Comment by nabla9 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nabla9 | Hacker News Reader

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https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.08632

If I understood the paper correctly, the results are totally unimpressive. The experiment setting seems to me to be intentionally convoluted to sound impressive. Like it's just creative bullshitting.

This is how it works:

(Edited after scribu corrected me)

1. Senders make a decision by concentrating on flashing lights. They use EEG-cap to capture difference in spectral power between light flashing 17Hz and 15 Hz using the Welch's method. The choice is difference averaged over several epochs in 10-second period (must be very low paced game). Lots of signal processing and averaging to get yes/no answer between bright 17Hz and 15Hz visual signal from steady state visually evoked potentials.

2. This one bit of information was then conveyed to the Receiver using TMS using signal where 10 consecutive pulses is yes, absence of pulses is no. Thresholds are well calibrated beforehand so that yes/no can transmitted. Receivers gets TMS signal that is completely different from what Senders did.

The senders do NOT control the cursor by hand. From the paper:

> The Senders convey their decisions of "rotate" or "do not rotate" by controlling a horizontally moving cursor (Figure 8) using steady-state visually-evoked potentials (SSVEPs).

It seems that you are correct. The cursor is moved by concentrating on the lights.

Reading these papers feels like watching someone high dive into a kiddie pool[0].

Incredible amounts of preparation and equipments are needed, for a simple transfer of body to pool.

Though it’s thrilling and makes a cool headline, why not just give everyone a normal diving board and normal pool? That’s hella fun, too, but surprisingly overlooked in research (and honestly looked down upon).

[0] https://youtu.be/9y0ssJJRFS8

Nature Scientific Reports where this is published is so called mega-journal. They accept practically everything that is technically sound, even if it's not scientifically important.

They do two basic and technically sound things in this paper.

1. Detect yes/no answer from EEG-singal when user is looking light that flickers in different frequency depending on the answer.

2. User is able to detect when transcranial magnetic stimulation is used to signal his brain.

It's not the bleeding edge science but neither of these is technically trivial experiments to set from scratch. Surprising amount of work is spend just setting it up and getting everything right, and fixing all errors. Writing technical report detailing of they did would be probably interesting at least for some. It's unfortunate that they feel the need to tie it up into this brain-to-brain gimmick stuff.

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