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An article on my favorite Chinese online community "cchere", discussing how technology changes our minds, our ways to use our brain or even our brain itself. The article is written in Chinese.
科技改变大脑 （上）
科技改变大脑（下）
My abstract is as follows:
- Part 1: how our brain/mind can be changed by new technologies
- It is found Nietzsche changed his writing style after using typewritter
- Google enable us to access to vast amount information so easily that it is unnecessary for us to memorize many things. As a result, our skills of memorization is impaired.
- After more and more reading on the Web, we lose our patient to read a long article from top to bottom: we keep jump from one point to another and all we remember is a pile of small pieces of information rather the whole set of them. Consequently, our capability of reading and understanding degenerates.
- Our brain can be change due to our style of using it (Neuroplasticity)
- Part 2: how control our world by directly using our brain and how we can control our brain
- we have already technology to issue some simple command using our brainwave, which is mostly used by disabled person
- DARPA's project "Silent Talk" on using brainwaves to communicate in battlefield
- DARPA's project on repairing our brain, which can be used by soldiers in battlefield
- 2008 NSA has a report "Emerging Cognitive Neuroscience and Related Technologies"
- Will the scenarios in "Matrix" become true? Very likely.
Recently, PLX devices release a new product called Xwave, which outputs eight EEG signals about your brainwave: Delta, Theta, Low Alpha, High Alpha, Low Beta, High Beta, Low Gamma and Mid Gamma and two easy-to-interpret values: attention and meditation that are derived from the Beta and Alpha wave respectively. The main advantage of the this device is its low price ($99) and easiness to use. In addition, Xwave has a SDK such that iphone developers can implement their ideas quickly. Currently, there has been a few games using this device. One of them is to try to float a ball using your attention strength. More complex and practical games are proposed in its developer guide, including
- MindWrestle – It’s the same as arm wrestling, however it’s done with the mind.
- Wormhole Disk - The more you relax or (meditate) the disks float into these wormholes
which pop up from the bottom of the screen. The more tense you are, the disks just float there and takes longer for the disks to find their way into the wormhole.
- useTheForce - use your mind's force to throw your enemy or objects
- Yoga
- Archery/Shooting
- MusicMatch - compare your brainwave with your friend's when you are listening to the same song
- CoupleSync - compare your brainwave with your loved one when you are doing the same activity
- BrainExercise
By the nature of the EEG signals, we can not use this types of device to do activities that require accurate handling or localization, such as drive a car. However, Xwave does bring us a huge potential on a lots of futuristic games and activities. To some extents, some scenarios in sci-fi will become true.
Here are a few more interesting applications using Xwave that come to my mind:
- youLie - use your brainwave to tell whether you are lying
- your wife or your fiancee will love it!
- findMyFavorite - find your favorite picture/food/game/product by reading your mind
- you can rely on your instinct now
- Zen - do Zen medication and let Xwave tell you how good you are (similar to Yoga)
- test your brainwave when you medicate and listen to relaxing music, so that you can find the best music to bring you peace
To me, Xwave is not just an entertaining device. I think it will be also useful in my research on computer vision. Several researchers have started to investigate the mapping between images and brain activity. For example, Fei-Fei Li's group has a project on scene classification using fMRI. Kewei Tu's blog "Mind Reading" also mentioned a few research work on mapping brain activities to words/images. Here are two papers referred in his blog:
I would like to tap into this research topic when time permits me to do so.
