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As exciting as this is now, I'm very eager to see how brain-machine interfaces mature with findings how to best meet the machine half way. Decoding hand writin
by Nihilartikel 5y ago
As exciting as this is now, I'm very eager to see how brain-machine interfaces mature with findings how to best meet the machine half way.
Decoding hand writing accurately is an approximate thing even when it's spoon fed to the machine via a digitizer, to say nothing of interpreting the movements from neural activity. What could be accomplished if we abandoned the familiarity of writing and existing glyphs and established a novel set of learnable 'brain semaphores' (e.g. visualize this symbol, play this sound on your mental speakers) that were easy enough for the user to practice and master with feedback, and blazing unambiguous markers to the probes and recognition algorithm? It's not hard to imagine that with deliberate practice and immediate feedback, the brain can develop connections for the sole purpose of the interface that no longer even piggyback on imagining motor/sensory events. Sending a keystroke would be no different than lifting a finger.
I'm sure this isn't a novel idea, but my armchair observer prediction is that the field will start to move in the direction of purposefully designed mind-sign schemes and away from mimicry of physical movement as the technology becomes ubiquitous and less invasive.
- alanbernstein 5y agoThat's an interesting idea, but what makes you confident that any concept/image/sound you hold in your mind can be less squishy and vague than traditional sounds or characters?
- nitred 5y agoYou've put to words what I've been thinking about for many years. I'm one of those people who find languages difficult and often find it difficult to convert my thoughts into words and sentences. From my perspective, 75 percent of mental effort goes into sentence formation and this process often derails my thought process. When I discovered NLP models like Word2Vec and Thought-Vectors, which assign vectors to words or even whole sentences/concepts, intuitively, it felt like that was exactly what was happening in my mind. It might be an illusion but I do not think in sentences or words, I only think in concepts and images that appear in my mind's eye in an instant. To form a larger idea, I build a chain of concepts. I am sure that eventually probes can pick up a clear distinct vector that uniquely summarizes the entire concept of what I was thinking or visualizing. And as you suggested we could start off with a smaller subset of semaphores or concepts or visualizations that at first are the easiest signals to pick up via probes. After practice, these signals only get crisper.
- rblatz 5y agoThanks for putting words to something I’ve been living with but unable to express.
- corndoge 5y agoCan I ask if/how much you read books? I have a hypothesis I'm gathering data on.
- nitred 5y agoDiscounting fantasy or sci-fi novels, I read about 6-12 non-fiction books a year and I usually only finish them half or quarter of the way.
- Hammershaft 5y agoThis concept made my sleep deprived morning just a little better, so thanks.