I admit I live under a rock. Maybe this might explain why. But stop me if you’ve heard this one.
You can buy one of these for $65. Go ahead, watch as much as you like! It’s real–I can’t make it go away.
2012 was a big year for brain-computer-interface. I thought you should know that you can buy yourself an EEG headband (also about $65), download this API* (I really LOVE the name), and write your own brain-reading software applications probably more easily than you can access the spell-check dictionary on your personal laptop.
I would suggest you do this, before someone else does. I mean, you knew about this already, right?
Here’s some other fun old research you probably already know about too. Scientists can control your moral character with magnets!
http://news.mit.edu/2010/moral-control-0330
That’s the computer-brain interface, I guess. You might want to get one of these, so that you can cognitively disable the people around you whenever they look like they might criticize your computer programs:
Great instructional video on TMS
Scientists have found that they can use this technology to make people playing a video game turn right when they fully intend to turn left.* I was going to a install a few along my commute, to steer people away from turning left at congested intersections.
I guess I could skip all that and just use the satellite system somehow. The video says TMS can be pretty painful, but so can sitting in traffic while you learn how to make a left turn be!
I admit, living under a rock as I do, I am so often frustrated by the lack of ways to control my computer. Think of how the world could be improved, if only I could play video games hands-free. And clearly there’s no downside.
I also have trouble knowing what I’m thinking, so I’m glad researchers at Berkeley** have been working on reading and generating thoughts via computers. Or is it just reading? Is reading good and generating bad or something? Who cares? I didn’t read anything about any of that. Anyway, they have a big dictionary of thoughts-in-the-form-of-radio-signals.
I wonder if they’ve bombarded any volunteers with computer-generated frequencies of this kind? What would that be like? Would you would suddenly drop in intelligence? Would your thought vocabulary shrink to 40-50 recurring concepts of disgusting shallowness? Although you weren’t a visual thinker previously, would you find your thoughts limited to those you could picture, and perhaps even wonder if your brain had been swapped with that of an animal, because you could not execute any higher-level thinking, no matter how hard you tried?
Would you find that what used to be a thought now appeared as picture of a word in black text on a white background? Or that you could never think of more than a single word? Would it be the case that perhaps just because of poor aim, other parts of your brain that scientists have little or no understanding of would be ‘hijacked,’ making it difficult to move your body? Would your emotional palette would be reduced to 7 simple colors, to which you would add ’embarrassment’?
And not mean yours?
Would each of these colors would be so cheap, garish, and obvious that they would actually be perceived as physical pain for a long time before you were able to ascertain what they were supposed to be? Pass the Mountain Dew.
I said, pass the frickin’ Mountain Dew right now. I want to play video games.
Just speculating.
It’s the ultimate LAN party!
Seems incredibly useful. And totally safe! I can’t think of any government in the world that would be interested funding research into such a technology though. Oh well.
Do me a favor, would you, and figure out how this stuff works, so we can figure out how to make it not work? I’m just trying to catch up here.
*<link broken oh nooo!>