Researcher controls colleague’s motions in first human brain-to-brain interface
washington.edu
washington.edu
Get a 'remote controlled cockroach' kit, a Star Wars Force Trainer, some wires to hook the force trainer's trigger to the cockroach kit's remote control, stick the receiver on your friend's head.
This seriously doesn't seem to have broken any new ground, only mashed together two existing technologies for a easily misinterpreted headline
I'd argue that new inventions are created by mashing existing technologies, often emerging or bleeding edge, and creating something new. Henry Ford didn't invent the combustion engine, transmission, suspension, etc, but he did mash these things together into something new. What we are seeing in the video and research is something new and pretty exciting if you take it a couple steps further. Think about replaying these signals, building a play book, etc.
ps. If you have some time to kill, I would check out this video called, "Everything Is A Remix", which talks about this idea @ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coGpmA4saEk
Cars were invented multiple times, including electric cars, before Ford showed up. Rifles were being made on assembly lines out of standard parts long before cars existed. Being a tyrannical jackass with a perfectionist streak, while perfected by Jobs, was certainly nothing new. Ford just mashed those together along with a framed picture of Hitler and it all worked.
Any time I see a comment like this, I know for a fact that someone does not understand what an assembly line is, nor why the invention of one was important.
An assembly line is a method of production where workers stand still, and the parts that they need come to them at the rate that they will be putting them together. This is vastly superior to previous modes of production because you eliminate all of the time people spend walking around trying to find the next thing that they need. Before the introduction of the assembly line, workers normally spent more time walking than assembling. After the introduction, workers spent more time assembling.
That said, the assembly line was not entirely a novel production. The closest predecessor was in the Chicago meatpacking industry where it took the form of a disassembly line - cows went in one end and standard cuts of meat came out the other. But using it for assembly of complex machinery was still a significant innovation, and Henry Ford deserves full credit for it.
It certainly was not simply applying widely known standardization techniques with interchangeable parts such as was pioneered in the rifle industry and had been predicted by Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations with an example involving pins.
Suppose you wanted to teach someone to roll a kayak. In my experience instructing the subject, perhaps a quarter of students can roll instantly once they "know how it feels". If one person can command another's body to do it, perhaps learning would be faster and more efficient.
This work is nifty. It's playful, but the applications may be vast.
If I can send involuntary motion, can I send you thoughts? Can I write as fast as I can think? Can I be forced to do something unwillingly? Time will tell.
1) See an interesting article.
2) Check the first comment to see how any interesting article can be struck down in a few lines
What do you consider breaking new ground? It was their goal to demonstrate the concept of human brain-to-brain interfacing. If it had not been done before, it seems to count as 'new'. What about the headline did you find misleading?
However, it is still genuinely cool despite that. Nowhere near a precision brain to brain interface that could be useful, but its the suggestion that one might be possible
and if people are twitchy about mobile phones radiating the brain, I doubt they will go for a TMS machine that focuses huge magnetic pulses into the brain. Pulses that are so strong the virtually unferrous bio matter still sheds electrons making your brain do unknown chemistry that makes your finger twitch slightly.
While an ever-more subjugated, time poor mass of humanity walls themselves in to ever smaller apartments in ever larger cities, stringing along their physical bodies through ever more artificial means, moving ever further from nature and sustainability, we see the rising tide of ever more immersive virtual experience: writing, phonographs, radio, television, computer games, three dimensional environments - now with depth - eye tracking, motion tracking, direct nervous system stimulation, even virtual emotion through the megacoroporate pharmacopia ("ever feel tired? hard to focus? unhappy? ask your doctor about...").
Humanity nears a fissure of potential future realities: constrain our engine of consumption, or face handing a once virtuous and verdant home planet down to succeeding generations as a biological desert demanding ever more artificial means of sustenance for an ever-smaller elite, clinging desperately to a bygone quality of life through the corporate-military force of dynastic capital.
Well, not quite so hyperbolic, but that was the gist: it'd be a shame if instead of dealing with the issues facing our planet we all just shut down and went virtual.
http://www.polymtl.ca/polystim/en/navigation/Prothesevisuell...
There had been experiments showing that visual cortex stimulation to generate imagery is possible:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1528-1157.1998....
Even still, when I program I mostly have an "image" of the program in my head. Imagine if a computer knew me well enough to translate that "image" to actual code.
This kind of stuff is a LONG ways away... but it seems like the basic concepts are being proven, and its both exciting and scary. What it means to be human could be different in 2100. If this technology is expensive, and we still have capitalism, and there's still a large class of poor. The digital divide could turn that casim into the grand canon. I'm scared that the technology is coming faster than our capability to handle it socially.
http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2011/09/22/brain-movies/
Correction: we can read arbitrary images, but so far only with cat's brain:
Assuming that a system is good enough to commercialize, there's probably some AI tech that's gaining traction too. If you could use AI to analyze a students understanding, the computer could interactively forge the lesson. The result would be faster, more accurate learning.
Learning, in my opinion being one of the biggest barriers to progress, the pace of change would be incredible!
Yes, forget about those uses. Judging from history, such a technology will more likely be used by our overlords to send us commands to obey...
...and now, I will saw my assistant in half!