Comment by jawns | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jawns | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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