I assume that will come well after Amazon uses the technology to remove the memory of rights holder content when you cancel your Prime subscription. Or after Disney uses it to retroactively edit the Star Wars movies for the nineteenth time, digitally gaslighting people by amending the original memories in place.
Only those who own a subscription, there will always be the ones that can’t or won’t pay fines related to piracy activities the retrospective thought analyser scan identified, or those whose current thoughts and opinions don’t align with Disneys core values.
I connect my brain to computers everyday using a keyboard and monitor. The entire loop consists with photons emitted from monitor hitting my eye-balls, being processed by my visual system, etc. you know "brain stuff", and then my responding to that by using my fingers to press "keys" on a keyboard and to move around an optical "mouse" to send signals to the computer. It actually works quite well, and is quite affordable (unless its an Apple Studio Display, those are ridiculously expensive).
Well you jest but the benefit of a direct interface is how much faster it can be. Typing is slow. Chemical based signals from eyes to brain to muscle are slow. Moving the mouse and keyboard are slow. All those middlemen can be removed and we can speed things up at least 3-4 times.
Yes, but I am talking about the parts outside the brain. Eye to brain. Brain to muscle. You can cut those out and since the brain is about 15cm in diameter while there are around 50cm of nerves between your fingers and brain, I think around 3-4x faster by replacing those nerves with near lightspeed communication is not too ambitious.
I really doubt that. Do you type as fast as you can think? As in the moment a line of code formed in your brain it got typed out immediately into the computer? Maybe you can but I don't think the majority of people can do that.
It's usually only those short bursts, usually you spend more time thinking than typing, but maybe for some languages where you write a lot of boilerplate all the time it's different.
Exactly, plus all 3 comments assumed I talked about my input into the computer, while I talked about how much info I can take into my brain from the computer being already too fast, who cares if it takes me 2 seconds to write a sentence I thought about for a minute or instantly, the thinking will always be slower and the reading is fast enough as is.
The issue facing us is on a genetic level, most people are too dumb to even profit from the current input/output speed, let alone making x4 faster.
When playing a musical instrument, humans usually transmit an order of magnitude more information through the instrument than they do when they type on the keyboard. This involves not only a higher tempo, but also the meaningful timing, key velocity / wind instrument blowing intensity, etc. Same applies to e.g. a plane pilot doing a complex maneuver, or even a player of a fast-paced game, computer or not.
Humans definitely can output more than the keyboard currently allows, and likely this can be used somehow beneficially. The output need not be all verbal though.
It wasn't flagged because of the Apple bit. I flagged and collapsed it because it was an offtopic distraction. I'm sure your intent was good but it's extremely easy for something like this to take over a thread, and indeed that was just what was happening.
Yeah imagine the anticompetitive laws in marketing and the free will questions we'll ask then? Something like Burger king suing mcdonalds for showing you a bicmac and releasing dopamine x1000 times not because it's weird (-er than today's ads) but because mcdonalds did it first.
Keyboard and mouse are the opposite of efficient - they are an extremely slow interface. Let's say you saw a person and want to transfer his image from your brain to a computer - how long would that take with a keyboard and mouse. An efficient brain computer interface should be able to do it in a second.
I just did a search on "blind person using computer" most used keyboards, some also used voice tools built into the OS. Whats the throughput on existing B2C tools?
I see research but not anything I can buy right now.
Actualy, if you receive input data faster than you can process and think, wouldn't that in effect just be a program telling you what to think and do? You could resist, but not be able to independently decide what to do anymore than if a room full of people were shouting at you 24/7.
I've been connecting a raspberry pi to a muse headset using the muselsl python library. But that only has 4 channels vs 8 for this one. I bought a muse about a year ago used for $125 on ebay, this board is $350 and you would still need to buy the electrodes and make a headset. I think the price is fair and it seems pretty competitive with openbci boards, but I think if you really wanted to just get started you could get going with a muse for a lot less and a lot quicker. The muse is finicky to get good connections, but I don't have any reason to believe it would be that much better with my own homemade headset with dry connections. Also it says for safety reasons you have to run the pi on a 5V battery which might not run all that long depending upon the size of the battery and which pi you are using.
The sad reality is that the open-source nature of this project adds less information to the world than the reference design documentation by Texas Instruments that you can download from their website.
Recording meditation sessions. I played around with one I borrowed from somebody in 2015 but it was just unreliable for longer 30 minute sessions. It's come a long way in terms of third party software and tutorials on removing artifacts from the data. There is a phone app mind monitor that makes it very easy to look at frequency domain data and make recordings which you can import into tools like eeglab.
1) it's going to be what 3-5v at some low power capability; 2) this is just a processing unit I think, no electrodes or whatever the sensors are called that actually connect to you.
Seems about as dangerous to me as (some kind of readout device that connects to) a finger-clip pulse oximeter.
The device connects directly to EEG electrodes, which means that in the presence of a sufficiently severe failure it could potentially drive current across the brain. There's also no obvious galvanic isolation (transformers, etc., like an Ethernet PHY) in the pictured design, which is especially concerning since it means the device could potentially provide a path to ground (again, through the brain!) in the case of a miswired or damaged appliance exposing mains voltage - which sounds like a rare concern, but has actually happened to me once; I was fortunate that the consequent cross-chest shock was only deeply unpleasant, and not lethal, which it easily might have been if I hadn't broken the connection by falling over.
At an absolute minimum, I'd expect to see clear warnings to only use this device while it was powered from battery and with no wired connections to a power supply or to any other device plugged into the mains. In that condition, it should be relatively safe; in any other, I wouldn't think of using it and would recommend no one else do, either.
This is still specialist/amateur grade stuff (requiring you to build/maintain/debug the system yourself). I'm optimistic about the technology continuing to develop and eventually becoming mainstream. Having a robust alternative to keyboard-and-mouse interactions will (hopefully) improve accessibility of software. (Though I have difficulty imagining that BCI input devices will be easier to support than today's complicated accessibility approaches, like screen-reader compatibility.)
> they were able to control toy mice by blinking, for example.
Anyone who's tried a neurosky knows that blinking is super obvious when looking at the graphs because of the electrical action motivating the muscles which results in that blink. The problem is that doesn't extrapolate to anything else - training yourself to move that third arm you never had is actually really hard, if not impossible.
Between this, the leaps VR is making (e.g. PSVR 2) and the rapid advancement of LLMs, I feel like we’re all working our way towards the gloop tanks from the first Matrix film - except in the real world we’re spending a lot of money and effort to get there on purpose.
Even if you could upload your whole conscious mind to a machine, is it still you?
I often think about this in the concept of teleporters from Star Trek. When they beam the away team down did they really send those people somewhere or just incinerate them and create clones in another place?
I read a great essay about that a few years ago. The thought experiment went like this: imagine a universe in which a machine scans your atoms one by one, transmits the data wirelessly to Mars, and rebuilds you there, atom by atom. Does your consciousness "jump" to the new body, or do you just die? *
What if the scanner is able to scan you without destroying the original body? What if you accidentally arrive in two destinations? etc...
* Another fascinating question is, we'll assume the new body will be just as conscious as you were. Where does its consciousness "come" from? From its point of view, it was in the teleporter on Earth one moment, and on Mars the next!
I thought the video game SOMA did a nice job exploring this area.
“Think like a dinosaur” a science fiction story on that subject. It’s been adapted a few times for TV, I think eg in The Outer Limits (90s version or early 2000s?)
I think it's bizarre that we all collectively cease consciousness around the same time every day as everyone around us. We all become willingly helpless for hours with no protection from any danger every day. It's ridiculous.
Teens typically stay up later than parents who stay up later than grandparents. And babies tend to use a 2-3 hour feed cycle which necessitates mom at the minimum to be somewhat awake. There seems to be evolutionary reasons for this (probably to prevent predation). Interesting some schools and I think California in general has introduced a later start time for teens because of this biology.
I've come to the personal conclusion that "I" am the sum of my memories. The physical parts that make me up are no more "me" than the clothes on that body. Whatever system contains my memories and makes computation based on those memories, whether a brain, computer, or something else, is "me" enough.
There are unconscious parts of your mind screaming interrupts at you as your limbs extend and react about your environment using trained behaviours. Your organs groan and churn also using unconscious trained behaviours from your brain.
They form a feedback loop of input with your brain, the conscious side of which you are aware of, and the unconscious side oprating silently in the background.
What do you think will happen if you deprive your brain of these inputs? Yes your conscious mind might cope, but your unconscious mind might go berserk, and start spamming hidden error messages to your conscious which might manifest in many unpredictable ways.
Your memories are not stored like a computer stores memories. Your brain recreates things that you remember such that remembering things is a creation of a new thing made from bits and pieces of things in your mind. This is the basis of constructivism in cognitive science.
This is an accounting question, no one intrinsically cares about identities except as entertainment or for sentimental reasons.
If someone said that we Officially (TM) become a different person when we sleep and wake up, no one would care.
On the other hand, we would really care about cloning because all sorts of things assume it to be impossible and it would all be a huge mess in practice. Not because the identities got tangled, but because as a consequence we don't know how to jail someone who created a clone a year ago, for example.
In Stargate it's a matter transporter so it literally takes all your molecules turns them into a collimated beam and shoots that beam at close to the speed of light to some other place to be reassembled.
In star trek I believe it does full matter to energy conversion and back again. I'm not entirely sure how piecewise motion of said energy is accomplished.
100% agree with you here: I try to take care of my body as much as I possibly can, but it still gives me pains, aches, cramps, & just buckets of discomfort for most of my waking moments.
This doesn't even take into account of the fact that even if you were to meticulously plan every single bit of your life, your body can just betray you out of spite (I fear testicular torsion every day.)
It’s a long way away. Assuming it will be based on MRI imaging of axons/neurons etc., the resolution of the current state of the art is too low. There’s no foreseeable advances in this area, so the only hope is a paradigm shift or serious breakthrough.
The Human Connectome Project might interest you. It is the closest thing we have to this right now.
Also the Open Worm project. We have successfuly uploaded nematodes (by countless dissections and microscopically mapping the neuron/axon connections).
I have a bit of experience in this space as we're making a sleep EEG device to improve the efficiency of deep sleep.
The hardware is one of the easier parts to build for an EEG system.
Along with this device, you could also buy a very similar device from https://openbci.com (about $1000 for 12 channel, $400 for 4 channel).
The challenge in letting "anyone connect their brain to a computer" is in the electrode design and comfort/weirdness of the device.
First you've just got the dry electrodes, which can be expensive, and in many designs (Muse S) wear over time, requiring replacement headbands.
Many devices try going for the through hair electrode design, which is challenging for people with lots of hair, or curly afros (like myself).
Once you've got your electrodes figured out, then you have to figure out how to keep them in place, comfortably, over an extended period of time.
Ok, so you've got that sorted, now get that into a form factor a person will be happy to wear.
However, even in these locations the electrodes are going to be sensitive to movement. So great it you are sitting still at work, but what are you really trying to accomplish.
So that's all the bad news. The good news is that with the low cost and experimentation that is happening in this space, I suspect we are going to learn more about the brain in the next 10 years than we have in the last 50.
It is becoming easier to watch the brain and learn more about it's functioning.
Many people ask what the benefit of a BCI device is. Unlike fitness monitors, which are giving users data, I believe the near future of BCI is in neurofeedback.
We're seeing a bunch of development from different start-ups (a bunch in Sydney, AUS - so reach out if you're local) that are looking at neurofeedback for treatment of psychological disorders.
At https://soundmind.co, we're using neurofeedback during sleep to increase the efficiency of deep sleep.
SoundMind product is fascinating. Is there a risk you become dependent on the device after longer term use and will have worse than pre-soundmind sleep when you have to go without it (e.g. it breaks or any other arbitrary reason)?
Nothing in the existing research suggests this to be the case.
It is important to understand, we don't help you to fall asleep. This isn't an insomnia device. We increase the efficiency of deep sleep specifically, and it is most effective on people who already have lower/less deep sleep.
I mean, what if the brain learns to expect the stimulus, and learns that it does not need to provide the stimulus on its own initiative anymore, or at least not to the same extent. Maybe it means the brain is spending that energy on other processes now that it is relieved of this task. Is that possible?
> Nothing in the existing research suggests this to be the case
I'm not sure I completely understand how you're phrasing that question.
However, I will say that there is now more than a decade of research into slow-wave enhancement, and multiple studies looking at safety, and efficacy.
If dependency is a concern, it's somewhat the opposite. We're stimulating a sleep function that naturally degrades as we age, and trying to get it to maintain it's power. So you naturally lose this ability.
Note: we can't create slow waves (yet) we can only increase what is already there.
Not affiliated, but I would bet on the opposite being the case, that this device (if it works) would teach you a pattern of sleep that persists after ceasing use.
In the same way brain kindling works for seizures, my guess is sleep is a learnable skill, and once the pathway is etched it sticks around.
The device is built on known science, and the brain may learn the response, but it is in response to a stimulus. Without the stimulus, the brain does not increase increase delta power on it's own.
There will be other discoveries in the future, who knows what we'll learn, but the current body of knowledge (and there is a decent amount of it) does not suggest a learned response to be the case.
Furthermore, the sleep we stimulate is deep sleep, which naturally degrades as we age, which perhaps suggests that it isn't a learned response, or else why would we see a reduction with age.
We have more "test subjects" than we have capacity, and we don't have our own sleep lab. So unless you're coming home and sleeping with me, I'm afraid not.
> At https://soundmind.co, we're using neurofeedback during sleep to increase the efficiency of deep sleep.
That's honestly a fascinating concept. How is it panning out so far? Do you control for participants having sleep apnea/UARS/other organic sleep pathology?
It's of interest, and are looking into a few things in that space, but we're starting out with known science where we can get to market "quickly" and help people currently in need.
There is LOTS of areas to look into once we have revenue and are looking more long-term opportunities.
I say "get to market 'quickly'" as it is still neuroscience, and as I describe in the parent, neurotech/eeg is not an easy physical thing to solve, then you've got the AI to build which is understanding the brainwave, providing the stimulation, and then adjusting the stimulation to the individual based on the resulting change in brainwave state.
Biomedical engineering background here. You didn’t mention anything about the quality of the resulting signal. My experience with with EEG was that you can only get a few bits/second of info. Is this still the case?
When I was mentioning electrodes, I made the assumption signal quality was the prime target, but you're right, I didn't address that directly. Of course there are other considerations as well, but signal quality is the main one.
I'm not sure where you are getting your "few bits/second" number. EEG chips can sample thousands of times per second, and it would also depend on how many channels you are running, and what you're looking for.
So the example OpenBCI board I linked to is an 8 channel device with 8,000 samples per second and 24 bits per sample - so 15m bits/second.
How does your device overcome the barrier of the mains power frequency being different (50 or 60 Hz) in different regions? Since brain gamma waves are 32-100 Hz you would need a high attenuation notch filter at the correct frequency.
Although for your sleep application, you may only be working with delta/theta waves.
We do need to filter for 50hz/60hz noise. The EEG front-ends include what's called RLD which is used to cancel common mode noise.
But you are also correct we are currently only interested in the lower bands, mostly delta/theta/alpha, potentially beta when looking at wakefulness. We're not currently doing anything in gamma.
The author built the hardware equivalent of a toy/gimmick. In software terms, this is a quick script/widget under a hundred lines of code. The chip is over ten years old and technology has improved a lot more. Four thousand dollars is not a feasible amount to manufacture any significant quantities of hardware (it's barely enough budget to do a prototype). 40 thousand and a high end FPGA or a more up to date amplifier mounted on a shield would be a lot better for this application.
120 comments
[ 12.3 ms ] story [ 3115 ms ] threadUh, these are the same types of signals that are happening inside the brain ...
What makes you think people can handle it being 4 times faster? The bottleneck will eventually be your neurotransmitters no?
The issue facing us is on a genetic level, most people are too dumb to even profit from the current input/output speed, let alone making x4 faster.
The downside is that many develop RSI from a keyboard and mouse.
https://www.slideserve.com/carrington/repetitive-strain-inju...
It’s discussed on HN from time to time:
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=rsi
Humans definitely can output more than the keyboard currently allows, and likely this can be used somehow beneficially. The output need not be all verbal though.
https://trekmovie.com/2007/06/07/we-have-found-spocks-braint...
https://store.neurosky.com/pages/mindwave
While no longer available, the Neurosky was once sold for only $109.
Neurosky is by far the worst. It’s nearly random. From the low cost devices, Muse (1 or 2) is by far the best.
UX, wearability, comfort, electric signal.
I see research but not anything I can buy right now.
Actualy, if you receive input data faster than you can process and think, wouldn't that in effect just be a program telling you what to think and do? You could resist, but not be able to independently decide what to do anymore than if a room full of people were shouting at you 24/7.
Gerbers: https://e2e.ti.com/support/data-converters-group/data-conver...
Firmware: https://www.ti.com/tool/ADS1299EEGFE-PDK
You are just making money selling $60 parts you bought too many of for $350.
https://e2e.ti.com/cfs-file/__key/communityserver-discussion...
Seems about as dangerous to me as (some kind of readout device that connects to) a finger-clip pulse oximeter.
At an absolute minimum, I'd expect to see clear warnings to only use this device while it was powered from battery and with no wired connections to a power supply or to any other device plugged into the mains. In that condition, it should be relatively safe; in any other, I wouldn't think of using it and would recommend no one else do, either.
Anyone who's tried a neurosky knows that blinking is super obvious when looking at the graphs because of the electrical action motivating the muscles which results in that blink. The problem is that doesn't extrapolate to anything else - training yourself to move that third arm you never had is actually really hard, if not impossible.
I often think about this in the concept of teleporters from Star Trek. When they beam the away team down did they really send those people somewhere or just incinerate them and create clones in another place?
What if the scanner is able to scan you without destroying the original body? What if you accidentally arrive in two destinations? etc...
* Another fascinating question is, we'll assume the new body will be just as conscious as you were. Where does its consciousness "come" from? From its point of view, it was in the teleporter on Earth one moment, and on Mars the next!
I thought the video game SOMA did a nice job exploring this area.
When someone dies where does the consciousness go?
I don’t think there’s any law of conservation of consciousness.
So it is staggered in general.
They form a feedback loop of input with your brain, the conscious side of which you are aware of, and the unconscious side oprating silently in the background.
What do you think will happen if you deprive your brain of these inputs? Yes your conscious mind might cope, but your unconscious mind might go berserk, and start spamming hidden error messages to your conscious which might manifest in many unpredictable ways.
If someone said that we Officially (TM) become a different person when we sleep and wake up, no one would care.
On the other hand, we would really care about cloning because all sorts of things assume it to be impossible and it would all be a huge mess in practice. Not because the identities got tangled, but because as a consequence we don't know how to jail someone who created a clone a year ago, for example.
In star trek I believe it does full matter to energy conversion and back again. I'm not entirely sure how piecewise motion of said energy is accomplished.
This doesn't even take into account of the fact that even if you were to meticulously plan every single bit of your life, your body can just betray you out of spite (I fear testicular torsion every day.)
The Human Connectome Project might interest you. It is the closest thing we have to this right now.
Also the Open Worm project. We have successfuly uploaded nematodes (by countless dissections and microscopically mapping the neuron/axon connections).
The hardware is one of the easier parts to build for an EEG system. Along with this device, you could also buy a very similar device from https://openbci.com (about $1000 for 12 channel, $400 for 4 channel).
The challenge in letting "anyone connect their brain to a computer" is in the electrode design and comfort/weirdness of the device.
First you've just got the dry electrodes, which can be expensive, and in many designs (Muse S) wear over time, requiring replacement headbands.
Many devices try going for the through hair electrode design, which is challenging for people with lots of hair, or curly afros (like myself).
Once you've got your electrodes figured out, then you have to figure out how to keep them in place, comfortably, over an extended period of time.
Ok, so you've got that sorted, now get that into a form factor a person will be happy to wear.
We are starting to see in-ear EEG devices built into headphones like the Emotiv Mn8 (https://www.emotiv.com/workplace-wellness-safety-and-product...).
However, even in these locations the electrodes are going to be sensitive to movement. So great it you are sitting still at work, but what are you really trying to accomplish.
So that's all the bad news. The good news is that with the low cost and experimentation that is happening in this space, I suspect we are going to learn more about the brain in the next 10 years than we have in the last 50.
It is becoming easier to watch the brain and learn more about it's functioning.
Many people ask what the benefit of a BCI device is. Unlike fitness monitors, which are giving users data, I believe the near future of BCI is in neurofeedback.
We're seeing a bunch of development from different start-ups (a bunch in Sydney, AUS - so reach out if you're local) that are looking at neurofeedback for treatment of psychological disorders.
At https://soundmind.co, we're using neurofeedback during sleep to increase the efficiency of deep sleep.
It is important to understand, we don't help you to fall asleep. This isn't an insomnia device. We increase the efficiency of deep sleep specifically, and it is most effective on people who already have lower/less deep sleep.
> Nothing in the existing research suggests this to be the case
Was it considered?
However, I will say that there is now more than a decade of research into slow-wave enhancement, and multiple studies looking at safety, and efficacy.
If dependency is a concern, it's somewhat the opposite. We're stimulating a sleep function that naturally degrades as we age, and trying to get it to maintain it's power. So you naturally lose this ability.
Note: we can't create slow waves (yet) we can only increase what is already there.
In the same way brain kindling works for seizures, my guess is sleep is a learnable skill, and once the pathway is etched it sticks around.
There will be other discoveries in the future, who knows what we'll learn, but the current body of knowledge (and there is a decent amount of it) does not suggest a learned response to be the case.
Furthermore, the sleep we stimulate is deep sleep, which naturally degrades as we age, which perhaps suggests that it isn't a learned response, or else why would we see a reduction with age.
That's honestly a fascinating concept. How is it panning out so far? Do you control for participants having sleep apnea/UARS/other organic sleep pathology?
There is LOTS of areas to look into once we have revenue and are looking more long-term opportunities.
I say "get to market 'quickly'" as it is still neuroscience, and as I describe in the parent, neurotech/eeg is not an easy physical thing to solve, then you've got the AI to build which is understanding the brainwave, providing the stimulation, and then adjusting the stimulation to the individual based on the resulting change in brainwave state.
I'm not sure where you are getting your "few bits/second" number. EEG chips can sample thousands of times per second, and it would also depend on how many channels you are running, and what you're looking for.
So the example OpenBCI board I linked to is an 8 channel device with 8,000 samples per second and 24 bits per sample - so 15m bits/second.
Or perhaps I'm misunderstanding the question.
Although for your sleep application, you may only be working with delta/theta waves.
But you are also correct we are currently only interested in the lower bands, mostly delta/theta/alpha, potentially beta when looking at wakefulness. We're not currently doing anything in gamma.
(Worked briefly on brain-computer interfaces at MIT in the early 80s)
Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.
Wait, Microsoft, Google and they "partners" already know everything i think of.