Kevin's Watch

www.livescience.com/humanbiology/050317 ... rface.html


Though the research described in this article is still at the very early stages it seems clear to me that in a few years hence we might find ourselves 'thinking" at our computers and much more. How about think- driving your hydrogen powered hovercraft to work?
The possibilities for paraplegic patients in the restoration of genuine mobility is very exciting. It appears there is a great deal of work to be done but the successes described in this article are very interesting.
Now let me try. *thinking* "I want that banana!" Aw rats. I'll keep practicing.

It's a very promising line of research. I think the implications are much bigger for the physically disabled than for Joe User, as the hands really are a very efficient conductor of neural data. Keyboards, mice, joysticks, etc. really do have a fairly high bandwidth, as brain-to-machine interfaces go. I expect it to be a long time before someone comes up with a direct neural interface that lets me input text as fast as I can type, for instance.

By the way, I hear that a major source of funding for this kind of research (though not this project in particular, as far as I know) is the U.S. Air Force. Several of the input devices now used by disabled computer users are based on systems designed for pilots working under heavy g.

aTOMiC wrote:Now let me try. *thinking* "I want that banana!" Aw rats. I'll keep practicing.

Use the Force, Tom.

Seriously though, it's a great step forward, especially, as you and VF say, for the disabled. I agree with VF in that I think it will be a long time before we have direct brain input for the things we can do easily in everyday life.

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The sheer amount of processing that goes in on in the precentral gyrus, supplementary motor cortex, deep nuclei and the cerebellar cortex would make it extremely difficult to interface with it. But, great strides are being made in visual interfaces, so it is only a matter of time.

Loremaster wrote:The sheer amount of processing that goes in on in the precentral gyrus, supplementary motor cortex, deep nuclei and the cerebellar cortex would make it extremely difficult to interface with it. But, great strides are being made in visual interfaces, so it is only a matter of time.

Careful: that's what they were saying about voice input 25 years ago, and while progress has been made, it's still a very inaccurate and inefficient input method. Direct neural input is susceptible to all the same kinds of errors and technical difficulties as voice input, except perhaps ambient noise. This may be one of those problems that are not computable by any system much less complex than the human brain itself.

Whenever a computer scientist says that some wildly futuristic technology is 'only a matter of time', I reach for my wallet and lock it in my safe.

"A matter of time" is subjective though, isn't it? 500 years is only a matter of time, and not a particularly great one, except from the human perspective.

Hell, by this reasoning, everything is only a matter of time.

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Variol Farseer wrote:

Loremaster wrote:The sheer amount of processing that goes in on in the precentral gyrus, supplementary motor cortex, deep nuclei and the cerebellar cortex would make it extremely difficult to interface with it. But, great strides are being made in visual interfaces, so it is only a matter of time.

Careful: that's what they were saying about voice input 25 years ago, and while progress has been made, it's still a very inaccurate and inefficient input method. Direct neural input is susceptible to all the same kinds of errors and technical difficulties as voice input, except perhaps ambient noise. This may be one of those problems that are not computable by any system much less complex than the human brain itself.

Whenever a computer scientist says that some wildly futuristic technology is 'only a matter of time', I reach for my wallet and lock it in my safe.

Yes, but to program a machine to recognise a range and pattern of frequencies is comparitively easy to deciphering neural firing patterns. But I do agree with your analogy. Perhaps super-powerful computers will detect the patterns in real time.

Did you know that researchers have identified the brain wave patterns of "LYING"? Seems infallible! Not to mention you can use the specific "frequency" of a certain thought to interface with a "wave reader" as opposed to trying to interface directly with the neural network itself, which could be external and therefore very safe, eh?

Avatar wrote:"A matter of time" is subjective though, isn't it? 500 years is only a matter of time, and not a particularly great one, except from the human perspective.

Hell, by this reasoning, everything is only a matter of time.

--Avatar

Isn't it? haha!