Brain-Twitter Interface
Shout out to Josh for sharing this with me….
So my friend Josh found an article about how science is connecting brain activity to Twitter. Essentially, they hook up a device to measure your brain waves and when you focus on a particular letter on the computer screen, the computer will figure out what letter you are focusing on based on your brain activity when the computer blinks certain rows of letters. The article explains it,
“The interface consists, essentially, of a keyboard displayed on a computer screen. “The way this works is that all the letters come up, and each one of them flashes individually,” says Williams. “And what your brain does is, if you’re looking at the ‘R’ on the screen and all the other letters are flashing, nothing happens. But when the ‘R’ flashes, your brain says, ‘Hey, wait a minute. Something’s different about what I was just paying attention to.’ And you see a momentary change in brain activity.”
You can tweet this message and people with locked-in syndrome, in which they can’t communicate, but their brain is working completely are able to communicate with the rest of the world. I found this so interesting because on my favorite TV show House, one the patients had locked-in syndrome or something similar to it, and was hooked up to a computer and a cursor to where up was yes and down was no. However he couldn’t communicate anything past this. With this new brain-twitter interface, these people are able to communicate normally.