Very cool! This triggered another idea - our ears already can move a slight bit by its own muscles. Can't we read these muscle movements, and amplify them by controlling the servo Cat Ears in sync? Might be easier to learn to control, maybe.
Something with two electrodes behind ears (or wherever the muscles responsible for moving ears are) could be even used as a tool to train to move your (human) ears.
Blink detection at least is pretty robust when I've played with it.
Muse is more or less couple of neurosky's glued together. With multiple sensors you can at least get to know which eye blinked, extract stuff like raised eyebrows and such. But dry electrodes on the forehead will never really give any good EEG results.
There was a paper when somebody managed to get P300 working with neurosky, but they needed to average something like a 1000 trials. This is tens of minutes of looking at a flashing screen.
Mux that in with the neural input.
Not everyone can do that though. My wife can easily twitch her ears by just thinking about it, I cannot no matter how hard I try - it's just like there is no nerve link to whatever is there.
Honestly it's not some major movement and I only have 1 degree of motion properly under control - I'm sure there's more that I can't. It's not a very significant thing irl.
I'd say a bit like raising my eyebrows, but the "tension" is behind the ears.
For me the tension is pretty far back, basically halfway to the back of my head on either side, and covers a vaguely oblong patch that is about 1.5 square inches.
Then again, maybe it gets easier with other muscles as you practice and master more things - could it help overall coordination, maybe improve typing speed or balance?
Unsurprisingly, hands are very popular.
Other things like proprioception of our backs and general posture can go unnoticed even as adults. I.e. it takes careful focus and training to [re]learn how and what to move.
Such abilities are latent in all of us, differences in brain function that paralyze or confuse any part of the body are very rare.
You, too, can pull off an arched eyebrow like The Rock, do ear wiggles, crazy eye rolls, and more. Getting good at it seems to be a matter of methodical practice.
Yes, but I can practice moving my eyebrows to achieve mastery, because I know how to move them at least a little bit. With my ears, I literally cannot - no matter how hard I think about it or how much I strain, they just won't move. So how can you practice something that you cannot do at all? Just "try harder"? I feel like that's like telling someone with no legs to practice walking.
Or maybe there's a genetic component, like tongue rolling. The nerves and muscles are there, no sensation seems to be lost, they're just arranged a bit different.
Kinda cool how something trivial can go into these weird rabbit holes, anyway.
It seems to use a type of camera to measure movement in the ear.