[ExI] WP: Joel Garreau on neurotoys

PJ Manney pjmanney at gmail.com
Tue Apr 28 20:18:05 UTC 2009


Why do people on these lists argue endlessly about things they neither
fully understand, nor will ever change their opponents' minds, when we
can be filling our holiday wish-lists with things like this?

PJ

Video:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/video/2009/04/22/VI2009042203236.html?sid=ST2009042204139
(If you want to understand why MSM doesn't get how fast things are
changing, watch his editors' reactions... LOL!)

Print:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/22/AR2009042204036_pf.html

Brain Wave of The Future
What If You Could Move Objects With Your Mind? Well, That Time Has Come.

By Joel Garreau
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, April 23, 2009

You slip the wireless headset on. It looks like something a
telemarketer would wear, except the earpieces are actually sensors,
and what looks like a microphone is a brain wave detector. You place
its tip against your forehead, above your left eyebrow.

A few feet away is a ping-pong ball in a clear tube called the Force
Trainer. The idea is to use your thoughts alone, as recognized by the
wand on your forehead, to lift the ball. Your brain's electrical
activity is translated into a signal understood by a little computer
that controls a fan that blows the ball up the tube. Levitates it. As
if by magic. It's mind over matter.

All you have to do is concentrate. On anything, it doesn't matter. The
harder you concentrate, the higher the ball goes. A musician says he
played a song in his head and focused on a particular chord change. A
former high school tennis star focused on his 120-mph serve. One woman
brought the image of a candle flame to mind. The ball rose.

Concentrate. Concentrate.

A sound erupts -- first a groan, then a woooo, WOOOO -- like a Halloween ghost.

The ball spins, slowly at first, then faster.

Concentrate, concentrate.

And then the ball rises inside the tube. Up it lifts, two inches, four
inches -- a foot!

You giggle and your concentration is broken; the ghostly sound fades
and the ball drops back into its nest with a gurgle.

You have just controlled a physical object with your mind.

Competing mind-over-matter toys from Mattel and Uncle Milton
Industries are coming this fall to a store near you. They are the
first "brain-computer interfaces" to enter the consumer mainstream.

Toys, but so much more. They embody a dream of the ages: controlling
the world with your thoughts. Telekinesis. The stuff of the gods.

* * *

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.



-- Arthur C. Clarke

* * *

The question everyone has about these gizmos is whether they are
parlor tricks like Magic 8 Balls or Ouija boards. Even Geoff Walker, a
senior vice president at Mattel, acknowledges that users "spend the
first 20 minutes stunned that it actually works."

Evidence in favor of them being for real is that some people are worse
than others at controlling them -- certainly not a marketing feature.

Lawyers and other multitaskers, for example, tend to have a terrible
time focusing their brain waves, says Johnny Liu of NeuroSky, the
creator of the mind-over-matter headset. But there are those to whom
controlling the device comes effortlessly and instantly, as if
single-mindedness is the person's natural default position. Copy
editors and IT jockeys on whom we tested this, you know who you are.

What happens when millions of youngsters in a notoriously ADHD
generation start getting programmed by these new toys? What happens
when they start being rewarded for very long periods of intense
concentration? Nobody in the toy industry seems to know.

But it sure looks like parents are about to find out.

The Monkey's Mind

Now let's get serious with these toys, with the idea of telekinesis. A
lot of scientists are. Nine years ago, they created the world's first
telekinetic monkey. That would be Belle, a cute little owl monkey in
the lab of Miguel Nicolelis at Duke University. She was the first to
actually control tangible objects, long distance, with her thoughts.

How do you make a monkey telekinetic?

First you get her way into a computer game. She knows that if a light
suddenly shines on her screen and she moves her joystick left or right
to hit it, she gets a drop of juice.

Then the researchers drill a hole in her head. They take a device the
size of a baby aspirin, out of which come many superfine wires, and
lower it into Belle's motor cortex -- the portion of the brain that
plans muscle movement. The object is to line up each wire with an
individual neuron to detect its firing.

Then comes the big moment in telekinesis.

When Belle resumes her game, the scientists put the signal from her
brain on the Internet and pipe it 600 miles north to a robotic arm at
MIT. Sure enough, it starts dancing like a ballerina in exactly the
same fashion as Belle's arm, "choreographed by the electrical impulses
sparking in Belle's mind," her researchers report.

"Amid the loud celebration that erupted in Durham, N.C., and
Cambridge, we could not help thinking that this was only the beginning
of a promising journey," Nicolelis wrote in Scientific American.

Indeed, work is advancing rapidly. Four profoundly paralyzed humans
equipped with a "BrainGate" implant created by the biotech firm
Cyberkinetics have demonstrated their ability, with just their
thoughts, to check and send e-mail; turn televisions, lights and
appliances on and off; and control a wheelchair. Monkeys equipped with
brain-controlled artificial arms have learned how to guide food to
their mouths. A monkey in Nicolelis's lab recently controlled a
humanoid robot in Japan.

But the most spectacular work has centered on neural control of
mechanical arms, hands and legs. The goal of a program funded by the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is to soon produce
intelligent artificial limbs controlled by your nervous system that
will allow you to pitch a fastball, thread a needle or play a piano as
well as you did before your loss.

"You have to dream big," says Col. Geoffrey Ling, a neurologist and
program manager. "If you don't dream that you're going to the moon,
you won't go to the moon."

'Replace Ball With Kitten'

It's not unusual for new technologies to first enter popular
consciousness as toys.

In the 1st century, Heron of Alexandria invented the aeolipile: a
metal ball with curved nozzles sticking out of it, perched on stilts.
With water in it, and flame beneath it, the resultant steam would make
it spin, whiz, whiz, whiz. Such fun. Nobody understood they were
looking at a steam engine. Hence, the Industrial Revolution didn't
start for another 1700 years.

In 1267 Roger Bacon wrote about "a child's toy of sound and fire and
explosion made in various parts of the world with powder of saltpeter,
sulfur and charcoal of hazelwood." That description of firecrackers is
one of the earliest European references to gunpowder.

Toys make sense as early adoptions of a new technology. Parents will
pay to make their children smile.

The generation raised on telekinetic X-Men, from Professor Xavier to
Jean Grey to Magneto, already is buzzing all over the Web about the
advance videos of these mind-over-matter toys, as they think of
further possibilities.

In a Gizmodo chat, "inseptiv" writes, "I'm all for modding the crap
out of this to use my brain waves to trigger custom things around the
house. 'Let me concentrate . . . and the coffee will be ready in 5
minutes.' "

"Silly scientists," writes "im2fools." "For this to be commercially
succesful, you have to tie it into a tv remote, and market it to couch
potatoes. 'Push' a button? Like I have that kind of energy!"

On Engadget, "absinthe party" suggests: "Replace ball with kitten."

"i wonder what would happen if you watch porn with this on?" asks
"godwhacker" on Gizmodo.

"I want one!" says "Mike." "Not really, nothing says, 'Lives with his
mom,' more than acting like you have, 'the force.' "

But it is "Skyfloating" on Abovetopsecret who takes the long view.

" 'Those were the beginnings' . . . they will say in a few hundred years."

The First Generation

As a mind-reading location, your forehead has only one significant advantage.

"It's a horrible place to get signals. But that's the only place most
people do not have hair," says Stanley Yang, chief executive of
NeuroSky. "Hair is not conductive."

NeuroSky is in the forefront of turning brain-computer interfaces into
cheap, ubiquitous consumer items. It's selling brain-reading hardware
and software headsets to all comers -- including Christmas competitors
like Mattel's $80 Mindflex and Uncle Milton's $130 Force Trainer, both
of which involve levitating a ping-pong-like ball. NeuroSky has its
sights set on providing brain-wave sensors for the automotive,
health-care and education industries.

The prospect for mind controlling matter dates to 1875, when Richard
Caton discovered that you could peer into the workings of the brain by
detecting its electrical impulses. In 1929 came the first
electroencephalograph -- the EEG machine -- that became the staple of
science-fiction movies. All those wires and sticky pads festooning
bare skulls.

But hospital EEG machines are expensive, enormous and not good at fine
control; plus you have to smear conductive goop on your head -- not a
great selling point. Thus, NeuroSky's adaptation is no small thing.
They get a single dry sensor to read your bare forehead, no goop, no
holes drilled through the skull. They get the device to focus on the
correct signals from that extremely noisy brain area, filtering out
everything else -- that's their big trick. "It's like being at a
crowded party, and picking out one quiet conversation," says Liu. Then
they make it small, light and cheap, and deliver it to market.

"The sensors you are seeing today are first generation," says Yang.
"You have to wear it. The second generation can sense your brain waves
and other bio-signals from a distance. Like sensors in your car seats
that can go through clothes without touching you. Embed the sensor in
the seat belt. In the steering wheel. Or embed a sensor in the
headrest."

Yang wants the car to know if you are falling asleep. Or drunk. Or
wishing the air conditioning would go on, or the music would play more
softly. He is talking with the Japanese telephone company NTT DoCoMo
about cellphones. Its brain lab has looked at over 300
mind-over-matter products, he says.

Where we go from there is limited only by imagination:
brain-controlled television couch-potato remote controls,
brain-controlled video games, brain-controlled race cars,
brain-controlled spouses. No, dream on, the last is not on the
horizon.

The next announcement NeuroSky expects from a business partner is one
that it won't talk about much. But the company expects it later this
year.

It will be able to fly.

Around the room.

Controlled by your brain.

* * *

Yoda: Luminous beings are we . . . [Yoda pinches Luke's shoulder] . .
. not this crude matter. You must feel the Force around you.
[Gesturing] Here, between you . . . me . . . the tree . . . the rock .
. . everywhere! Yes, even between the land and the ship.

Luke: [Discouraged] You want the impossible.

[Quietly Yoda turns toward the sunken X-wing fighter. With his eyes
closed and his head bowed he raises his arm and points at the ship.
Soon the fighter rises above the water and moves forward as Artoo
beeps in terror and scoots away. The entire X-wing moves majestically,
surely, toward the shore. Yoda, perched on a tree root, guides the
fighter carefully down toward the beach. Luke stares in astonishment
as the fighter settles gently onto the shore. He walks toward Yoda.]

Luke: I don't . . . I don't believe it.

Yoda: That is why you fail.


-- "The Empire Strikes Back" * * *

So where does this leave us right now?

Steve Koenig, director of industry analysis at the Consumer
Electronics Association, has little doubt about the high-end,
professional possibilities of the mind-over-matter market. He sees the
opportunities for military robot wrangling, say, or mastering space or
undersea exploration, or allowing the profoundly ill or disabled to
control their surroundings.

He is, however, a skeptic about how eagerly we will embrace the toys.
"Anybody having to wear anything is challenged in a lot of ways.
That's why you don't see everybody you know having a little Bluetooth
earpiece in their ear."

As for the TV remote control, Koenig says: "If, to control things, you
have to concentrate, at what point is it much easier to just grab the
knob and turn the volume down?"

Reyne Rice, the toy trends specialist for the Toy Industry
Association, is more optimistic:

"What's been happening in the last couple of years is a real interest
in mental gymnastics, mind games and logic solving. Not only for kids
but adults" including boomers interested in staving off Alzheimer's.
To Rice, mind-over-matter technology is "the next logical step."

She sees great potential for games. Imagine a "CSI"-like law-and-order
game that could use a lie detector. Or multi-player games. "Whoever
has the strongest mind control can take over the thing on the screen,"
she says. She also wonders what happens when user-generated content
kicks in. When players start creating their own applications to be
controlled by mind-over-matter headsets.

Mattel is aiming Mindflex at 8-to-12-year-olds, both girls and boys,
although "it seems like a product that can inspire a 'wow' from 8 to
82," says Walker, the senior vice president. Uncle Milton is aiming
the Force Trainer, which has a "Star Wars" theme, at those adults who
still can't get too much Luke Skywalker in their lives, and then at
boys 6 to 11.

But the industry considers $80 or $130 pricey for a little kid's toy
-- especially in this year's economy. Rice sees the market as being
"older kids, college students and adults" who are willing to pay much
more.

And indeed, talk to spring-break college kids, suggesting these
first-generation ping-pong ball games might be a tad primitive, and
you get major push-back. "You've been doing this stuff for too long,"
says one. "This is going to be the biggest thing to hit colleges since
the Frisbee."

We're talking beer-pong plus superpowers, here.



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