Transmitting binary information from one person’s brain to another | Hacker News Reader

Transmitting binary information from one person’s brain to another

newsweek.com

100 pointsholasnic42 comments

This -- or future developments in the area -- is of greatest possible interest to people who are profoundly disabled and may be incapable of communicating but remain at some level of capability/consciousness. Even a lossy, slow method of getting information in/out of them lets them participate in their own medical care (e.g. "Do you perceive pain?" "Yyyy" "I'm sorry about that. I'll adjust your medication.") and continue interacting with their loved ones.

A quick search for "locked-in syndrome" turns up this citation:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16186044

"It has been shown that more than half of the time it is the family and not the physician who first realized that the patient was aware. Distressingly, recent studies reported that the diagnosis of LIS on average takes over 2.5 months. In some cases it took 4-6 years before aware and sensitive patients, locked in an immobile body, were recognized as being conscious."

Based on the Glasgow Coma Scale, people with Locked-In Syndrome _are also in comas, technically_. Figuring it out seems remarkably hard, and is almost certainly wildly under-detected. I'd be interested to see if we are able to use tools like this to discover whether our assumptions about comatose states are at all accurate.

Also, of course, the obvious Inception-oriented ideas would be good to test out as well.

You know, I've always wondered why, in edge cases like this, it's not standard to run the patients through fMRI to detect whether or not the patient is actually conscious before just consigning them to a bed with no interaction. Or am I mistaken, and this is routinely done?

It's not that simple, at all. From my Pinboard archives (what would I do without Pinboard?):

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/12/15/magazine/what-anesthesi...

For every 1,000 people who undergo general anesthesia, there will be one or two who are not as unconscious as they seem — people who remember their doctors talking, and who are aware of the surgeon’s knife, even while their bodies remain catatonic and passive. For the unlucky 0.13 percent for whom anesthesia goes awry, there’s not really a good preventive. That’s because successful anesthetization requires complete unconsciousness, and consciousness isn’t something we can measure.

Here we have a much more common problem than locked-in syndrome, a problem which anesthesiologists have been studying since before their job had a name, but we can't even solve that because we don't even have a decent working definition of what we mean by "consciousness" in these contexts, let alone what we can measure to determine someone's "consciousness". It's an active field of research, which is a fine thing to remember whenever we start getting too high on science fiction:

http://www.xkcd.com/1345/

Slightly off topic, but have you seen the movie The Diving Bell and the Butterfly? It's about a man with locked-in syndrome. Only his left eye isn't paralysed and he writes a book by blinking the alphabet one letter at a time... If your glass if half full it's life affirming, if not it's harrowing. Either way it's worth watching.

> of greatest possible interest to people who are profoundly disabled and may be incapable of communicating but remain at some level of capability/consciousness

I understand what you're saying, but I think it's just as applicable to anyone else. Clear communication through writing is tough so when we can avoid it we attempt to verbally communicate our ideas but sometimes even that isn't enough. Now imagine being able to share your feelings with someone instead. You have an idea for an app and you know in your head what the look and feel is like, but you can't really describe it or put it onto paper. Transfer your thoughts to another person and I imagine this process would be much easier.

Or imagine thinking through tasks instead of performing them physically. Say I have a few vim windows open and my code isn't working. I see a few potential spots where I'll want to log some data. Even if you're a keyboard shortcut guru in vim or any other editor, you still have to navigate to each of those lines and add the line of code. If my brain were hooked up to my computer, I could simply think or look at those few sections and suddenly my code is there. Just thinking about this gets me excited about how much more productive I could be as a developer.

Or maybe I'm just crazy :)

I suspect that if you can't describe the design then it is not a fully formed idea. Communication often serves as a forcing function. You fill in all the fuzzy areas your mind was glossing over. Transmitting the feeling would help the other person understand the context, but all the little decisions that happen when making something "real" would still need to be made by someone.

Here's the direct link to the PLOS One journal article: http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone...

EDIT: A better summary is available below from jawns.

The Newsweek headline is pretty misleading, although the study lends itself to being misread.

It looks as though the "emitter" of information (the person who begins the communication) used two different motor movements -- one that represents a 1 and the other that represents a 0 -- to communicate a stream of binary information. An EEG picked up those motor-based signals from the subject's brain.

Then that binary information was sent to another location, where transcranial magnetic stimulation was used on the "receivers," who sensed the 1s as visual stimuli and the 0s as no visual stimuli. After each bit was communicated, they told the researchers whether they saw any visual stimuli.

In other words, the "emitter" didn't just think of a word and that word somehow magically popped into the heads of the receivers. We're a loooooong way off from that.

In fact, if I'm understanding this correctly, the entire gimmick about words like "hola" and "ciao" being transmitted is misleading, or at least irrelevant in terms of what was actually achieved.

Really, the best way to sum this up is:

Binary information is transmitted with significant accuracy using non-invasive neural sensors (for detection) and non-invasive neural stimuli (for reception).

And indeed, I have a sneaking suspicion that neither the accurate detection of binary signals using EEG nor the accurate communication of binary signals using TMS is particularly groundbreaking ... in which case, the only thing novel about this study is that the researchers decided to pair the two.

EDIT: Actually, the paper seems to be implying that accurate communication of binary signals in a computer-to-brain interface is indeed groundbreaking (From the introduction: "the realization of non-invasive CBI in humans remains elusive") but if that were so, one would think that the EEG component of the study introduces needlessly complexity; the researchers could just as easily begin with a predefined stream of 1s and 0s, rather than trying to extract them from someone else's brain.

>In fact, if I'm understanding this correctly, the entire gimmick about words like "hola" and "ciao" being transmitted is misleading, or at least irrelevant in terms of what was actually achieved.

You're absolutely right; this study is neither novel nor groundbreaking.

On the sending side, forget 90%, success rates of 99% are easy to achieve with some types of BCI systems such as SSVEP or P300. As for the information detected, you might have heard of the P300 speller[1] which demonstrated an easy way to accurately spell out words using a BCI headset.

On the receiving side we see why they opted for binary communication. The 'telepathy' was nothing more than a flash of light being visible for a value of '1', achieved by blasting a region of the brain associated with vision with magnetic fields about as strong as an MRI. That sounds cool, but it is a technique that has been in use for over a decade[2].

So tl;dr, what these researchers have achieved is essentially stringing together two or three decades-old technologies in a not terribly original way.

[1]: http://www.cortechsolutions.com/Applications/Brain-Computer-... [2]: http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/125/3/479.long

It's also ridiculous—outright intellectual fraud, that they've located the subjects in different cities, as if the internet connection would make it more of a breakthrough.

I have a sneaking suspicion that neither the accurate detection of binary signals using EEG nor the accurate communication of binary signals using TMS is particularly groundbreaking... in which case, the only thing novel about this study is that the researchers decided to pair the two.

Indeed: to put it charitably, the whole thing is a farce. The EEG part is nothing new (note it's an off-the shelf component from one of their sponsors/employers); and neither are electrically-induced phosphenes [1] which, by the way, in this case (non-invasive TMS) consist of little more than single, barely perceptible, indistinct flashes induced every time the device is turned on, one for each 'bit' --about the crudest possible way to 'send' information directly into a brain, if you ask me.

But then, once you read their conflict of interest statement, all that ridiculous overselling suddenly makes much more sense.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphene

An old metaphor: conventional brain-to-brain communication is literally serialization. The thought is serialized as a sequence of letters or sounds, as writing or talking, and deserialized by the reader/listener. As with data structures and JSON/XML, the structures and serial representation might be similar or utterly different. But this mapping is taken care of at each end, so that people can communicate with a common tongue or lingua franca, even when their own internal representations differ greatly from it, and from each other.

My takehome is that without an intermediate serial representation (and mapping to/from), direct brain-to-brain communication will have to tackle mapping between these differences in internal representation in some other way (assuming such differences exist, which I believe they do).

>> In other words, the "emitter" didn't just think of a word and that word somehow magically popped into the heads of the receivers. We're a loooooong way off from that.

No we're not, LOL. We already have it - it's called spoken language.

I am glad, quite relieved even, that it turns out that this is just coarse muscle input --> flashing lights.

Like, that's not nearly as horriterrifying. That all said, my point higher in this thread stands.

Thanks -- this is the only relevant thread in this discussion.

Nope. Nope nope nope nope nope nope nope.

Not okay. Direct brain interfaces, as cool as they are, make me super-nervous if I'm hooked up to anything not 100% in my control. We can't even keep Windows XP boxes from getting rooted--what chance does a person have?

What you think of as "you" is just the "press secretary" making up stories after the fact for a cabal of subconscious agents who are opaque to introspection and are making decisions on your behalf. "You" are already not in control. Enjoy the ride.

I upvoted you to try to bring you out of the gray because I think you're making a useful point (though I don't think your tone is effective, which is probably why you got downvoted).

Write access to minds is, uh, pretty serious. And we generally suck at writing secure software. So yeah, this is scary. As much as I love the idea of this tech, and want to live in a world where it's ubiquitous and safe and we don't need screens or keyboards etc., I'm not going to be beta testing any of this stuff.

i have write access to your mind write now! not so bad, is it?

once you learn not to put extreme trust into anything you think, it won't feel so bothersome. it'll probably help us trust each other more.

You have extremely limited write access to my mind - text over the internet is not a particular high-bandwidth or invasive channel. Short of some kind of neurolinguistic programming (which AFAIK isn't really a thing), the worst anyone can do is offend me.

Direct electric stimulation is a pretty different beast. I am normally all for deconstructing arbitrary distinctions, but I don't think this one is arbitrary. There is a qualitative difference between reading text and having my brain internals directly manipulated by electrical impulses.

It is not important that you think of pink elephants right now. Or, even, if you can, then, remember a time when you might have thought of a pink elephant? And how the pink elephant made you feel, and then remember a future where you've been thinking about pink elephants for some time. Kind of amazing isn't it, how you came to think of a pink elephant that time? It's kind of warm, fuzzy, comforting pink feeling, just washing pink warmness all over your body and bathing you in the comforting embrace when you think of a pink elephant.

Yes, you can make me think about pink elephants (though I'm not convinced you can make me associate them with a warm fuzzy feeling). But you can't change my values or my memories by writing me a paragraph like that. You could if you kidnapped and brainwashed me, but that's also something I plan to avoid. It is precisely because my mind is vulnerable and malleable that I want to limit other people's write access to it.

My house has windows, and you can see in, and you can put up a poster outside my window and I might see and read it and think about something. That's not the same as letting you walk into my house and touch me (or remote control my toilets or whatever).

It was worth a try! :-)

All joking aside, the mention of NLP above reminded me of some stuff I'd read a while back. I'm fairly skeptical of NLP, but I can see how some of those techniques might have a certain sort of value.

they work really well on people who believe they work. they don't work at all on people who dismiss them.

funny, that.

try that in Sumerian. May be more effective.

This is why I consider Dollhouse the single most terrifying piece of science fiction in recent memory.

http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/blit.htm

From 26 years ago.

You're not 100% in control of yourself, so I don't think 100% control of anything is possible.

i can't wait for the first telepathic social network!

i had a psychotic break in 2012 and believed that i was on such a thing - like, i thought it already existed and i was given beta access. i wasn't sure how else to explain it. i could 'talk' with other people just by thinking about them, or set them up for conversations with each other. it was pretty cool.

"Finally, we anticipate that computers in the not-so-distant future will interact directly with the human brain in a fluent manner, supporting both computer- and brain-to-brain communication routinely."

Pretty interesting, history shows that tech gets cheaper and easier over time. If this is also the case here this could change communication as we know it.

By the way, given Newsweeks recent history with the bitcoin Satoshi Nakamoto fiasco maybe just link the original source? It seems to be freely available [1].

http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone...

I wonder what the implications of a direct brain-to-computer interface, and through that, the internet, are if this interface is left on while you sleep. Would your unconscious mind wander out into the internet? What would it do there?

While people futz with their text messages, their facebook, their google, it is telepathy - the ultimate means of knowledge transfer and communication that we seek.

If/when wireless telepathy becomes a feasible technique it would be a breakthrough of greater significance than the internet

i understand the greater point of this, but its funny to me to think that we already have api's for this (sight, sound, mainly) and these guys just forgot to read the docs

Theses API are broken on some of us.

You just transmitted your words into my brain!

If something this sexy only made it into PLoS One, either it can't be that good or the authors have some ideological commitment to PLoS One's publishing values.

Step 1: Include the brain wave scanner in future Oculus VR devices.

Step 2: Use virtual reality as the interface for brain-to-computer, brain-to-internet, and brain-to-brain communication.

Step 3: Considering the acquisition of Oculus by Facebook, make these types of communication available on Facebook.

By the way, you will get a free Oculus device if you allow it to handle internet-to-brain communication: "Indirect" advertising (through text, video etc.) is a thing of the past. Long live "direct" advertising -- projected right into the brain.

This article is unreadable on mobile. Anyone getting it working?

Sure, if you define "words" as a binary "did you see lights?" question.

See jawns comment for what this study was actually about; certainly not the transmission of actual words. Deceptive headline and article.

EDIT: After reading the linked study, I was too harsh; they did actually transmit the words (with a 2-11% error rate) via this binary "lights" mechanism, so you could use such a mechanism to communicate in Morse code. Just not for the sort of subliminal communication inferred in the article.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com