Affordable device will let anyone connect their brain to a computer
vice.com
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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.
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.
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.
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).
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
(Worked briefly on brain-computer interfaces at MIT in the early 80s)
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.
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.
Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.
Wait, Microsoft, Google and they "partners" already know everything i think of.
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.
https://trekmovie.com/2007/06/07/we-have-found-spocks-braint...
What makes you think people can handle it being 4 times faster? The bottleneck will eventually be your neurotransmitters no?
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.
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:
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.
Uh, these are the same types of signals that are happening inside the brain ...