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From brain waves to words: a new path to communication without surgery
- mpenick 4mo agoNow the remaining problem is to make Magnetoencephalography devices affordable and not insanely huge.
- traverseda 4mo agoFrom a few days ago, uses ultrasound. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48685558 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48685558
- greentea23 4mo agoThe ultrasound technique there is more like MRI, static imaging, not measuring dynamic electrical signals. Also, regardless of static vs moving, all of this hinges on massive relatively expensive devices (ultrasound is never going to be dirt cheap or miniaturized compared to a smartwatch or even a VR headset) and for the subject to remain perfectly still and probably go through regular calibration sequences. All for <75% accuracy on simple classification tasks. The information mixes in the propagation out of the skull, erasing information. It's analogous to trying to do a row hammer attack on a CPU from outside the computer case. Also, in the Meta result here, "while actively typing" is actually quite different than passive mind reading because the motor cortex sits nicely near the top surface of the skull, and the muscle memory from past typing makes for a nice well formed signal to measure and classify. It's the same trick over and over since the Brown BrainGate days where you can have people perform or imagine movements and get a decent but not good classification result, and it never gets much better after that trick is exploited. Project dies, VCs and grant writers forget or never appreciated the effect, time goes by, a grad student or corporate research lackey rediscovers it, media puts out an article claiming mind reading is here, and the cycle repeats...
- ge96 4mo agoThe size of that machine
- lwhi 4mo agoThe participants end up looking a bit like Toad from Mariokart. How realistic would it be to make a smaller device?
- slipperybeluga 4mo ago[dead]
- Sanzig 4mo agoNot my field, but since they use SQUIDs I suspect most of the volume is taken up by cryo equipment. So, maybe if someone eventually discovers a room temperature superconductor.
- jeffbee 4mo agoPatients should get a "My other hat is a superconducting quantum interferometer" hat.
- fjlunky 4mo agoI imagine you’re wanting instead something the size of a hat, but smaller fMRI are certainly in development, for example [0] with discussion about the size at [1]. [0] https://med.umn.edu/news/university-minnesota-developing-compact-and-portable-mri-scanner https://med.umn.edu/news/university-minnesota-developing-com... [1] https://designawards.core77.com/Strategy-Research/95329/A-new-perspective-MRI-Patient-handling-system-for-a-novel-head-only-MRI-system.html https://designawards.core77.com/Strategy-Research/95329/A-ne...
- Junk_Collector 4mo agoIt's worth noting that this isn't new technology. This paper is specifically about how their new technique provides a small but statistically significant improvement on existing techniques. The fact that they provide code and dataset is really praiseworthy.
- hackermeows 4mo agowhy is there no live demo? Anyone seen this in action? Can someone share a demo video or something
- alexpotato 4mo agoSo attended an interesting talk a couple years ago: - fMRI and/or brain implants are the best to figure out brain waves - but they are expensive or invasive - EEG is a lot cheaper and easier but not as precise - BUT what if you used LLMs to analyze EEG data taken at the same time as brain implants etc The answer seemed to be that "yes, you can get better than traditional EEG data using EEG + LLMs". Curious to see where this ends up and hopefully not that like that Black Mirror episode with the brain scanning leading to murders.
- devindotcom 4mo agoPiramidal was doing that last I checked: https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/23/piramidals-foundation-model-for-brainwaves-could-supercharge-eegs/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/23/piramidals-foundation-mode...
- insane_dreamer 4mo ago> “yes, you can get better than traditional EEG data using EEG + LLMs" Not yet. There are plenty of transformer based models out there for EEG but they so far do not outperform the SOTA “traditional” (ML/DL) models.
- Honali 4mo agoIf these systems ever become good enough to be useful, the privacy and consent questions need to be treated as core engineering requirements, not as a policy afterthought
- GaggiX 4mo agoSomeone should try it while sleeping and see if anything is related to a dream.
- Rekindle8090 4mo ago[dead]
- iwassayinbourns 4mo agoThis wouldn’t work. Apart from it being very difficult to get people to sleep deeply enough for them to dream in machines like this, the brain state is very different whilst asleep compared with awake. Also the data generated from typing would be very different than thought since it’s likely picking up on broad electrical activity in the primary motor cortex. Source: spouse works in a sleep lab studying dreams with MRI
- ASTP001 4mo agowhat sleep lab does your spouse work at? i'm curious about studying dreams
- whimsicalism 4mo agoInteresting -- really excited for the future of human-brain interfaces and just in general more interface exploration enabled by large transformers. I'm already very excited by voice, although wish I could get something akin to the subvoc common in scifi novels. Seems like it would be an easier path than human-brain and would allow me to use voice models in public. As an aside, disappointed by the very low quality of comments on this article here.
- dang 4mo ago[stub for offtopicness] p.s. come on you guys - this is not what HN is for. You may not owe $megacorp better but you owe this community better if you're participating here.
- 999900000999 4mo agoFeels like the premise for a spy comedy with a protagonist whose mind can’t be read. When the bad guys try they just get the lyrics to Yoko Ono music.
- iLoveOncall 4mo agoThe future is dark.
- TheOtherHobbes 4mo agoA word recondition ration of 78% is still petty poop.
- dang 4mo ago"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- 1970-01-01 4mo agoThe dystopian future will use this to get passwords/passphrases.
- t_gamer_kle 4mo agoAnd you reverse it to go from words to brain waves! Mind reading at a distance.
- dclavijo 4mo agogreat news!, I would like to conversate with my dog...i'm sure he has more important thing than lots of people
- ksd482 4mo agoIf one were to go about translating brain waves from dogs to meaning, we'd run into a big problem immediately: vocabulary resolution. What I mean by that is we'll have a very limited number of words to which a dog's brainwaves can be translated to since we aren't able to understand them beyond their basic instincts of food, survival, fear, affection towards their owner etc. There is just no way to go past what we have already observed by their behavior since dogs can't talk or write. I do wonder how animals think. Perhaps this resolution would also be the theoretical maximum?
- supern0va 4mo ago>There is just no way to go past what we have already observed by their behavior since dogs can't talk or write. There are many dogs that have been trained to press buttons corresponding to words, in the extreme case tens/hundreds of buttons/words, and they can even construct rudimentary sentences. It doesn't seem insane to me that we could perhaps do a very rudimentary version of this for dogs, given a large enough training set.
- gloyoyo 4mo agoSome important ones like, "earthquake", "Seizure", etc... Might be of use.
- yieldcrv 4mo agobut that's imposing our language on them, when we should be understanding them there's a movie about that default human hubris, it spoils it though
- ksd482 4mo agoThat's a great point. The "vocabulary resolution being low" basically just means within our own limited context, it's low. But that doesn't mean it's a good measure. Heck, I'd say it isn't.
- Havoc 4mo agoReminds me of the scene in series Incorporated where a megacorp uses this sort of tech to interrogate an employee from a competitor mega-corp to get at a trade secret. It's a little spooky how real that could now be. Oh and that series was a dystopian series because ofc it was
- bpiche 4mo agoI still think of this video often and wonder if it is building on any of that technology, almost 10 years old now. Just looking at this whitepaper it seems like they both use some kind of infrared transcranial light, but never imagined the machine in the original iteration was so big [Regina Dugan's Keynote at Facebook F8 2017 | Inverse] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCDWKdmwhUI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCDWKdmwhUI
- albemuth 4mo agoOne practical application comes to mind: [China’s Robot Juggernaut Unitree Debuts a $650,000 Personal Gundam ](https://gizmodo.com/chinas-robot-juggernaut-unitree-debuts-a-650000-personal-gundam-2000757574 https://gizmodo.com/chinas-robot-juggernaut-unitree-debuts-a...)
- consumer451 4mo agoPlease see my bio for the full rant. The key take-away is: > While we missed the boat on Internet tracking, there is still time to avoid sailing through the final frontier of neural tracking. > Thanks to the BCI, we will soon be offered the trade of our privacy for the convenience of password-free login and faster typing. Next, there will be a quick TSA neural scan prior to boarding...
- smusamashah 4mo agoThis is the most pessimistic take on this tech here. You can view anything with the same lens.
- ImPostingOnHN 4mo agoSaying "this is the most pessimistic take" doesn't make for good discussion. Something can have "good takes" but still run an unacceptable risk of ending badly
- consumer451 4mo agoI ain't young. I have seen this all play out before. It's just extrapolating based on what we did with cookies, browsing history, cell tower data, etc... unless we pass very strict neural privacy laws, why wouldn't it go the same way? The decent news is that if you search "neural privacy laws," you will find some states are already on top of it, a bit. We need national laws, in every country ASAP. This needs to happen before there are billions in economic inertia behind BCIs.
- Georgelemental 4mo agoThe way to not get the most pessimistic outcome is to work for a better one, and to do that you have to first recognize the danger
- moolcool 4mo agoI’m trying to not be snarky here, but it is difficult to have an optimistic take about an advertising company working on mind reading technology. At some point we have to call a spade a spade, I think.
- LowLevelKernel 4mo agoThere were alpha block classes
- smath 4mo agoAre they trying to infer characters/words from brain waves? I would have thought the brain is thinking in concepts rather than actual words
- nok22kon 4mo agono contradiction, both can be true, you think in concepts, then verbalize, which is what they capture
- emsign 4mo agoI hate this because we have crazy billionaires who want to abuse this technology. But apart from tht it's pretty cool, though I hate that it's being developed in this dark day and age. Miserable times.
- rushil_b_patel 4mo agoMark always been framed/stated for stealing user's data or invasing user's privacy but apart from these, this guy has always been one step ahead in making new research, technology possible by experimenting new things. First with the AR/VR which didn't work I guess so he pivoted from that to Rayban glasses, and now this.
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- wwind123 4mo agoThe "Metaverse" bet was a bold but lost bet, in hindsight. Mark is fortunate that the Facebook empire is still printing a lot of money to burn, so he could switch his focus to AI now that it's clear AI is the real thing for this decade. This brain-wave thing is a very small wrinkle in the big picture, not really a big strategy shift.
- celltalk 4mo agoAs far as I understand the underlying model is not multimodal. Maybe a quite naive question but can't we improve the performance by a joint embedding of EEG and MEG data? If it scales with log-linear data, maybe it would also improve with other data as well.
- Honali 4mo agoMy guess is that multimodal training could be useful as a pretraining strategy
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- Honali 4mo ago[dead]
- eaf7e281 4mo agoI'm excited to see what happens when there's enough data, will it show the same kind of progress just like GPT does.
- sometimelurker 4mo ago[dead]
- JohnMakin 4mo ago(literal) thought crimes, coming soon to a place near you by Meta