7 ms·
Brain-sensing technology allows typing at 12 words per minute
- redirectleft 10y agoErr.. isn't monkeys transcribing a New York Times article even more amazing?
- creshal 10y agoAmazing maybe, but not really news. Monkeys could pilot the Mercury capsule, too. With several months of intense training, you can make them do a lot of tasks involving pattern recognition. Reliable brain-sensing, on the other hand, is news.
- daveguy 10y agoAhem. They didn't pilot the capsule. They were passengers.
- creshal 10y agoThank you for your opinion, Chuck.
- creshal 10y agoSince people don't seem to get the reference: "Mercury astronauts are passengers, not pilots" was a prejudice against the budding manned space program, spread by among others Chuck Yeager. It seemed to hurt their ego that even a monkey could do it (…after months of training, which included electroshock therapy).
- astrodust 10y agoI don't know. I saw a pretty compelling documentary about the space capabilities of monkeys: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Chimps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Chimps
- melling 10y agoNo. "Look at me, I can type 100 wpm... Why would anyone ever want to do this?" Why does the value always need to be explained? Of course the value is explained in the article, but you just read the headline?
- visarga 10y ago... by the power of mind alone!
- marvy 10y agoAs someone else in the comments pointed out, they didn't transcribe it by reading it. The right letter to type was lit up on the screen. (The article mentions this, but doesn't emphasize it too well.)
- justAlittleCom 10y agoHow does this compare to eyes tracking? 90% of the hyper fancy things using brain activity get pwned by simple eye tracking. Or are not usable in real life due to the equipment needed.
- creshal 10y agoEven if eye tracking is better (and IIRC it is), this is still valuable for patients that don't have any other option left (like Stephen Hawking soon).
- bonoboTP 10y agoThis still relies on visual feedback (you need to move a cursor on a screen). It would be better if you just had to think the letter itself, not drive a cursor over it.
- riskable 10y agoNot much of a difference, actually. Once you've got your brain trained to select the letters by location you can remove the eye tracking part and just use abstract thought. "I'm thinking of a letter... On the far left of the keyboard, middle row."
- bonoboTP 10y agoI think there's not enough bandwidth for such information density. These usually work with 2D directional commands, you're driving the cursor up/down/left/right. You're not thinking of "letter E", but look at the screen and think of the direction where the cursor has to move from its current location to drift to E.
- Retric 10y agoYou can use auditory feedback instead of visual feedback to drive the system. Even if you are down to say 2 words per minute that's vastly better than zero.
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- visarga 10y agoOn the other hand, it shows the primitive state of brain computer interfaces, that they are implanting a few electrodes in a region of the brain related to the hands, in order to move a mouse cursor. We're decades away from thinking to computers. What is the state of the art in brain interfaces?
- coldtea 10y ago>We're decades away from thinking to computers. Considered most governments and corporations, the more decades, the better...
- hx87 10y agoIf the steady erosion of privacy is combined with a steady loss of government arresting powers (i.e. coercion through violence) and the steady decline of social conservatism (i.e. coercion through blackmail and hypocrisy), I'm surprisingly okay with that.
- mamon 10y agoGovernment powers can only go up, never down. One possible exception is when government is in total decay, but that's only temporary state before it gets replaced by other strong government (through revolution or external conquest)
- hx87 10y agoGovernment /reach/ tends to go up, but government /repressiveness/ tends to go down. The trend is towards a state that is everyone but coerces little.
- pmoriarty 10y ago"Government powers can only go up, never down." That's not really true. There were significant curtailments of US government power after scandals like Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, the revelations of MK ULTRA, and all the spying that was done on journalists, civil rights leaders, etc. Of course, now there's been a backlash in the other direction, and it will probably get a lot worse before it will get better. But history has shown that it can get better. Also, see the history of the Stasi in East Germany and Stalin in the USSR.
- M_Grey 10y agoFor a bit of context, Stephen Hawking can only manage about 1 WPM last I read about him; I'm sure everyone here could appreciate a twelvefold increase in their ability to express themselves, even if the end result wasn't speedy.
- ktRolster 10y agoYeah, win for Stephen Hawking. Hopefully it gets even better.
- M_Grey 10y agoDefinitely. As bad as it would be to struggle with expressing a single word, that must be even more agonizing if you're a genius in high demand. I also wonder if something like this could be adapted to test for locked-in syndrome?
- WhitneyLand 10y agoInstead of moving a mouse, how much harder would it be to just try to learn a thought pattern for each letter? Or better, learn 50 "commands" which could then be assigned to anything be it letters, tasks, phrases, etc.
- DarkLinkXXXX 10y agoAs long as one of those commands is a compose key, I'd be fine with it.
- marvy 10y agoThat's what I was wondering.
- aoverton07 10y agoIINM I think the limitation is in the ability to read such small signal changes. Considering all the noise (especially with topical sensors) and dealing with microvolts, it can be trivial to distinguish an eye blink where you're suddenly contracting muscles close to the brain. As opposed to distinguishing the thought pattern between thinking about a "dog" vs a "cat"
- ChuckMcM 10y agoI am not sure what is more surprising, that you can get 12WPM by simply using your brain, or that you can train monkeys to transcribe the New York Times or hamlet.
- kirykl 10y agoHow soon until we can remove the monkey from its brain and leave the training. This is what the alien robot swarms that arrive at Earth will be after, cheap organic computers
- samstave 10y agoHmm, well what about all the care that an organic computer would need: food, some level of comfort grooming heat etc... Unless they make gooey pods like in the matrix
- s_kilk 10y agoPresuming that organic computers are special in some way that would justify an inter-stellar war of conquest to acquire them, the care and feeding can't be all that expensive. Perhaps a jar of nutrient-rich slurry, housing five or six brains each, and a monthly cleaning of the probes?
- samstave 10y agoWe will never be harvested (as a stand alone species) for any of our parts by an inter-stellar faring alien race -- if they can make it here via space vehicles, then they can surely create bio-computers in some lab without the deficiencies of the human body.... Unless, for some odd reason our DNA is special such that the way our brains/neurons work would be some benefit. At that point though, they would only need to snatch up a few of us and reverse engineer our DNA/genome to do what was stated in step one.... That would be a good topic for /r/writingprompts.
- djoshea 10y agoThey're not transcribing it, so much as selecting the keys one would need to press in order to type the text. That is, the correct key lights up, and they move the cursor and mentally "click" to select it. This serves two purposes: - WPM is a difficult metric to "game", since if they make a mistake they have to select the backspace key, and then select the correct key again. - It's a proof of concept demonstration that a human (e.g. in the BrainGate[1] clinical trial) could use this prosthetic system to communicate in text. When a human were driving the system, the keys wouldn't light up; they'd just type freely. [1] http://www.braingate.org/ http://www.braingate.org/
- etrautmann 10y agoThis paper is from a colleague in my lab at Stanford - happy to answer questions. For intuition, this is like clicking on an on-screen keyboard, so the typing speed is very high given the constraint of focusing on each key as a separate, discrete movement.
- mtrimpe 10y agoWould this also allow for chorded input?
- etrautmann 10y agoThis particular approach would require an extension to do that, likely decoding from the hand and finger related regions of motor cortex. It's a great idea but would require additions to the algorithm to decode overlapping discrete actions for chord detection.
- shmel 10y agoSounds like the ultimate solution to emacs carpal tunnel syndrome.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- poslathian 10y agoThere is super work going on in your camp, kudos! I really appreciated your review of fluorescent imaging in NHP, which is absolutely going to be, along with advancements in implantables, a major enabling tech for prosthetics. In our lab, we've recently started down the path of light field imaging for whole-brain, single neuron recording in the larval zebrafish - supplementing existing work in developing very large, dense ephys recordings. As crazy as NESD/MiCRONS programs are, it really does feel like the field is transitioning to stitching pieces, many years in the making, together towards bona-fide clinical applications. Exciting times!
- etrautmann 10y ago
- poslathian 10y agoThe paper itself is not yet available, but the same researchers have published before on this work: http://www.stanford.edu/~shenoy/GroupResearchPublications.htm http://www.stanford.edu/~shenoy/GroupResearchPublications.ht... http://www.stanford.edu/~shenoy/GroupPublications/KaoEtAlIEEETBME2016-Preprint.pdf http://www.stanford.edu/~shenoy/GroupPublications/KaoEtAlIEE... Reading the latter reveals the implant side is a 96 channel utah array.
- petra 10y agoConnecting brains to computers in order to type ??? Or Elon's Musk "neural lace" that enables interface between AI and brains ??? Such sad, shallow visions for such powerful technologies. Maybe instead , we'll start really asking what is the good life(for both society and the person), we'll probably get answers like(from various philoshophers and religions): life full of love, compassion, empathy, peace, trancendence, meaning, service, self-actualiztion, health, etc. And better understanding, control and training of the brain(maybe by using fmri neurofeedback) may be a great tool in achieving all of those qualities in a safe, effective and efficient manner, and of course fully based on personal choice. How can this expand what it means to be human ? how could it shape society ? And instead, we're talking about typing with the brain. And we see this kind of thinking everywhere. for example , the world is filled with tons of "social" technologies, but we can't even get video chat with eye-contact, at people's homes ?
- no_wave 10y agoWe can, and do have video chat at eye-level but most people seem not to like it. Typing is a first step and is a great way of testing the technology and verifying that the sensors are working as expected, as it's extremely obvious how accurately they're working.
- lovebunny 10y agoThis is a start. The same technology will be used for great things.
- kafkaesq 10y agoHow can this expand what it means to be human? How could it shape society? "Typing with the brain" can not only be very useful, but potentially life-transforming for those with mobility impairments -- e.g. quadriplegics, and those fully or partially paralyzed for other reasons.
- SilasX 10y agoImportant note: they were using monkeys and didn't take advantage of the speedups that humans would use, like adaptive letter-guessing/autocomplete: >“Also understand that we’re not using auto completion here like your smartphone does where it guesses your words for you,” That would reduce the "distance" you have to move the cursor on average. (Several years ago I had the idea to combine the accessibility software Dasher with the "Neural impulse actuator", which tranduces brain waves, but never went through with it, though I bought the tech.)
- JackFr 10y agoWell they're not using autocomplete, but the software sitting between the electrodes and the cursor is a black box as far as the article goes. If the software is trained or calibrated, what's to say that it isn't picking up some information from the structure of English. Also depending the setup of the onscreen keyboard, it too could have error reducing aspects built in. Also it's unclear whether the 12 wpm is actual wpm with back spacing and correction, or whether it's an 'adjusted' wpm based on the error rate. This isn't to say that it's not an impressive result regardless. Just that I'm more skeptical of the 12 wpm.