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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When all is said and done, our current generation has grown-up through pure connectivity and interactivity more so than any previous generation can boast.  Through our own progress with how we use a computer, the 1’s and 0’s have become as familiar as our ABC’s.  We have become more intimate with different types of interface devices allowing us to have a more of an impact in how we interact with what it is we see displayed. The mouse itself revolutionized how we use computers and computer based machines.   Even in Hollywood, we have interfaced with every muscle of the body to translate to 3D rendering software to create better stock 3D models of ourselves. What these progressions did was give us new dimensions into computing, furthering our ability to quantify life into a digital stream.  Every leap we seem to take in the relationship that our species has with the digital world, the more precise, the more detailed, the more efficient, and the more real it becomes.

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Tansy Brook at NeuroSky has just emailed me to let me know their SDK for the NeuroSky MindSet has been made Free and to the Public.

This means that anyone can now develop software for this fantastic BCI device.  And if the NeuroSky user community is anywhere near as enthusiastic about developing and hacking the MindSet as I have seen otehrs do for the OCZ NIA we have some great things on the horizon.

Stay Tuned.

Rejoice! it seems as if the rumors were thankfully untrue about Emotiv going under. They have recently announce the release of their SDK Package with SDK headset for a nominal fee of $500. In an email I received a few days ago.

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In today’s economy, it seems there is a tight rope act being preformed financially by most companies to keep themselves afloat, and as a reader has brought to my attention, this may be the case for Emotiv, creator of the EPOC BCI headset.

In a fairly recent (read: 03-09-2009) Dr. Michael Schuette, creator of OCZ’s Neural Impulse Actuator has had reason to believe the hopeful BCI manufacturer Emotiv has possibly run out of time and money to push their product out and clues to its reason being that it simply doesn’t work.  He also states that it was second hand information, and that he does not wish to spread rumors, but to be honest, with several setbacks announced by Emotiv, it would be no surprise (albeit a very very sad one) that this may possibly be the case.

The Dr is quoted as saying “…one of their vendors talked to me trying to get some business from OCZ because allegedly Emotiv went out of business.” And then further on continues on regarding a possibility why by saying “…I know one thing, which is that their approach cannot function.” He also makes sure that it is stated that it is second hand information (one of Emotivs own former vendors) and that he is not trying to be negative or trying to spread rumors.  Michael is a great guy, and very helpful to the OCZ NIA community, so I can 100% believe his intentions in saying this was not inflammatory, but purely informational.

I’m waiting to hear back from the Emotiv camp and will update this post when/if I hear something substantial about this.

Stay Tuned.