MadSci Network: Anatomy |
Biofeedback has hawked "voluntary brain wave control" for 25+ years. The military entertains hallucinations of soldiers and pilots thinking to their equipment. Psychology and psychiatry worship the EEG, spewing paradigms and statistical correlations summing to nothing - douse the patient in mind-numbing drugs or fry his brain with electroshock. Where promises of harnessing brain electrical potentials fail to snare the really big grant monies, brain magnetic fields (via SQUIDS - superconducting quantum interference devices) take up the slack, including input. Nothing. The Earth has a fundamental electromagnetic resonance - rings like a bell - at lightspeed divided by the ionosphere's circumference, the Schumann resonance. Oddly enough, this is the frequency band credited with normal human attentive wakefulness. Pump noise into a signal and it is called "jamming." The only demonstrated successful brain/device interfaces have been cochlear implants for the profoundly deaf. Given a correlated signal input, the brain learns to make some sense of it. Interfaces between amputated limbs and powered prostheses mediated by peripheral nerves have also had some success. Search engines! "Schumann resonance" 701 hits "brain interface" 582 hits "cochlear implant" 10,100 hits If you want to play man-machine games either as a cyborg (cybernetic organism - assembled after the fact) or as an android (born to the interface) you will have to invent the field from scratch. As the first one in the stadium, at least you don't have to go through mind-numbing piles of scholarly literature. But remember... if you succeed the mob will celebrate you with torches and pitchforks (e.g., genetically engineered crops).
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