Twofer of Machine/Brain Interfaces

The ever quickening pace of technology is leading to more and more good news! The first bit is a great story from New Scientist.

cyborg illustration by Renegade Zen

A man named Matt Nagle controls a computer cursor by ‘thinking’ about it much like you would ‘think’ about moving your arm, despite being totally paralyzed. A brain implant the size of a pill with 96 electrodes allows the man to control the computer or a robotic arm through a system developed by the company Cyberkinetics.

The second bit of good neuroscience news comes from Wired magazine, and is all about a wild new DARPA project called the “cortically coupled computer vision system” or C3 Vision. The system uses an electrode cap to pick up the ‘aha!’ signal that your brain generates when it sees something interesting. As images flicker past the user, the ones that generate the ‘aha!’ signal are saved for later inspection by the user.

There are many commercial applications in military and law enforcement/security sectors, but one could imagine all sorts of other novel uses for the technology such as culling good designs from bad ones.

Readers of TAG will remember the story last month about Japan’s bionic hand

About Benny Powers

Benny is a 20 year old student of the arts and sciences. He will be attending Trent University for the 2006-2007 semester. An experienced percussionist, Benny specializes in hand percussion such as djembe, doumbek and udu drums. Recently he has joined the Toronto samba band <a href="http://www.sambaelegua.com">Samba Elegua</a>, playing the surdo. He also does <a href="http://bennyp.wordpress.com">spoken word poetry</a>, and performs at open mic nights in Toronto in the summer time.

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