Controlling Machines With Your Thoughts?

April 03, 2009

What if you were able to make machines do things simply by thinking about the action that you want to happen? Imagine being able to adjust the air conditioning in your house without leaving your couch, simply by pondering your perception that the room is too warm for your taste, or being able to type without touching the keyboard. Or being able to order your personal Honda ASIMO robot to go into the kitchen and fetch you a nice cold bottle of Black Forest Berry Honest Tea, without even lifting a finger to press a button.

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On a more serious level, the ability to mentally control machines would have enormous benefits for people with disabilities, because it would enable an amputee to use a next-generation prosthetic arm and hand as effortlessly as his or her unimpaired limb, or allow a quadriplegic to use a powered exoskeleton to get around and perform tasks as effortlessly as a fully-abled person.
    I’m struggling to think of a downside to this one. I suppose our actual meat bodies might atrophy a bit from reduced use, especially the forearm and hand muscles needed to work keyboards and remote controls. We might even attain the level of laziness and torpor now only seen in Futurama’s Hedonism Bot.  And once everybody is using thoughts to control machines, there’s the possibility that we might cross signals and inadvertently send our next-door neighbor’s robotic lawnmower on a rampage.
    This all might sound a lot like the psychokinesis that the Soviet psychic Nina Kulagina claimed to be able to use to  manipulate inanimate objects. (You may laugh, but as this declassified U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency report details, somebody powerful in the Kremlin apparently believed in such paranormal powers, because the USSR had scores of researchers assigned to learn the secrets of the spoon-benders, in hopes that they could be used in warfare.) But what we’re actually talking about here is not magic but actual technology, something called a brain machine interface.  BMIs—which are also called brain computer interfaces, neuroprosthetics and direct neural interfaces—essentially are communication pathways that allow brain cells to send signals to external devices, the same way they do with muscles.
    The research behind BMIs dates back to the 1970s and 1980s, when scientists began trying to develop algorithms to imitate the instructions given to the body by motor cortex neurons, which control movement. (Here’s a Science Daily article on the current state of knowledge in that area.) In the early 1990s, University of Utah bioengineer Richard Normann  invented the Utah electrode array, an implant that could send signals into the brain, and then realized that it could be used as an uplink as well. In the early 2000s, Duke University neurobiologist Miguel Nicolelis and neurophysiologist John K. Chapin implanted electrodes into the brain of an owl monkey named Belle, and then transmitted Belle’s neural impulses over the Internet to a Massachusetts Institute of Technology lab six hundred miles away. When Belle earned squirts of orange juice by manipulating a computer joystick and make a cursor move on a computer screen, a robotic arm in the MIT lab moved in synchronicity to the monkey’s limb. (Here’s “Controlling Robots with the Mind,” a 2002 Scientific American article that they wrote about it.)
    More recently, a team led by University of Pittsburgh researcher Andrew Schwartz equipped two monkeys with neural implants. As this 2008 New York Times article  details, the monkeys not only learned how to control a robotic arm to reach for food, but invented new uses for the device.

On several occasions, a monkey kept its claw open on the way back, with the food stuck to one finger. At other times, a monkey moved the arm to lick the fingers clean or to push a bit of food into its mouth while ignoring a newly presented morsel.

    The animals were apparently freelancing, discovering new uses for the arm, showing “displays of embodiment that would never be seen in a virtual environment,” the researchers wrote.
“In the real world, things don’t work as expected,” said the senior author of the paper, Dr. Andrew Schwartz, a professor of neurobiology at the University of Pittsburgh. “The marshmallow sticks to your hand or the food slips, and you can’t program a computer to anticipate all of that.
“But the monkeys’ brains adjusted. They were licking the marshmallow off the prosthetic gripper, pushing food into their mouth, as if it were their own hand.”

Granted, you may not be as enthused as the monkeys are about free marshmallows, or about having electrodes implanted in your brain. But not to worry. In Japan,automaker Honda  -- with help from the government-backed Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute, and Shimadzu Corporation – has developed a non-invasive method that employs  electroencephalography and near-infrared spectroscopy, along with newly developed information extraction technology . As Honda’s corporate web site explains,

    During the human thought process, slight electrical current and blood flow change occur in the brain. The most important factor in the development of the BMI technology is the accuracy of measuring and analyzing these changes. The newly developed BMI technology uses EEG, which measures changes in electrical potential on the scalp, and NIRS, which measures changes in cerebral blood flow, with a newly developed information extraction technology which enables statistical processing of the complex information from these two types of sensors. As a result, it became possible to distinguish brain activities with high precision without any physical motion, but just human thought alone.

Check out this YouTube of a recent demonstration, in which a human subject wearing a brain activity measuring device directs Honda’s ASIMO robot by visualizing an image.

Okay, so the helmet looks a bit dorky. But give Honda scientists a few years to miniaturize the technology, and they’ll probably be able to fit it inside a hair band or a pair of eyeglass frames.
So what do you think? Do you like the idea of being able to control machines with your mind? Or are you unable to get your head around the idea? Express your opinion below.

Comments

[Astroboy]

FIRST!

[Caffeine Driven Stress Magnet]

I think this is a tremendous development for disabled people.

[Sandman]

I'm wondering how practical this technology would be in the real world. What's to keep your brain signals from interfering with somebody else's machine, or vice-versa? We could end up with a lot of garage doors going up and down all the time.

[Mothra]

My thoughts are so random that I would be really worried that I'd need special training to control machines. Otherwise I could wreak havoc by thinking things at the wrong time!

[Uri Geller]

I can already control machines with my thoughts. So there!

[Madame Blavatsky]

Big deal--so can I.

[Natural Man]

I think that if people get carried away with controlling machines and robots with their minds, they'll forget about what they should be training their minds for, which is spiritual development through meditation and etc.

[Jerome]

If I could control a robot with my brain, I would do a lot of stuff I can't do now, like lift heavy objects. I might also have the robot walk my dog. It would be a lot easier if the robot did it.

[Mechagodzilla]

Hmmm. Why don't you get a robot dog instead?

[Mr. Roboto]

Now I won't have to search under the couch cushions for the remote control to the TV.

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[kelly neuendorf.]

arn't they trying to do this with the next play station or some thing?