003,
will release the $US299 ($315) EPOC headset on the US market this
year. Featuring 16 sensors that measure electrical impulses from the
brain, the headset - which plugs into the PC's USB port - will enable
games to register facial expressions, emotions and even cognitive
thoughts, allowing players to perform in-game actions just by
visualising them.
The headset works in a similar way to voice recognition, in that it
must first be calibrated using Emotiv's software to recognise patterns
in the user's electrical brain impulses, which are used to perform 30
preset actions. When the player performs those same thoughts in the
game the software knows to associate them with the correct action,
such as rotate object or push object. "If you look at the way we
communicate with machines up to this day, it's always in a conscious
form, so whether you turn on and off the light or you program software
you always consciously tell a machine to perform a task for you,"
Emotiv CEO and co-founder Nam Do said in an interview from the
company's Pyrmont offices. "But the communication among ourselves is
much more interesting because we have non-conscious communications, so
we read body language, we read facial expressions and we also have
feelings and emotions which differentiate us from machines. Our vision
for the next generation of man-machine interface is it's not going to
be limited to just conscious [interaction]."
While the headset will work in a very limited sense with existing
titles, Do said the major game developers and publishers were
designing a number of their upcoming titles to take full advantage of
the technology. For instance, an in-game avatar would be able to mimic
the human player's facial expressions - smiles, winks, grimaces, and
so on - in real time, and other non-human characters in the game could
respond to these. "If you shoot somebody and you're smiling, the non-
player character can turn around and say to you, 'What are you
laughing at? You just killed that dude,' " Do said.
The headset could also detect the players' emotions - whether they're
bored, angry, engaged, happy, stressed, etc - and adjust difficulty
levels, in-game music and the game environment accordingly. Characters
could also react to a player's emotional cues. In horror-themed games,
enemies could intelligently select the perfect time to startle a
player based on how they feel, rather than having opponents in the
same positions every time a mission is reloaded.
But the most powerful aspect of the EPOC is its ability to detect
thoughts. Players can just think about performing actions, such as
lifting or pushing objects or making them disappear, and have the game
act accordingly without the need to push any keys or buttons. All of
these features have been publicly demonstrated to thousands at gaming
conferences using a role playing game developed by Emotiv. It will be
included for free with the headset and was trialled in Sydney by
smh.com.au.
Do, who came to Australia from Vietnam in 1995 on a university
scholarship, said his intention was not to replace the keyboard or
traditional game controller; he simple wanted to add another layer to
the experience. "You can still move around using your joystick, using
your keypad, using your mouse and keyboard, just like a normal game,
but there is a lot of activity that we take to another level by adding
a headset - such as being able to levitate an object by thinking about
it," he said.
He said that, while the company was initially focused on gaming, the
technology had applications in any situations where humans interacted
with machines, such as in medicine and robotics. Further, market
research companies and even Hollywood studios were tapping Emotiv's
technology to measure reactions from focus groups. Emotiv spent two
years developing its technology in Sydney before moving its
headquarters to San Francisco, the home of Silicon Valley, in 2005. It
employs about 50 staff - neurologists, biomedical scientists,
mathematicians, engineers - but its entire research team is still
based in Sydney.
Moving to the US, Do said, meant Emotiv was "closer to all the action,
all the [big gaming] companies, all the clients and also access to
money, because, as a start-up company, money is always one of the key
considerations". He said Emotiv had been approached by numerous
suitors keen to acquire the company, but wanted to first see how far
the technology could grow. Emotiv has also had meetings with the major
game console makers about licensing the technology to them for future
products.
In addition to Do, Emotiv was founded by 1998 Young Australian of the
Year Tan Le; Neil Weste, a neuroscientist who sold his chip
manufacturing company Radiata Communications to Cisco in 2000 for
$US295 million; and Allan Snyder, the director of the University of
Sydney's Centre for the Mind and winner of the 2001 Marconi Prize. The
four founders self-funded the initial $1 million needed to start the
company but have since raised $US14.5 million in series A funding. It
is now in the process of raising series B funding.
BRAINBALL
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5595041045553729644&hl=en
http://www.moberg.com/files/products/brainball.htm
http://www.tii.se/touchingtheinvisible/brainball.html
http://smart.tii.se/smart/projects/brainball/index_en.html
http://smart.tii.se/smart/publications/pubs/brainballInteractions.html
http://cid.nada.kth.se/pdf/CID-235.pdf
http://www.mindball.se/product.html
ATARI MINDLINK (CIRCA 1984)
http://www.atarimuseum.com/videogames/consoles/2600/mindlink.html
"Although never released, feedback from Atari engineers and people who
tested the Mindlink have commented that the time and effort put into
the Mindlink system was wasted because the controllers did not perform
well and gave people headaches from over concentration and constantly
moving their eyebrows around to control the onscreen activities."
BEYOND Wii
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19726471.600-next-generation-video-games-will-be-mental.html
Next generation of video games will be mental
BY Duncan Graham-Rowe / 13 March 2008
TWO players sit across a table from one another, staring at a small
white ball on a track between them. Both are wearing headbands and
concentrating, trying to nudge the ball towards their opponent. All
they can use is the power of thought. This is Mindball, an addictive
"mind game" in which the winning strategy is to remain as focused and
relaxed as possible in the heat of battle. The ball rolls away from
the player with the calmest mind, as measured by sensors on their
headbands.
The sensors are similar to those in an electroencephalogram (EEG),
which probes brain activity by detecting "brainwaves" - tiny
electrical currents playing across the scalp. Because EEGs are a non-
invasive and near-instantaneous way to read brain activity, they have
long been touted as potentially useful in gaming. It now looks as if
that promise will be fulfilled, and not just in Mindball.
Several companies are developing hardware and software which they
claim can detect brainwaves and use them in video games. If all goes
to plan, the first of a new generation of games with mind control as a
central feature will hit the high street this year.
Mind gaming has its roots in the way new games are tested. Since 2004,
EmSense, a company based in Monterey, California, has been using
biofeedback to help game designers evaluate new products. Testers play
a game wearing EmSense's headset, which uses an EEG to record their
brainwaves, and also measures their heart rate and the sweatiness of
their skin. EmSense then builds up a blow-by-blow profile of the
player's emotional state and levels of arousal during play so the game
can be made more engaging.
The basic technologies inside EmSense's headset are nothing new.
Neurologists have been using the EEG as a diagnostic tool for nearly a
century, while measuring heart rate with an electrocardiogram (ECG)
has an even longer pedigree. Galvanic skin response (GSR), which
measures emotional arousal via the conductivity of the skin - a proxy
for sweatiness - has been a central element of lie detectors since the
first world war.
Now, though, developers are finding ways to go beyond merely improving
traditional games, and incorporating biofeedback into the games
themselves. One of the leaders in the field is Emotiv of San
Francisco. It has developed a headset with 16 sensors that it says
allows players to control aspects of a game simply by thinking about
them: concentrating on an on-screen object, for example, might allow
their avatar to pick it up and move it around. Similarly, NeuroSky of
San Jose, California, has developed a headset which chief executive
Stanley Yang says can tell whether you are focused, challenged,
relaxed, afraid, anxious and so on using a single sensor held against
the temple.
Developers have been trying to incorporate biofeedback into gaming for
years. In 1984, Atari experimented with a headband called MindLink,
which used electromyographic (EMG) sensors to detect muscle movements,
allowing players to move an on-screen cursor with a frown or a raised
eyebrow. In 1998, AmTex developed a game called Bio Tetris for the
Nintendo 64. A heart-rate sensor clipped to the player's ear lobe
allowed players to slow the speed at which the Tetris blocks fell by
remaining calm. Neither took off.
So what's different this time? One factor is the dazzling success of
Nintendo's Wii - 20 million consoles sold and rising. It dispenses
with the traditional joystick and instead uses gestures to control the
game via a hand-held wireless motion sensor. Its success has made it
clear that people are ready for new ways to interact with games.
Another factor is that the core technology is different, though
whether it works is another matter. On the surface the claims seem
plausible. Neurologists have long known how to read emotional states
off an EEG, and Mindball apparently picks up alpha waves - a hallmark
of mental calmness. But there are also many reasons to be sceptical.
Where neurologists use as many as 120 EEG sensors all over the scalp,
gaming headsets have just a handful - or, in NeuroSky's case, just
one. The headsets don't use the sticky conductive gel that medical
EEGs need to transmit the signal from the scalp to the electrode. On
top of that, EEGs are notoriously "noisy" - prone to interference from
nearby electrical devices as well as the electrical activity produced
by muscles, especially the heart. Even blinking can play havoc with an
EEG signal.
So how do they do it? Although the firms are cagey about how exactly
their technologies work, there are a few details to go on. The number
of electrodes seems to come down to a question of resolution. Medical
and research-grade EEGs need to be sensitive enough to detect subtle
signals amid a chorus of electrical brain activity. For gaming, the
chorus itself is sufficient. "We can't achieve the same resolution as
medical EEGs, but it's enough to detect the basic brainwaves," Yang
says.
Dealing with interference is another matter and perhaps the fledgling
industry's biggest challenge. EMG signals, produced by muscle
activity, are a particular problem because they can be an order of
magnitude bigger than those produced by the brain, says Desney Tan, a
researcher at Microsoft in Redmond, Washington, who has worked on
diagnosing cognitive states using EEGs. Yang agrees that this is a
challenge, but says the trick is to develop software that can
recognise and filter out unwanted signals. "Our core technology is
filtering," he says.
In any case, it may not be necessary to filter out all EMG signals,
says Tan. Some could be turned to the developers' advantage, as there
is a strong correspondence between involuntary facial muscle
contractions and your cognitive states and emotions, he says. So EMG
signals can be used to supplement the EEG.
In fact, the companies already use other bio-information from ECGs and
GSR. Heart rate and sweating are both good measures of how physically
and mentally aroused someone is. The trick is to combine all the
measurements to get an overall sense of the player's mental and
physical state. "Each of these sensors gives us a little piece of the
picture," Tan says. Using slight variations of this approach NeuroSky
and its competitors claim to have cracked it.
But even if the technology works as advertised, there's no guarantee
of success in a competitive games market. How do these companies
intend to succeed where others failed? One answer is by following
Nintendo's example with Wii. MindLink and Bio Tetris failed in part
because they didn't make the most of their novel interface. The games
were really no different from what was already out there. "With the
Wii, Nintendo did something right in designing a suite of tailored
games," Tan says. Wii games offer features that are not possible with
a regular joystick, such as swinging the controller like a tennis
racquet or brandishing it like a sword.
The mind-game companies intend to emulate this, though without
abandoning the traditional controller altogether. Their games will
still be largely controlled by hand, with biofeedback offering
additional features. For example, Emotiv has adapted a game based on
the Harry Potter books so that players can lift boulders and throw
thunderbolts just by concentrating on making it happen.
Whatever form biofeedback games take, the world is ready for them,
says Kiel Gilleade a computer games researcher at Lancaster University
in the UK. The current market is less interested in finding new game
genres than in looking for new hardware to enhance the gaming
experience, he says.
Not everyone is convinced. Michael Zyda, director of the University of
Southern California's GamePipe Laboratory in Marina del Rey, says
biofeedback seems to work as an evaluation tool but he believes not
enough research has been done to confirm its reliability in the real
world. Hans Lee, head of technology at EmSense, agrees that more work
is needed. One outstanding problem, he says, is that the hardware and
software don't work for everyone. Reading emotional and cognitive
states reliably is difficult because of each individual's variation in
brain activity.
Even so, at least one company believes the technology is ready. Emotiv
says its headsets will be on the shelves later this year, alongside a
suite of biofeedback games developed by its partners. Biofeedback has
been talked about in video gaming for years, but the real quest for
hearts and minds begins here.
FURTHER AND FURTHUR
Electrical activity isn't the only way to read a gamer's mind / BY
Colin Barras
EEG is just one form of brain-computer interface that the games
industry is toying with. The other is optical topography, which
overcomes some of the problems with EEG.
Though EEG provides lightning-quick read-outs - perfect for fast-
reaction games - speed comes at the cost of resolution. This makes
some experts doubt its usefulness in gaming. An EEG does little more
than tell you the general area that brain activity originated in, says
John-Dylan Haynes of the Bernstein Center for Computational
Neuroscience in Berlin, Germany.
At the other end of the spectrum is functional magnetic resonance
imaging (fMRI), which provides readings accurate to down to a
millimetre. For gaming, however, fMRI has crippling disadvantages: a
price tag in the millions, bulky equipment and the fact that it takes
at least 10 seconds to collect each data point.
Optical topography offers a compromise. It relies on the fact that
oxygenated blood absorbs more infrared radiation than deoxygenated
blood. When the brain is busy, the body responds by pumping oxygen to
active regions. Optical topography uses near infrared spectroscopy
(NIRS) to monitor changes in blood oxygenation, measuring brain
activity by proxy.
Technology companies are beginning to see the advantages. Hitachi, for
example, showcased an optical topography headset in London last month.
The headset can distinguish between an active and a resting brain, and
is mobile enough to tempt game developers. "Our wireless headset can
be worn without interfering with other activities," says Atsushi Maki
of the Hitachi Advanced Research Laboratory in Hatoyama, Japan.
Maki thinks that the future might be a combination device. "Light
doesn't interfere with electric fields," he says. "You could develop a
headset that combines NIRS with EEG to give complementary readings."
BRAIN-CONTROLLED VIDEO GAMES
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=2IC5Neoq_1M
http://www.pinktentacle.com/2007/10/brain-computer-interface-for-second-life/
Brain-computer interface for Second Life / 12 Oct 2007
While recent developments in brain-computer interface (BCI) technology
have given humans the power to mentally control computers, nobody has
used the technology in conjunction with the Second Life online virtual
world — until now.
A research team led by professor Jun’ichi Ushiba of the Keio
University Biomedical Engineering Laboratory has developed a BCI
system that lets the user walk an avatar through the streets of Second
Life while relying solely on the power of thought. To control the
avatar on screen, the user simply thinks about moving various body
parts — the avatar walks forward when the user thinks about moving his/
her own feet, and it turns right and left when the user imagines
moving his/her right and left arms.
The system consists of a headpiece equipped with electrodes that
monitor activity in three areas of the motor cortex (the region of the
brain involved in controlling the movement of the arms and legs). An
EEG machine reads and graphs the data and relays it to the BCI, where
a brain wave analysis algorithm interprets the user’s imagined
movements. A keyboard emulator then converts this data into a signal
and relays it to Second Life, causing the on-screen avatar to move. In
this way, the user can exercise real-time control over the avatar in
the 3D virtual world without moving a muscle.
Future plans are to improve the BCI so that users can make Second Life
avatars perform more complex movements and gestures. The researchers
hope the mind-controlled avatar, which was created through a joint
medical engineering project involving Keio’s Department of
Rehabilitation Medicine and the Tsukigase Rehabilitation Center, will
one day help people with serious physical impairments communicate and
do business in Second Life.
BRAINLOOP
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwNUpOVZu2E
http://www.aksioma.org/brainloop/index.html
http://www.aksioma.org/brainloop/elements.html
"Brainloop utilizes a Brain Computer Interface (BCI) system which
allows a subject to operate devices merely by imagining specific motor
commands. These mentally visualized commands may be seen as the
rehearsal of a motor act without the overt motor output; a neural
synapse occurs but the actual movement is blocked at the corticospinal
level. Motor imagery such as "move left hand", "move right hand" or
"move feet" become non-muscular communication and control signals that
convey messages and commands to the external world. In Brainloop the
performer is able - without physically moving - to investigate urban
areas and rural landscapes as he globe-trots around virtual Google
Earth."
BRAINMASTER : NEURY THE TACTILE BEAR (AVAILABLE SOON!)
http://www.brainmaster.com/productinfo/misc/NeuryBear/bear02.jpg
http://www.brainmaster.com/productinfo/misc/NeuryBear/neurybear.html
"This furry friend sits with you in your neurofeedback session, to
keep you company, and help you out! He's not just any bear. This bear
rumbles and grumbles with your EEG. So when you do the right thing,
you feel the bear rumble a little louder, and when you are not
focused, and not on target, the bear gets quiet. So he's there to help
you out, and he's really great for those who can't see well, or who
don't like the visual displays. But he's a friendly bear, he gets
along great with everyone he meets."
TRAINING YOUR BRAIN
http://www.brainmaster.com/tfc/
http://www.brainmaster.com/generalinfo/eegbands/eegbands.html
The Measurement, Interpretation, and Use of EEG Frequency Bands
BY Thomas F. Collura / December 7, 1997
How brain rhythms are generated:
Populations of cells generate rhythms when they depolarize in
synchrony. This activity occurs primarily in the upper 4 layers
(about 1/4 inch thick) of the outer layers of the cerebral cortex. The
presence of an EEG rhythm indicates that there is some brain activity
occurring in terms of millions of cells acting together, in a
synchronized fashion. The exact causes of this, and what it means for
the brain and information processing, is an entire dissertation in
itself.
Overall, the observed brainwave frequencies must be thought of as
"epiphenomena," which are the byproduct of normal brain function, but
not a brain signal in themselves. The brain does not communicate, or
do its business, using the EEG. Rather, it is a secondary measure,
such as the vibration measured from an engine, or the temperature of
an electronic circuit. Therefore, the brain does not, for example,
produce alpha waves for any purpose. It produces them as a result of
certain types of brain activity, and we can learn to recognize them,
and take advantage of them, by learning what they represent, and what
happens when we work with them.
Training of EEG rhythms
Biofeedback techniques can be used to train EEG rhythms. Training
systems can use visual feedback, auditory feedback (sounds), or use a
personal trainer to provide verbal feedback, thus making the trainee
aware of which brain rhythms are present. Displays can be of many
types, and computer displays are capable of producing a wide variety
of useful displays. These can include "thermometers", video games,
and other graphic displays. Systems can be set up to train to
reinforce, or to reduce, any rhythm or combination of rhythms, or for
more complex situations such as training different locations to be
synchronized, or desynchronized, or to train different locations to
produce (or inhibit) different frequencies.
We can also train more complex, derived properties, such as brainwave
synchrony, coherence, or relationships between brain rhythms recorded
from different sites. This has been found particularly useful in
training concentration and relaxation, for peak-performance training,
and for athletics, golfers, etc. Certain EEG properties have been
found conducive to being "in the zone," which is a highly efficient
and responsive state, useful for improving performance in many
applications.
It is important to realize that, although rhythms can be trained, to
produce desired results, the production (or reduction) of the
specific rhythm is not an end in itself, and the change in the EEG may
not signify that the desired change has occurred. Rather, the desired
brain/mind changes are a byproduct of the training, independent of
changes in the EEG itself. The brain is a self-regulating system, and
may behave much like a thermostat, that tries to keep the system
stable. To use an analogy, if a window is left open in a house in the
winter, the house may not be cold, but the furnace will be working
hard, and the heating bills will be high. If the window is closed,
representing a return to normal operation, the temperature may not
rise significantly, but the furnace will work less. Thus, the brain
may achieve a desired state, even if the measured variable, the brain
rhythms, do not change significantly, in and of themselves.
Nonetheless, changes in the brain have occurred, and their benefits
may be forthcoming, even in the absence of large changes in the EEG
signal.
Summary of EEG Frequency Bands:
The basic EEG rhythms are summarized briefly as follows, with regard
to their typical distribution on the scalp, subject states, tasks,
physiological correlates, and the effects of training. This summary
should be taken as a general roadmap, not as fixed and hard rules.
Delta (0.1-3 Hz):
Distribution: generally broad or diffused, may be bilateral,
widespread
Subjective feeling states: deep, dreamless sleep, non-REM sleep,
trance, unconscious
Associated tasks & behaviors: lethargic, not moving, not attentive
Physiological correlates: not moving, low-level of arousal
Effects of Training: can induce drowsiness, trance, deeply relaxed
states
Theta (4-7 Hz):
Distribution: usually regional, may involve many lobes, can be
lateralized or diffuse;
Subjective feeling states: intuitive, creative, recall, fantasy,
imagery, creative, dreamlike, switching thoughts, drowsy; "oneness",
"knowing"
Associated tasks & behaviors: creative, intuitive; but may also be
distracted, unfocused
Physiological correlates: healing, integration of mind/body
Effects of Training: if enhanced, can induce drifting, trancelike
state if suppressed, can improve concentration, ability to focus
attention
Alpha (8-12 Hz):
Distribution: regional, usually involves entire lobe; strong
occipital w/eyes closed
Subjective feeling states: relaxed, not agitated, but not drowsy;
tranquil, conscious
Associated tasks & behaviors: meditation, no action
Physiological correlates: relaxed, healing
Effects of Training: can produce relaxation
Sub band low alpha: 8-10: inner-awareness of self, mind/body
integration, balance
Sub band high alpha: 10-12: centering, healing, mind/body connection
Beta (above 12 Hz)
The beta band has a relatively large range, and has been defined as
anything above the alpha band.
Low Beta (12-15 Hz);:
Distribution: localized by side and by lobe (frontal, occipital,
etc.)
Subjective feeling states: relaxed yet focused, integrated
Associated tasks & behaviors: Typically resting yet alert when Low
Beta is present.
Physiological correlates: Low Beta may be observed anywhere on the
cortex. When it is recorded from the motor areas (C3, C4, Cz), it is
considered to be "Sensorimotor Rhythm" or "SMR". SMR is reduced by
muscular activity, e.g. moving the arm or leg; Restraining the body
may increase SMR.
Effects of Training: increasing SMR can produce relaxed focus,
improved attentive abilities, may remediate Attention Disorders.
Midrange Beta (15-18 Hz)
Distribution: localized, over various areas. May be focused on one
electrode.
Subjective feeling states: thinking, aware of self & surroundings
Associated tasks & behaviors: mental activity
Physiological correlates: alert, active, but not agitated
Effects of Training: can increase mental ability, focus, alertness, IQ
High Beta (above 18 Hz):
Distribution: localized, may be very focused.
Subjective feeling states: alertness, agitation
Associated tasks & behaviors: mental activity, e.g. math, planning,
etc.
Physiological correlates: general activation of mind & body functions.
Effects of Training: can induce alertness, but may also produce
agitation, etc.
Gamma (40 Hz):
Distribution: very localized
Subjective feeling states: thinking; integrated thought
Associated tasks & behaviors: high-level information processing,
"binding
Physiological correlates: associated with information-rich task
processing
Effects of Training: not known
THETA WAVES
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theta_rhythm
http://www.stanford.edu/group/maciverlab/theta.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroencephalography
NEUROFEEDBACK
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurofeedback
http://www.med.harvard.edu/AANLIB/home.html
http://www.geocities.com/adriancmvd/pagefreqs.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_neurofeedback_software
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_brainwave_entrainment_software
OPEN-SOURCE EEG SOFTWARE
http://openeeg.sourceforge.net/doc/
http://pceeg.sourceforge.net/
http://biosig.sourceforge.net/download.html
http://www.teuniz.net/edfbrowser/
http://www.opencircuits.com/Programmable_Chip_EEG
http://pceeg.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page
NOISY SIGNAL
http://arstechnica.com/journals/science.ars/2008/01/03/brain-computer-interfaces-slowly-getting-better
A recent Journal of Neural Engineering article shows why progress
seems to have slowed and gives an impression of the hurdles to be
overcome. The basic premise of these systems are all the same: first,
record the electrical brain activity using a skullcap of electrodes,
then these signals are processed and fed into a genetic algorithm,
which evolves to associate particular signals as instructions to move.
This is then tested, with the result that only about 41 percent of
attempts to move are followed, and once every 12 seconds or so, the
computer decides you wanted to move when you really didn't. To put
this in perspective, imagine that you were using this interface to
control an artificial knee. Six in every ten steps would result in you
tripping and once every 12 seconds you would randomly kick someone
(actually, I can see a benefit there). Clearly, a lot of effort is
going into reducing the rate of false positives and increasing the
rate of true positives.
The problem is that the skullcap records a very generalized and quite
noisy signal, from which useful information must be extracted. The
current approach seems to be using increasingly sophisticated
filtering techniques to extract certain known signals, such as
movement-related potentials, beta rhythms, and Mu rhythms. Changes to
these signals are then compared and correlated to actual movement
events. Using these more sophisticated methods, the true positive rate
remains at about 50 percent. However, the false positive result has
been substantially reduced to about 0.1 percent.
Overall, this still isn't that good because the system doesn't pick up
true positives very well. Although I was quite enthusiastic about the
progress when this was first reported, it is becoming apparent that
there is a lot of hard engineering work to do. The pessimist in me
suggests that this approach will simply never be sensitive enough to
pick up all the intended movements while still retaining a low false
positive rate. This is because the skullcaps record a general,
unlocalized signal from the brain and, from that, try to infer
localized information.
This doesn't mean the approach will never yield good results though.
For instance, if proven safe, more invasive methods could be used to
extract a more localized signal. Or perhaps neurological studies will
allow researchers to use filtering techniques that result in localized
information. However, pure filtering and statistical association may
never yield enough specificity by itself.
{Journal of Neural Engineering, 2007, DOI: 10.1088/1741-2560/5/1/002}
HARD-WIRED MONKEY STOPS USING JOYSTICK
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-cpcoIJbOU
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/4474.php
In the initial behavioral experiments, the researchers recorded and
analyzed the output signals from the monkeys' brains as the animals
were taught to use a joystick to both position a cursor over a target
on a video screen and to grasp the joystick with a specified force.
After the animals' initial training, however, the researchers made the
cursor more than a simple display -- now incorporating into its
movement the dynamics, such as inertia and momentum, of a robot arm
functioning in another room.
While the animals' performance initially declined when the robot arm
was included in the feedback loop, they quickly learned to allow for
these dynamics and became proficient in manipulating the robot-
reflecting cursor, found the scientists. The scientists next removed
the joystick, after which the monkeys continued to move their arms in
mid-air to manipulate and 'grab' the cursor, thus controlling the
robot arm.
'The most amazing result, though, was that after only a few days of
playing with the robot in this way, the monkey suddenly realized that
she didn't need to move her arm at all,' said Nicolelis. 'Her arm
muscles went completely quiet, she kept the arm at her side and she
controlled the robot arm using only her brain and visual feedback. Our
analyses of the brain signals showed that the animal learned to
assimilate the robot arm into her brain as if it was her own arm.'
CONTACT
Miguel Nicolelis
http://www.nicolelislab.net
email : nicoleli [at] neuro.duke [dot] edu
http://scienceblogs.com/neurophilosophy/2008/01/monkeys_brain_activity_control.php
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8oAz4WS4O0
LICKING MARSHMALLOWS OFF ROBOT FINGERS
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnWSah4RD2E
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=sm2d0w87wQE
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v453/n7198/abs/nature06996.html
http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/2008/05/monkey_see_monkey_control_prosthetic_arm_with_thoughts.php
Velliste believes that the secret to the arm's success lay in making
it as natural as possible. For a start, it could freely move its head
and eyes without affecting the signals controlling the arm. It could
also move the fake arm in real time. There was only about an seventh
of a second worth of delay between a burst of brain activity and the
corresponding movement; natural arms have similar delays between
thought and deed. This nigh-instantaneous control was obvious during
one trial when the animal dropped the food and immediately stopped
moving the arm.
This natural responsiveness made it easier for the monkeys to accept
the arm as their own. They learned behaviours that had nothing to do
with the task, like licking remaining food off the fingers or using
the hand to push food into their mouths. They learned to move the arm
in arcs to avoid knocking the food off the platform while bringing it
back in a straight line. They even learned that the food (marshmallows
and grape halves) stick to the fingers so while they initially opened
the hand only when it was near their mouths, one of them figured out
that they could open the hand well before then.
CONTACT
Meel Velliste
http://motorlab.neurobio.pitt.edu/people.php?name=meel
email : mev3 [at] pitt [dot] edu
Andrew Schwartz
http://motorlab.neurobio.pitt.edu/people.php?name=andy
email : abs21 [at] pitt [dot] edu
BRAIN-COMPUTER INTERFACE (BCI) WORKAROUNDS FOR PRIMATE PARALYSIS
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/images/2008/10/15/monkeyhand.jpg
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14948
http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/21553/
http://www.nature.com/news/2008/081015/full/news.2008.1170.html
http://spectrum.ieee.org/oct08/6908
http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/17163/
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19125606.200-overcoming-paralysis-is-a-case-of-mind-over-matter.html
CONTACT
Eberhard Fetz
http://depts.washington.edu/pbiopage/
http://depts.washington.edu/pbiopage/people_fac_page.php?fac_ID=12
email : fetz [at] u.washington [dot] edu
John Donoghue
http://neuroscience.brown.edu/donoghue.html
http://donoghue.neuro.brown.edu/
email : John_Donoghue [at] Brown [dot] edu
THE LUKE ARM
http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid452319854?bctid=1576332530
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/dean_kamen_previews_a_new_prosthetic_arm.html
http://spectrum.ieee.org/feb08/5957
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Kamen
http://www.dekaresearch.com/
PEAR / PSYLERON
http://www.icrl.org/
http://www.psyleron.com/overview.aspx
http://www.psyleron.com/faq.aspx
http://www.psyleron.com/research.aspx
http://www.psyleron.com/products.aspx
http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/
http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/human_machine.html
I. Human/Machine Anomalies
The most substantial portion of the PEAR experimental program examines
anomalies arising in human/machine interactions. In these studies
human operators attempt to bias the output of a variety of mechanical,
electronic, optical, acoustical, and fluid devices to conform to pre-
stated intentions, without recourse to any known physical influences.
In unattended calibrations all of these sophisticated machines produce
strictly random data, yet the experimental results display increases
in information content that can only be attributed to the
consciousness of their human operators.
Over the [Princeton] laboratory's 27-year history, thousands of such
experiments, involving many millions of trials, have been performed by
several hundred operators. The observed effects are usually quite
small, of the order of a few parts in ten thousand on average, but
they compound to highly significant statistical deviations from chance
expectations. These results are summarized in "Correlations of Random
Binary Sequences with Pre-Stated Operator Intention" and "The PEAR
Proposition."
http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/pdfs/correlations.pdf
http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/pdfs/jse_papers/PEARproposition.pdf
A number of secondary correlations reveal other anomalous structural
features within these human/machine databases. In many instances, the
effects appear to be operator-specific in their details and the
results of given operators on widely different machines frequently
tend to be similar in character and scale. Pairs of operators with
shared intentions are found to induce further anomalies in the
experimental outputs, especially when the two individuals share an
emotional bond. The data also display significant disparities between
female and male operator performances, and consistent series position
effects are observed in individual and collective results. These
anomalies can be demonstrated with the operators located up to
thousands of miles from the laboratory, exerting their efforts many
hours before or after the actual operation of the devices.
The random devices also respond to group activities of larger numbers
of people, even when they are unaware of the presence of the machine.
Such "FieldREG" data produced in environments fostering relatively
intense or profound subjective resonance show larger deviations than
those generated in more pragmatic assemblies. (See "FieldREG II:
Consciousness Field Effects: Replications and Explorations.") Venues
that appear to be particularly conducive to such field anomalies
include small intimate groups, group rituals, sacred sites, musical
and theatrical performances, and other charismatic events. In
contrast, data generated during most academic conferences, business
meetings, or other mundane venues show less deviations than would be
expected by chance.
http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/pdfs/FR3.pdf
MIND OVER MATTER
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.04/pear_pr.html
Princeton University scientists believe that the human mind can
influence machines. Now, when is the last time you said something nice
to your computer?
By Rogier van Bakel / Apr 1995
"Come on, sweetheart, you can do it. Oh, now, show me what you're made
of. Thaaat's it!" I am alone in a room with a woman I met barely an
hour ago. She is talking softly, seductively, in a voice that is both
sweet and persuasive. Not to me, mind you. She is directing her words
- saccharine mutterings that other people might reserve for a sick
child or a particularly weak puppy - to an ugly electronic box with a
red digital display.
She is Brenda Dunne, the manager of the Princeton Engineering
Anomalies Research laboratory, and she is giving me a demonstration of
how she might "will" a random event generator (REG) to come up with
more high than low numbers. She is somehow using the power of her mind
to achieve that result. And the power of her voice. She coos. She
crows. She coaxes.
In case you were wondering: Dunne, a developmental psychologist, is
far from the mad scientist type. But she is doggedly determined to
prove what most physicists have never thought possible: that the human
mind can change the performance characteristics of machines. Mind over
matter, as it were. Sound crazy? The work at the PEAR lab has
consistently shown that "normal" volunteers - not people who purport
to have any psychic powers - can indeed influence the behavior of
micro-electronic equipment with their minds, with their consciousness.
This is done without the benefit of electrodes and wires - and without
anyone being permitted to give the machine a good whack. Nearly a
hundred volunteers have conducted 212 million REG trials during the 15
years of the lab's existence, and the research shows a tiny but
statistically significant result that is not attributable to chance.
The volunteers didn't even have to sweet-talk the machine into its
deviations the way Dunne has just done. Some of the "operators" merely
stare broodingly at the display, focusing their minds to beat the
silicon into submission. Others let their thoughts wander or read a
book. Two-thirds of the volunteers have been able to affect the REG in
the direction they had intended (to select more high or more low
numbers), while only half of them would have produced those results by
chance. A few of them have gotten results that, when expressed in a
graph, are so distinct the PEAR scientists can recognize these
volunteers' patterns at a glance. Dunne refers to such patterns as
"signatures."
The effects that the volunteers accomplish are very small, but
amazing. "The operators are roughly altering one bit in 1,000,"
explains Michael Ibison, a British mathematical physicist who has come
to work for a year at PEAR after stints at Siemens, IBM, and Agfa.
"That means if you had a coin toss, psychokinesis could affect one of
those coin tosses if you tossed a thousand times."
The metaphor is apt. The REG, in its simplest form, is nothing more
than an electronic coin flipper. It is de-signed to come up with as
many heads as tails. That is precisely what the carefully calibrated
instrument does when humans leave it alone. But sit an operator in
front of it, and more often than not, the REG obligingly produces
slightly more heads than tails - or vice versa, depending on the
operator's intentions.
If that sounds weird, consider this: you don't have to be in the same
room as the REG to get results. Or, for that matter, in the same city,
state, or country. Volunteers as far away as Hungary, Kenya, Brazil,
and India have shown they can influence Princeton's REG as if they
were sitting 3 feet away.
What's love got to do with it?
Another surprising finding occurred when Dunne and her team asked
couples to interact with the REG. The effects generated by two people
with an emotional attachment were much larger than those produced by
an "unattached" pair of operators.
And the PEAR team uses other instruments to get similar, perhaps even
more striking, results. There's the Random Mechanical Cascade known as
Murphy (after Murphy's Law), a 9-foot-high vertical contraption that
drops 9,000 small polystyrene balls from a spout onto a grid of 336
evenly spaced nylon pegs. The balls land in a horizontal row of 19
bins at the bottom, in a distribution pattern that looks like a bell-
shaped curve. Volunteers can "think left" or "think right," and a
majority of them can cause a modest but measurable shift in where the
balls land. A more recent experiment involves operators trying to
control the swing of a custom-built pendulum. In another one, they're
seated in front of a computer displaying two superimposed pictures,
and are told to try to suppress one and bring the other to the
foreground.
Skeptics have examined the lab's instruments, its data-processing
software, its protocols. Environmental, non-consciousness-related
influences such as temperature differences, passing traffic, earth
tremors, and vibrations from a nearby machine shop have been ruled out
as a cause for the anomalies. Other scientists have, by and large,
been able to replicate PEAR's experiments - just as PEAR's own work
builds on other academically sound research. But the Princeton
University lab has amassed so much scientific evidence of the
consciousness effect that, by sheer quantity of data, it has become
the foremost player in this field.
If the empirical proof seems to be strong and solid, the theoretical
part - how does it happen, and what does it mean? - is uncharted
territory. That doesn't stop Brenda Dunne from developing theories of
her own. She points to a clipping on the wall of her chaotic office.
It's a cartoon of two scientists. One says: "I actually prayed to
receive this grant money. You won't tell anyone, will you, Charles?"
After we're done laughing, Dunne strikes an earnest note. "It's human
nature to pray, to hope, to desire. Where does this fit into a
scientific world view? How can you talk about a reality that has no
place for human consciousness - the very human consciousness that
created that world view in the first place, the consciousness that
designs the models and observes the data? Where is it in the models?"
Dunne has come to believe that human consciousness establishes a
"resonance" with the physical world that can reduce some of the
randomness around us. "One form of this resonance is what we know as
love," she says, referring to the experiments with the bonded-pair
operators. "Do we dare theorize that love has a palpable influence on
random noise? I don't know. I would be willing to at least raise the
question. This emotional bond, the 'being on the same wavelength,'
somehow reduces the entropy in the world a little bit. And random
processes seem to reflect this reduction by showing a more organized
physical reality."
Heresy versus recalcitrance
It's easy to scoff at such notions - call them scientific heresy, or
New-Age drivel. And, to be sure, PEAR has a number of detractors. The
editor of a prominent scientific journal once told the lab's founder
and senior scientist, Robert Jahn, that he might consider publishing
Jahn's recent paper, provided the author would transmit it
telepathically.
Dunne has learned to deal with the barbs, she says, "without flying
off the handle, without getting angry or defensive. We welcome the
criticism, and have frequently made changes at the suggestion of other
scientists. It think it was Nietzsche who said: 'Love your enemies,
because they bring out the best in you.' Unfortunately, many of our
critics basically say: 'This is the kind of nonsense I wouldn't
believe even if it were real.' They're people who have made up their
minds that this is all hogwash, without having studied the data."
Robert Jahn agrees. "We were not fully prepared for the degree of
recalcitrance that we would encounter in otherwise learned,
professional circles," he says, somewhat testily, when I visit the lab
again two months later and mention the criticism.
Jahn is a thin, hollow-cheeked man in his 60s who is inseparable from
his baseball cap. He holds an undergraduate degree in mechanical
engineering, an MS and a PhD in physics, is a professor of aerospace
sciences at Princeton University, and holds the position of Dean
Emeritus of its School of Engineering and Applied Science. He started
the PEAR Lab in 1979, putting his reputation, if not his career, on
the line. Afraid of being lumped together with all kinds of swindlers
and charlatans who have polluted the field, Jahn avoids words like
"paranormal," "psychic," and "parapsychology" like the plague. The
phenomena he looks at are "engineering anomalies," he insists.
It was clear from the start that the subject he wanted to study was
mired in controversy. Princeton administrators did not hide their
concern over Jahn's unusual career turn. They nodded their approval
only after an ad hoc committee had been established to ensure Jahn's
research met scientific standards - a first at New Jersey's famous
powerhouse of learning.
Although that committee has since been disbanded, a Princeton
colleague, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Philip Anderson, has since
attacked PEAR's work, arguing that "if the effect of human
consciousness on machines existed, hundreds of people would be beating
the bank at Las Vegas." Anderson also believes that it is not up to
serious scholars to disprove Jahn's data, smirking that this task
should instead be handled by "those who are used to dealing in flim-
flam, such as magicians and policemen."
Jahn dismisses the Vegas comment as "a spurious red herring." The
effects PEAR has measured are much too small to have any usefulness at
the roulette table, he counters wearily. And, yes, for the same
reason, you can forget about trying to get the ATM machine to slip you
an extra twenty, or about "willing" the traffic lights on Main Street
to jump to green as you're speeding along. Your odds would be
astronomical.
Virtual zoo
Robert Jahn's office is a virtual zoo of stuffed animals, mostly given
to him by friends, colleagues, and students. In a corner, Jahn proudly
displays his collection of small carousel horses, the fruit of a one-
time subscription to the Franklin Mint's Horse of the Month Club. The
book he co-authored with Dunne, Margins of Reality (Harcourt Brace &
Co., 1987), a tome on the role of consciousness in the physical world,
is dedicated to the scientist's respective pets, "and to all our other
animal friends, who kept watch and understood it all."
He is quick to explain his fascination for animals. "I believe that
the capacity for the so-called anomalous interaction between
consciousness and the physical environment is best utilized by other-
than-human life forms. You see it in the migration capabilities of
birds and fish, and in the group consciousness that is evident in
swarming insects. It is a capacity of consciousness that we have
largely bred out of ourselves, as humans, by our preoccupation with
the development of analytical and intellectual capabilities of the
mind, leaving the intuitive aspects to whither." PEAR has never done
experiments with animal consciousness. However, scattered data from
researchers who have seem to support Jahn's notions (see "Animal
Magnetism: Chick It Out," page 84).
A flight down from his office, in the engineering school's basement,
the PEAR lab is also populated by an array of teddy bears and other
furry friends, most of whom cozily hang out on the velvet orange couch
that looks like yesterday's Salvation Army special. On a wall hangs an
official-looking certificate from a group called The Giraffe Project,
proclaiming Jahn a giraffe because he "sticks his neck out."
But perhaps more telling are the two signs over the copying machine.
One simply identifies the machine as "Baby." That's the name the
copier was given by the lab people, who are seeking its full
cooperation by using a flattering moniker. "This machine is subject to
breakdowns during periods of critical need," warns the other sign. "A
special circuit called a critical detector senses the operator's
emotional state in terms of how desperate he or she is to use the
machine. The detector then creates a malfunction proportional to the
desperation of the operator. Threatening the machine with violence
only aggravates the situation. Likewise, attempts to use another
machine also may cause it to malfunction. They belong to the same
union. Keep cool, say nice things to the machine. Nothing else seems
to work. Never let anything mechanical know you're in a hurry."
It's pretty standard office humor. Identical signs must be hanging
over thousands of computers and copiers throughout the country. But
nowhere is it more appropriate than here, where a team of scientists
ponders if "technical" glitches might not, sometimes, be the result of
operator anxiety.
"It's funny," critiques Dunne, nodding at the placard. "And on the
surface, that's all it is. But taking that kind of an attitude toward
a machine, humorous though it may be, means treating the machine as if
it were alive. To a degree, we all anthropomorphize the sophisticated
equipment we work with - our computers, our cars. "The way you treat a
machine is going to have a great deal to do with the way it behaves.
If you slam it, if you bang it, if you treat it like a thing, that
reflects an attitude. If you consider the world an extension of
yourself, it becomes a better place. Is that engineering? I don't
know. Probably, yes. At the very least, the equipment is simply going
to last longer because you take better care of it."
Murphy's Law: joke or gospel?
Some people, it seems, only have to get near a computer system and it
breaks down. And your hard drive, modern lore would have it, is most
likely to give up the ghost when you absolutely need that report you
forgot to back up last night. Is Dunne implying that Murphy's Law is
more than a whimsical piece of pseudo-science, more than a propeller
head's version of a generic urban legend? "Most people who work around
technology laugh - nervously - when they hear about such phenomena,"
she says, smiling. "They may dismiss it, but they know exactly what
you're talking about."
The sentiment is echoed by Dean Radin, a researcher in Nevada who
worked for Bell Labs in Columbus, Ohio, and later at Princeton. "In
technical circles, Murphy's Law is revered as the gospel; and on the
other hand, the same people laugh about it. I also noticed that
employees got reputations as jinxes or as people who would make
systems work. And at Bell, whenever we were under the gun for an
important demonstration to a VIP, the jinxes were not allowed to be
present, and the people who were good were almost forced to be
present. Because we figured it couldn't hurt. And I thought this was
interesting behavior for people who were otherwise highly analytical
and quite bright."
Radin, who has a master's degree in electrical engineering and a
doctorate in psychology, got his bosses to OK a study into a possible
link between operator anxiety and a machine's performance. "The reason
I was able to sell this to management was that if one of the big
telephone switching machines goes down for a second, we lose US$1
million in revenue," he explains. Tenacious attempts notwithstanding,
the link he sought to establish was elusive at best. "I did find,
however, that there is a relationship between an operator's intention
and the performance of a machine," Radin enthuses. He was able to
replicate the random generator experiments that physicist Helmut
Schmidt did at Boeing Scientific Research Labs in the '60s. In late
1993, Radin started the privately funded Consciousness Research
Laboratory through the University of Nevada. He conducts studies there
that he calls both "similar" and "complementary" to PEAR's.
Is there not even a shadow of a doubt in his mind that the mind-over-
matter effect really exists? "No. The criticism of this type of
research by other scientists is just the usual knee-jerk reaction to
unexpected data."
A psychic garage door opener
That the effects of the human/machine resonance are tiny doesn't mean
they can't be important in an exceedingly pragmatic way. For starters,
they're arguably greater than the effects of the flaw in Intel's
Pentium chip that caused such a brouhaha late last year. And small
causes can have large consequences. In the late '70s, Bob Jahn
observed how certain aerospace technology was becoming so sensitive
that it had to be protected against a passing cosmic ray. So, he told
himself, it wouldn't necessarily be a stretch to imagine some small
effect that a human operator - someone who sits in front of a delicate
machine, stares at it, and interacts with it for hours on end - might
have on that same piece of equipment.
Jahn is not much closer to the answers now than he was 15 years ago.
"We're far short of understanding the parameters. It's not at all
clear how you shield a sensitive device to ignore the cross talk
between the information processor that is our mind and the information
processor that is the machine. But we know that the cross talk exists,
under certain circumstances at least. And I still have the concern
that it is the source of some of the gremlin effects that pilots
report, and of events that occur in emergency situations where the
stress among the operational crew is bound to be very high."
PEAR may be laying the groundwork for technology that could eventually
lead to more reliable vital computer systems, such as those used in
air-traffic control or spacecraft. From the most pragmatic of
perspectives, though, how will Dunne's and Jahn's notions about the
properties of conscious-ness change the lives of average Janes and
Joes everywhere? "Given what we see in the way of volunteers'
signature patterns, a personalized switch is a definite possibility,"
Dunne muses. "It would open the garage door when you mind-beam your
request at it. If you want to get really science fictiony, you might
envision a car that's been attuned to you, and when you're very tense
and nervous, a sensor in the car is able to pick this up, and won't
allow you to drive over 40 miles an hour."
Does she believe we'll reach a point where we can interact with our
machines by the sheer force of our minds? "It's long-term, but I won't
be surprised," she allows. "We are moving in that direction, with
technology being developed for disabled people, in which they can wire
the device to brain waves or eye movements [see "Zen and the Art of
Flying a Plane," page 86]. "We already have voice-activated computers,
and voice locks that recognize the voice patterns of authorized users.
That's damn close. If you have something that you might call a psychic
signature, how different is that from a voice pattern? Not very."
Dunne also sees a medical component to PEAR's ventures into human/
machine relationships. "Our own bodies are perhaps the most complex
and sensitive of information processing machines. That raises the
question: Is it possible that some of the processes that go on in the
body - for example, random fluctuations in functions like heartbeat,
immune response, neuronal connections, and the like - might be
susceptible, or indeed might be designed to respond to the directives
of our consciousness? There are many stories about patients who refuse
to accept a diagnosis and get better in spite of every expectation. On
the other hand, there are tales of patients who refuse to get better
even though there is nothing terribly wrong. If we could get a handle
on this thing, it might make a vast difference in how we heal
ourselves. I know this is very speculative, but it's an area that is
worthy of investigation."
Cutting off your arm
The technology we use shapes our self-image, theorizes Dunne, and
therefore becomes an integral part of who we are. "When the radio was
invented, our brain was likened to a box with transmitters and
receivers. Now we're into computers, and the brain has become an
information processor, a complex computer. These technologies and
metaphors are a reflection of our self-perception, of our own
evolution; we develop them as extensions of ourselves. But how can you
detach that extension from notions of self and ideas of consciousness?
That's like cutting off your arm."
But is she serious when she recommends pampering and coochy-cooing
your com-puter equipment? Why is that smile playing on her lips? "I'm
half-serious," she insists. "I make fun of it, because yes, sometimes
it gets silly."
Dunne likes to tell a story about Danish physicist Niels Bohr, who
supposedly had a horseshoe over his barn door. During a visit, a
colleague noticed the horseshoe and inquired, "Come now Niels, you
don't believe in that nonsense, do you?" Whereupon Bohr smiled most
agreeably, and replied: "Of course not, but I am told that it works
whether you believe in it or not."
BABY CHICKS CAN DO IT
http://gerp.free.fr/rpeoch-chicks.htm
Abstract : 80 groups of 7 chicks were used to test their ability to
influence the trajectory of a robot bearing a candle as the unique
source of light in the room. The robot is driven, via telephone line,
by a random generator located 23 kilometres away. When chicks are
present, the robot moves preferentially into their direction (66.25%
out of 80 trials). This is significantly different from the non
specific displacement of the machine in the absence of chicks and
observer (p<0.00001). The random generator being the source of
movements, this result suggests that chicks are able to influence it
over a long distance.
Animal Magnetism
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.04/pear_pr.html
You can probably have some effect on the behavior of a sensitive
random device if you really try - but chances are you'll never be as
good as a cage full of chicks. In a series of experiments carried out
by René Peoc'h in collaboration with the Swiss Fondation Marcel et
Monique Odier de Psycho-Physique, a small, self-propelled robot called
a Tychoscope was allowed to wander around aimlessly in an enclosed
room. A random generator determined the lengths of the robot's
straight-line movement and angles of rotation. Left to itself, the
Tychoscope moved in entirely random patterns, and spent as much time
in the left half of the room as it did in the right half.
But when a cage filled with live chicks was placed on one side of the
room, the robot's pattern changed dramatically. On average, it spent
considerably more time in the area nearest the animals. It was as if
the birds "willed" the robot to stay close. The chicks had two reasons
for not wanting the robot to stray too far. One group had been
"imprinted" (when they hatched, the first thing they saw was the
Tychoscope, and they adopted it as their mother). Another group had
not, but the chicks seemed to respond to the lit candle that was
placed on top of the Tychoscope in the darkened room. The scientists
assume from this that the chicks didn't like the dark. By comparison,
human operators who tried to "will" the robot to stay on one side of
the room achieved much smaller and more erratic results.
Dean Radin, a researcher at the University of Nevada who is familiar
with the Odier experiments, is not surprised by what appears to be the
superior psychic aptitude of the baby chicks. "The level of motivation
that was manipulated there is much higher than what is typically
manipulated in a human experiment. For humans, such an experiment is
relatively boring. The chicks, on the other hand, reacted as if their
lives depended on it."
A second explanation could be that the birds were not hampered by
rationalizations that might affect the results of a human volunteer. A
person, no matter how open-minded, may subconsciously believe that the
experiment is strange or silly. Says Radin: "When you have subjects
who work on an instinctual level, it presumably leads to higher
motivation and more remarkable results."
FOIA BONUS
SOVIET TELEKINESIS RESEARCH
http://foia.abovetopsecret.com/ultimate_UFO/UFO_GOVT/of_Interest/paranormal_briefing.pdf
http://blog.wired.com/defense/files/SovParapsych.pdf
http://blog.wired.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/12/11/ussr_paranormal.jpg
http://blog.wired.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/12/11/us_paranormal_2.jpg
spectre
Jul 13, 2009, 3:49:42 PM7/13/09
to spectre, spectre_event...@googlegroups.com
FREE NEUROSKY SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS KIT
http://store.neurosky.com/products/mindset-development-tools
http://www.neurosky.com/products/mindset-development-tools-update/
Become a BCI Developer with the MindSet Development Tools
http://store.neurosky.com/products/mindset-development-tools
http://www.neurosky.com/products/mindset-development-tools-update/
Become a BCI Developer with the MindSet Development Tools
"Begin developing products and applications that interface with the
brain, by using NeuroSky’s MindSet Development Tools. NeuroSky’s Brain-
Computer Interface (BCI) turns the users thoughts into actions,
unlocking new worlds of interactivity. By monitoring your brain waves,
the headset can send messages to a device—allowing the user to control
the device with their thoughts. The MindSet Development Tools (MDT)
include everything necessary to develop applications for the MindSet.
The NeuroSky MindSet can be paired with video games, research devices
or a number of other tools for an enhanced user experience. Upon
approval, applications created using the MindSet Development Tools
qualify for entry into the NeuroSky Store.
Development:
* A convenient, fully documented API library and drivers for
common platforms (such as Windows, Windows Mobile, and Symbian) with
support across multiple program languages (such as C/C++, C#, .NET,
and Java).
* All the documentation, guides, and examples necessary to develop
your own BCI-enabled software or application on many popular computing
platforms using the MindSet."
CALL FOR AMATEUR RESEARCH
http://gizmodo.com/5184287/neurosky-mindset-hands+on-brainwave-gameplay
http://gizmodo.com/5303674/neurosky-brain-gaming-headset-now-has-free-sdk
"Remember the Neurosky mind-gaming headset we tried earlier this year?
The one that actually worked? It's getting a free SDK. This means both
developers at large studios as well as dudes in their basement can
make programs and games that do things with the data generated by the
headset. And you generate data just by thinking a certain way. What
kind of stuff can these developers do? Well, for larger companies they
can make this an additional controller to supplement their normal
games, such as reloading just by concentrating or lifting boxes and
"setting crap on fire." Independent developers can make weird one-off
games that can really stretch the limits of what the Neurosky Mindset
can read from your brain."
PREVIOUSLY ON SPECTRE
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2009/01/16/telekinesis-comes-to-market/
spectre
Jul 13, 2009, 5:01:00 PM7/13/09
to spectre.event.horizon.group, spectre_event...@googlegroups.com
http://store.neurosky.com/products/mindset-development-tools
http://store.neurosky.com/pages/design-your-own-apps
PROGRAMMABLE BRAINWAVE-SENSITIVE HEADSET
http://www.businesspundit.com/playing-games-with-your-mind-neuroskys-brainwave-device-lets-users-move-objects-with-their-thoughts/print/
NeuroSky’s Brainwave Device Lets Users Move Objects With Their
Thoughts / July 17, 2008
Attention. Meditation. Two default human settings. You pay attention
when you’re driving. You’re in a state of meditation when you watch
the ocean, or perhaps a good movie. You may even meditate on purpose,
sitting a pillow with closed eyes. Silicon Valley innovator NeuroSky
has given new meaning to these two states of mind. Attention means you
can move things back and forth. Meditation means you can levitate
objects.
Sound outlandish, like a lucid dream, or a hallucinogenic flashback?
Actually, all it takes is a headset. NeuroSky, using a consumer-
friendly EEG device, is taking Virtual Reality one step closer to just
plain Real. NeuroSky has created a wearable biosensor allowing users
to control electronic devices with their minds. A red wire feeds
brainwaves into a patented device that turns them into commands. The
device uses a series of emotion-based algorithms to allow users to
push and pull objects (virtual or external) based on an attention or
meditation rating. For example, users can levitate virtual objects
with a strong meditation rating, or push/pull objects with a strong
attention rating.
Their technology allows users to control just about any mechanical
system. They plan to expand into brainwave-read robots for the elderly
and disabled in the future, as well as diversify their command suite
to include more emotions and subtle movements such as eye blinks.
Business Pundit interviewed Greg Hyver, VP of Marketing at San Jose
brainwave device manufacturer, to find out more about NeuroSky’s
fascinating EEG device.
Q: According to the website, NeuroSky’s goal is to “take medical
sensor technology out of the hospitals, institutes and universities
and put it into the hands of the average consumer in order to enhance
lifestyles.” Can you talk about some progress you’ve made in that
field recently?
A. Sure. The first challenge was actually non-technical in nature. We
had to identify the conditions in which an “average” consumer would
actually purchase a device that reads and translates their brainwaves
to perform a function. NeuroSky identified five major categories that
we had to address to establish our products’ design parameters: (a)
price; (b) wearability; (c) ease-of-use; (d) mobility; (e) utility. It
all came down to building a dry (no electrode gel), single-EEG-sensor
solution that met each of our markets’ technical and costing
requirements.
The medical industry already uses multiple sensor headsets and it
didn’t seem to make much sense for us to produce another “medical-
like” headset. You may lose a few features with a single sensor versus
multiple sensors, but it’s much more intuitive for a consumer who has
never used this type of technology to understand and control it more
quickly and consistently. We didn’t want to frustrate the consumer by
producing a multiple sensor headset that created head placement
problems, lengthy calibration periods, special training sessions, non-
repeatable performances and high-end (and expensive) hardware
requirements that limited a platform’s (mobility) ability to support
it.
By making it simple, we created a fully-embedded headset where all of
the processing (reading-filtering-amplifying EEG, translating the
mental states) is done on the headset, itself, without requiring a
remote processing device. Since we don’t steal processor bandwidth
from the remote device (for example, a simple toy product), our
technology can effectively communicate with any product that can read
our data stream.
Q: Who do you see as your biggest markets, considering the numerous
possible applications of your technology?
A: Our early markets, what we consider the low-hanging fruit, are in
toys, video games and interactive music (music controlled by mood).
These are clearly entertainment-related applications where users can
experience brainwave control in a casual and fun environment. This is
where some of the earliest end-products from our customers should
begin hitting the mass market shelves, probably in late 2008.
More advanced markets that we consider fairly massive would be the
simple wellness market, especially for the baby boomer population
(e.g. brain training, stress reduction, meditation), the education
market (e.g. methods to improve learning in children), the cognitive
disorder therapies market (e.g. ADD-ADHD, addiction, phobias, anxiety,
PTSD, etc.) and the transportation market (e.g. sleep detection
devices). These more advanced markets require more sophisticated
applications to be built and tested which produces longer time-to-
market for these products.
Q: Why the licensing model? If the unit is relatively inexpensive, why
not just sell directly to consumers?
A: I’ve always liked this question because it pinpoints why I believe
we will be so successful with our products. NeuroSky is a core
technology provider. We license our MindKit-EM™ SDK to the developer
community to enable them to easily integrate our technology into the
applications they develop. Once they are ready to enter the mass
market, we give them two options: (a) they may purchase our ThinkGear-
EM™ modules and go off to design and build their own headset
customized to their own market requirements;
(b) they may purchase our off-the-shelf MindSet™ commercial headsets,
place their logo on it, and bundle it with their application. Our
clients then distribute and promote their products through their
established channels. NeuroSky simply does not have, nor do we prefer
to build, the infrastructure to reach the end-retail market, so we
back-door through our OEM partners’ channels.
Q: Was your technology developed in association with any major
research institutions, such as universities?
A: Yes, there were three universities professors involved in
developing our technology. They were at the University of Korea
(Seoul), the Moscow University (Russia) and the Virginia Polytechnic
Institute (U.S.).
Q: Is there a way of confusing your device? Generating emotional
uncertainty, for example?
A: EEG systems are prone to noise issues, whether on-head noise or
ambient noise, creating disturbances requiring noise filtering to
obtain the EEG signals. Brainwaves are very small electrical signals
in the micro-volt range and certain types of noise may interfere with
proper interpretation. The challenge for all EEG systems is to reduce
the impact of noise during the filtering operation. Noise filtering
continues to be an important technical priority in this industry.
NeuroSky’s technology is not deemed “medical grade”, as we focus on
consumer and not medical applications.
Q: Do you have any additional cool anecdotes about the device? For
example, an amazing function it’s been used for, or a video-game trick
someone accomplished?
A: Our current, single sensor technology reads and translates
brainwaves on, in medical terms, the Fp1 or Fp2 locations on the
forehead. There is a wealth of mental state information that can be
retrieved from the forehead location, for example, a user’s attention,
meditation, drowsiness, anxiety, pleasure or displeasure. Today, we
have already tested and released two important mental state values:
Attention & Meditation.
This continually updated mental state information is sent from the
headset to an application, say a video game. The developer of that
video game then decides how he or she wishes to map the attention or
meditation states. In our technical “NeuroBoy World Demo” that we
allow users to experience at our trade shows, and is included as part
of our SDK license, our own developers have decided to map these
states to certain telekinesis modes of operation. They still require
the user to manually set the mode and select the object via a keyboard
command, but once set, a certain mental state is mapped to operate on
that mode (we view our technology as an additional complement, and not
an end-all, to the current gaming experience).
For example, if the user manually sets the “lift” mode and selects an
object in the room, this mode corresponds to the user’s “meditation”
level at the time. By relaxing and emptying his or her mind, the
meditation level grows higher and eventually the object can be raised
up. Another powerful way of using these mental states is for the
application to simply monitor the user’s mental state. Say, for
example, you are listening to someone speak. Are you paying attention?
Someone could ultimately develop an audio application that measures a
person’s attention level during a played speech and identify the level
of “listening performance,” then make suggestions for improvement with
the mental state feedback providing the benchmark for performance
measurement. The same can be applied to market research applications
using EEG to rate a user’s response to an advertisement or television
show during a focus group session in order to make determinations
about the effectiveness of a particular media piece. The end-use of
this technology is not being driven by NeuroSky, but by the
imaginations of the customers that we encounter every day. And, I must
say, there have been some very creative ideas that will find their way
onto retail shelves in a relatively short period."
PREVIOUSLY ON SPECTRE
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2009/07/13/telekinesis-comes-to-market/
http://store.neurosky.com/pages/design-your-own-apps
PROGRAMMABLE BRAINWAVE-SENSITIVE HEADSET
http://www.businesspundit.com/playing-games-with-your-mind-neuroskys-brainwave-device-lets-users-move-objects-with-their-thoughts/print/
NeuroSky’s Brainwave Device Lets Users Move Objects With Their
Thoughts / July 17, 2008
Attention. Meditation. Two default human settings. You pay attention
when you’re driving. You’re in a state of meditation when you watch
the ocean, or perhaps a good movie. You may even meditate on purpose,
sitting a pillow with closed eyes. Silicon Valley innovator NeuroSky
has given new meaning to these two states of mind. Attention means you
can move things back and forth. Meditation means you can levitate
objects.
Sound outlandish, like a lucid dream, or a hallucinogenic flashback?
Actually, all it takes is a headset. NeuroSky, using a consumer-
friendly EEG device, is taking Virtual Reality one step closer to just
plain Real. NeuroSky has created a wearable biosensor allowing users
to control electronic devices with their minds. A red wire feeds
brainwaves into a patented device that turns them into commands. The
device uses a series of emotion-based algorithms to allow users to
push and pull objects (virtual or external) based on an attention or
meditation rating. For example, users can levitate virtual objects
with a strong meditation rating, or push/pull objects with a strong
attention rating.
Their technology allows users to control just about any mechanical
system. They plan to expand into brainwave-read robots for the elderly
and disabled in the future, as well as diversify their command suite
to include more emotions and subtle movements such as eye blinks.
Business Pundit interviewed Greg Hyver, VP of Marketing at San Jose
brainwave device manufacturer, to find out more about NeuroSky’s
fascinating EEG device.
Q: According to the website, NeuroSky’s goal is to “take medical
sensor technology out of the hospitals, institutes and universities
and put it into the hands of the average consumer in order to enhance
lifestyles.” Can you talk about some progress you’ve made in that
field recently?
A. Sure. The first challenge was actually non-technical in nature. We
had to identify the conditions in which an “average” consumer would
actually purchase a device that reads and translates their brainwaves
to perform a function. NeuroSky identified five major categories that
we had to address to establish our products’ design parameters: (a)
price; (b) wearability; (c) ease-of-use; (d) mobility; (e) utility. It
all came down to building a dry (no electrode gel), single-EEG-sensor
solution that met each of our markets’ technical and costing
requirements.
The medical industry already uses multiple sensor headsets and it
didn’t seem to make much sense for us to produce another “medical-
like” headset. You may lose a few features with a single sensor versus
multiple sensors, but it’s much more intuitive for a consumer who has
never used this type of technology to understand and control it more
quickly and consistently. We didn’t want to frustrate the consumer by
producing a multiple sensor headset that created head placement
problems, lengthy calibration periods, special training sessions, non-
repeatable performances and high-end (and expensive) hardware
requirements that limited a platform’s (mobility) ability to support
it.
By making it simple, we created a fully-embedded headset where all of
the processing (reading-filtering-amplifying EEG, translating the
mental states) is done on the headset, itself, without requiring a
remote processing device. Since we don’t steal processor bandwidth
from the remote device (for example, a simple toy product), our
technology can effectively communicate with any product that can read
our data stream.
Q: Who do you see as your biggest markets, considering the numerous
possible applications of your technology?
A: Our early markets, what we consider the low-hanging fruit, are in
toys, video games and interactive music (music controlled by mood).
These are clearly entertainment-related applications where users can
experience brainwave control in a casual and fun environment. This is
where some of the earliest end-products from our customers should
begin hitting the mass market shelves, probably in late 2008.
More advanced markets that we consider fairly massive would be the
simple wellness market, especially for the baby boomer population
(e.g. brain training, stress reduction, meditation), the education
market (e.g. methods to improve learning in children), the cognitive
disorder therapies market (e.g. ADD-ADHD, addiction, phobias, anxiety,
PTSD, etc.) and the transportation market (e.g. sleep detection
devices). These more advanced markets require more sophisticated
applications to be built and tested which produces longer time-to-
market for these products.
Q: Why the licensing model? If the unit is relatively inexpensive, why
not just sell directly to consumers?
A: I’ve always liked this question because it pinpoints why I believe
we will be so successful with our products. NeuroSky is a core
technology provider. We license our MindKit-EM™ SDK to the developer
community to enable them to easily integrate our technology into the
applications they develop. Once they are ready to enter the mass
market, we give them two options: (a) they may purchase our ThinkGear-
EM™ modules and go off to design and build their own headset
customized to their own market requirements;
(b) they may purchase our off-the-shelf MindSet™ commercial headsets,
place their logo on it, and bundle it with their application. Our
clients then distribute and promote their products through their
established channels. NeuroSky simply does not have, nor do we prefer
to build, the infrastructure to reach the end-retail market, so we
back-door through our OEM partners’ channels.
Q: Was your technology developed in association with any major
research institutions, such as universities?
A: Yes, there were three universities professors involved in
developing our technology. They were at the University of Korea
(Seoul), the Moscow University (Russia) and the Virginia Polytechnic
Institute (U.S.).
Q: Is there a way of confusing your device? Generating emotional
uncertainty, for example?
A: EEG systems are prone to noise issues, whether on-head noise or
ambient noise, creating disturbances requiring noise filtering to
obtain the EEG signals. Brainwaves are very small electrical signals
in the micro-volt range and certain types of noise may interfere with
proper interpretation. The challenge for all EEG systems is to reduce
the impact of noise during the filtering operation. Noise filtering
continues to be an important technical priority in this industry.
NeuroSky’s technology is not deemed “medical grade”, as we focus on
consumer and not medical applications.
Q: Do you have any additional cool anecdotes about the device? For
example, an amazing function it’s been used for, or a video-game trick
someone accomplished?
A: Our current, single sensor technology reads and translates
brainwaves on, in medical terms, the Fp1 or Fp2 locations on the
forehead. There is a wealth of mental state information that can be
retrieved from the forehead location, for example, a user’s attention,
meditation, drowsiness, anxiety, pleasure or displeasure. Today, we
have already tested and released two important mental state values:
Attention & Meditation.
This continually updated mental state information is sent from the
headset to an application, say a video game. The developer of that
video game then decides how he or she wishes to map the attention or
meditation states. In our technical “NeuroBoy World Demo” that we
allow users to experience at our trade shows, and is included as part
of our SDK license, our own developers have decided to map these
states to certain telekinesis modes of operation. They still require
the user to manually set the mode and select the object via a keyboard
command, but once set, a certain mental state is mapped to operate on
that mode (we view our technology as an additional complement, and not
an end-all, to the current gaming experience).
For example, if the user manually sets the “lift” mode and selects an
object in the room, this mode corresponds to the user’s “meditation”
level at the time. By relaxing and emptying his or her mind, the
meditation level grows higher and eventually the object can be raised
up. Another powerful way of using these mental states is for the
application to simply monitor the user’s mental state. Say, for
example, you are listening to someone speak. Are you paying attention?
Someone could ultimately develop an audio application that measures a
person’s attention level during a played speech and identify the level
of “listening performance,” then make suggestions for improvement with
the mental state feedback providing the benchmark for performance
measurement. The same can be applied to market research applications
using EEG to rate a user’s response to an advertisement or television
show during a focus group session in order to make determinations
about the effectiveness of a particular media piece. The end-use of
this technology is not being driven by NeuroSky, but by the
imaginations of the customers that we encounter every day. And, I must
say, there have been some very creative ideas that will find their way
onto retail shelves in a relatively short period."
PREVIOUSLY ON SPECTRE
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2009/07/13/telekinesis-comes-to-market/
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