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A person interfaces to another person over the Internet, and gets him to do something with his body involuntarily, and you think it's not "that interesting"? A

by r0h1n 13y ago

A person interfaces to another person over the Internet, and gets him to do something with his body involuntarily, and you think it's not "that interesting"? All I can say is you must be living in a truly advanced world :)

femto 13y ago
These days, I think it is valid to take "over the Internet" out of the equation when deciding if something is impressive. For most applications, the Internet is a black box for transferring bits. For "over the Internet" to be interesting, it needs to be pushing then boundaries of the Internet in some way.
pygy_ 13y ago
It could have been done twenty years ago, and it will not progress beyond what is shown here: causing a given muscle to twitch. Transcranial magnetic stimulation is inherently imprecise and brutish. It causes all the neurons in the target brain area (3-4 cm^3) to discharge at once. Depending on the intensity of the stimulation, you can recruit more or less neurons, but it is not selective. For most of the brain, it just disrupts the activity for less than a second, causing a "virtual lesion". This is useful for brain mapping research, but that's it. When you zap the motor cortex, it also sends action potentials down the spine, which in turn stimulate the motor neurons then the muscles. The hardware is bulky and unpractical [0]. You could maybe use two coils per brain hemisphere, and then, you must stimulate areas distant from one another. For the foreseeable future the only mind control techniques are propaganda and manipulative behavior, with some drugs sprinkled in for good measure. No need to worry about this. [0] https://www.google.com/search?q=transcranial+magnetic+stimulation https://www.google.com/search?q=transcranial+magnetic+stimul...
- pmarca 13y ago
  I don't care what that lunatic Alexander Graham Bell says, and I don't care what stupid little one-time demos he has in his lab, the telephone is never going to take off.
  - pygy_ 13y ago
    This approach is a dead end. The electric resistance of the skull is way too high to send any useful information through electric stimulation, and magnetic stimulation is inherently blunt. For the same reason, the complexity of the information that you can get with EEG is very limited. There's a lot of noise, and the spatial resolution is very coarse. Useful brain to brain communication requires invasive surgery, in order to put sensors and stimulation electrodes next to the cortex. It will happen, and it will be revolutionary, but the method described in the article is not a progress in that direction.

by r0h1n 13y ago

femto 13y ago

These days, I think it is valid to take "over the Internet" out of the equation when deciding if something is impressive. For most applications, the Internet is a black box for transferring bits. For "over the Internet" to be interesting, it needs to be pushing then boundaries of the Internet in some way.

pygy_ 13y ago

It could have been done twenty years ago, and it will not progress beyond what is shown here: causing a given muscle to twitch. Transcranial magnetic stimulation is inherently imprecise and brutish. It causes all the neurons in the target brain area (3-4 cm^3) to discharge at once. Depending on the intensity of the stimulation, you can recruit more or less neurons, but it is not selective. For most of the brain, it just disrupts the activity for less than a second, causing a "virtual lesion". This is useful for brain mapping research, but that's it. When you zap the motor cortex, it also sends action potentials down the spine, which in turn stimulate the motor neurons then the muscles. The hardware is bulky and unpractical [0]. You could maybe use two coils per brain hemisphere, and then, you must stimulate areas distant from one another. For the foreseeable future the only mind control techniques are propaganda and manipulative behavior, with some drugs sprinkled in for good measure. No need to worry about this. [0] https://www.google.com/search?q=transcranial+magnetic+stimulation https://www.google.com/search?q=transcranial+magnetic+stimul...

pmarca 13y ago
I don't care what that lunatic Alexander Graham Bell says, and I don't care what stupid little one-time demos he has in his lab, the telephone is never going to take off.
- pygy_ 13y ago
  This approach is a dead end. The electric resistance of the skull is way too high to send any useful information through electric stimulation, and magnetic stimulation is inherently blunt. For the same reason, the complexity of the information that you can get with EEG is very limited. There's a lot of noise, and the spatial resolution is very coarse. Useful brain to brain communication requires invasive surgery, in order to put sensors and stimulation electrodes next to the cortex. It will happen, and it will be revolutionary, but the method described in the article is not a progress in that direction.