Cerebral Hack

It’s long been accepted by the medical community that physical exercise has a dramatic effect on brain function, it even causes neurons to be made. In fact it would represent a commercial opportunity when you start to look at studies that show the delay of the onset of Alzheimer’s and senility, this applies mainly towards general brain health and function. My particular interest is in physical activity and brain function. What I have in mind is; for an example, say we have a machine that causes physical activity, a treadmill, and we have a variety of sensors, respiration, pulse, the others could be EEG, or whatever technology we can use to monitor the brain. Obviously we cannot use an MRI, it’s too big.  Say we put this person in a virtual environment and create an immersive experience.

Put these things together with the specific goal of achieving tasks, or being successful with certain mental tasks that would otherwise seem unreachable to that person otherwise. We already know by observing MRIs the increase in oxygen levels with brain activity. There are a lot of things we can tell from observing with EEG, this technology has already been accessed for gaming head-gear and so on that can observe in some ways what’s going on. But basically if we were successful with this we would have a device that allows us to be smarter, and for me that’s a pretty interesting task.

This was the presentation Jamie Hyneman, Host of Mythbusters, gave at the VLAB “Business of the Brain” event.  Thanks to my friend EdRabbit and one of the co-chairs for the event, Tansy Brook, Comms. Mng. @ Neurosky we got to sit-own with him and ask him a few more questions in relation to his presentation, and a tiny delve into his interest into the brain, and where he sees BCI in the future..

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Last Tuesday, EdRabbit covered the VLAB “Business of the Brain” event for Cerebralhack, we also lined up a fantastic sit down 1 on 1 Q/A with the inventor of Brain Fingerprinting, and also built the first EEG based BCI device, Dr. Larry Farwell.  The idea of Brainfinger printing is also briefly mentioned in our interview with Dr. Michael Schuette

Ed: You built the first EEG based BCI device in 1984, what was your motivation, what drove you towards that field?

Larry: I was minding my business in my brain research lab *laughs* measuring brain responses. Getting brain response without any overt physical indication and knew of a kid in Illinois (where Dr. Farwell attended Grad school, Harvard undergrad) who was paralyzed from the eyeballs down. So he couldn’t communicate at all, but we suspected he was still awake in there, it’s called locked in syndrome. If you damage the brain in a particular way you can wipe out the motor system and still keep everything intact. We suspected that was the case with him.

We said “hey!” we could set up a system whereby he could communicate with the computer and a speech synthesizer. So I built the program and set up the system to be a brain computer interface and it worked! That was what got me involved first. Then I thought “Well if we can communicate from the brain to the computer, what else can we use this for?” Well, we can find out if someone was at a murder scene, we could find out if someone was KGB, at that time it was a KGB agent, now they are more concerned if someone’s a bomb maker, or a terrorist, we can tell what information is stored in the brain.

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Every time you look at someone, every time you walk past the bakery and take in the smell of fresh baked bread, every time you hear a car alarm go off, every time you shake a hand your brain is firing signals back and forth billions of times a day from our various senses. And from the time we wake up, to the time we go to sleep…and even when we sleep, our brain sends signals to the body to contract/retract muscles, whether it be walking, running, jogging, working, or even sleeping, all of these billions and billions of signals have been happening on a consistent basis since the day you were born. At its lowest point of activity; REM Sleep, is normally the closest we get to being without our physical senses in our daily lives from all this sensory work our brain does, and to me it seems due to the fact that since it’s not utilizing energy for those sensory elements, it allows for other brain activity to occur while our smarter and more adept sub-conscience brain wakes up and goes to work. What if we could trigger this on our own without the cloudiness of REM sleep? What if we could harness the voice of our sub-consciousness?

Through isolation tanks, people are saying they can. Isolation Tanks however are more descriptively referred to as Sensory Deprivation Tanks, as this is essentially what they are, and is a bit more explanatory as to how the “isolation tank” really works. (continue reading…)

Since my adoption of hobbies concerning brain function, I have sought communities, joined communities, and observed communities. Most communities specialized towards a particular technology or methodology, all equally friendly and respectful amongst themselves. It’s a bit refreshing to see a [technology/methodology] movement be so open, so ready to help and/or give. If you haven’t poked your head around into different necks of the woods, have a look at the Links bellow. For reference, these can always be found in the CH Library

NeuroSky Developer Forum – - more info

Emotiv Developer Forums Thanks for the heads up from BCIForums

Facebook – Emotivated Facebook group – more info

Brainwaves Entrainment Forums – - more info

Openeeg Main mailing list – Discussion of EEG hardware, software, training protocols, NFB theory – for developers and users. – more info

Facebook Group – Emotiv EPOC fan page – more info

OCZ Support – OCZ Support & Community Forum – OCZ Neural Impulse Actuator – more info

OCZ (NIA) – Facebook Grp: OCZ (NIA) Neural Impulse Actuator Users – more info

Openeeg Software – Mailserv for the OpenEEG project – more info

Brainwaves Entrainment Forums – - more info

Looks like we will be seeing EPOCs in the wild sooner than later. Updates from the company’s Facebook say they are in fact in production (for SDK developers read:customers) and units have shipped as long as a week ago.

Bellow is the link to a gallery of a bunch of production stage pics and shots of the factory.

Click here

Again I cant thank enough my bud @EdRabbit and his friend @VioletBlue who are in the San Francisco area for giving me a hand at Interviewing and Demoing at Neurosky HQ Located in San Jose, CA. with me being in Chicago (and in this economy) they opted to do the foot work for me, much thanks, you two did a great job!

HOW DOES THE MINDSET WORK?

“A couple of keys for us,” Jim Sullivan, VP Worldwide Sales begins to explain “in that in some of the products we see today you can tell they took traditional medical technology and repurposed it. They cleaned it up and pulled away the pieces you don’t need. We took the opposite approach. We started with the individual – and that presented some challenges – and created the product from the ground up with them in mind. The brain is a wonderful computer, but it’s an analog computer. People in the digital age are used to digital responses. A digital response is immediate and definite, it’s either a 1 or a 0, its on or off. Analog is not that way at all. Our chip converts the signals from analog to digital”.

“Now [the Mindset] can remove the measurement of muscle movement, it’s listening to brainwaves, the faintest signal in the human body. Your heartbeat can be picked up very easily, it’s a very strong electrical signal. Brainwaves are measured in microvolt’s. Anytime you’re listening to brainwaves, because they are so faint, you have to listen really, really hard. So for us it was a challenge to get rid of the muscle noise and just focus on brainwaves. When you look at something like the NIA that uses muscles for control, most of that noise you see in the brainwave, we worked hard to filter out. So it’s simply a different approach. We take that [muscle noise] out of the equation”

“The two algorithms we ship in this chip are Attention and Mediation, that’s what we call them. You can call them any number of things. Attention; by the way in Neuroscience, has 42 very different definitions, and meditation also has a very large amount. Attention in our case is really a single minded focus, blocking everything but one thing out in your mind. So you can drive the attention meter on our Brainwave Visualizer application  very high by staring at something and concentrating on moving the dial. Meditation is not the opposite of attention, it’s like a venn diagram; you can be very attentive, and very serene at the same time. The MindSet does also provide the raw EEG wave – but that is primarily used more by researchers than developers at the moment.”

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