Mind-goggling
Oct 29th 2011 | from the print edition
IF YOU think the art of mind-reading is a conjuring trick, think
again. Over the past few years, the ability to connect first monkeys
and then men to machines in ways that allow brain signals to tell those
machines what to do has improved by leaps and bounds. In the latest
demonstration of this, just published in the
Public Library of Science,
Bin He and his colleagues at the University of Minnesota report that
their volunteers can successfully fly a helicopter (admittedly a
virtual one, on a computer screen) through a three-dimensional digital
sky, merely by thinking about it. Signals from electrodes taped to the
scalp of such pilots provide enough information for a computer to work
out exactly what the pilot wants to do.
That is interesting and useful.
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