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Mind controlled technology: how possible, how effective and how soon?

by Josef Kafka

One of the more intriguing stories to hit the technology press this week came from the BBC. The national broadcaster announced it has developed a headset that will allow people with severe physical disabilities to control their televisions using only their mind.

Though still in the early stages, the fact that the prototype version of the device has passed its initial test, with 10 out of 10 BBC staff members successfully launching BBC iPlayer and turning on a programme through brainwaves alone, is fairly astounding.

While this is certainly not the first or most improbable story regarding mind controlled technology to come down the pipe, there is something about the everyday nature of the device that makes it all the more beguiling. The idea that, one day, an activity as normal as flicking through channels on the telly could be handled psychokinetically is a giddy thought indeed.

It also raises some pretty big questions. Namely, how on earth does mind controlled technology work and what are the most intriguing possibilities? 

Electroencephalography

Mind control operates based on Electroencephalography (EEG) technology. The hardware measures the user’s brain activity, responding differently depending upon the part of the brain the user activates. Though this might sound impossibly hard to learn, some working in the field see it in far more straightforward terms. 

Ricardo Mendes, the chief operating officer at Tekever, a Portuguese firm who recently developed a drone flown by the pilot’s brainwaves, believes that one day people will fly a plane the same way they move their legs or wave their arms. 

Possibilities and doubts

In principal, the process is the same. After all, as babies we learn to wiggle our fingers, crawl and walk based on figuring out how to activate the part of the brain that will trigger the right response. Yet EEG has its fair share of sceptics, including researchers at MIT whose 2010 Technology Review pointed out mind controlled devices still only respond to a very limited number of commands.

Since then, however, there have been a succession of astounding uses of EEG, of which the BBC’s headset is only the latest. 

There was Ruggero Scuccioni’s Good Times app, which read the user’s brainwaves and told their smartphone to re-route calls to voicemail if it felt the user was too busy or stressed out to answer. There was the somewhat terrifying development in the University of Washington where Professor Rajesh Rao actually took control of his colleague’s right hand via the internet despite the fact that they were on different ends of the campus. And there are the smart prosthetic limbs developed at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency that respond to instructions sent directly from the wearer’s brain. 

So, lots of different people are working on EEG and taking it in lots of different directions. But how likely is it that mind controlled technology will end up in your living room or at your workplace anytime soon? 

While it certainly has plenty of current applications for those who have lost limbs or are suffering physical disabilities, it still might be a while before mind control works as part of a standard user interface. The headsets are pretty unwieldy and ugly, while even the technology’s biggest believers admit it is still too limited to adopt as a UI. 

Yet it is a technology that is developing faster than many expected it to 10 years ago. One gets the feeling it might be wise to not make too many predictions about what will come next from this most mind-bending of fields.

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