Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!psuvax1!burdvax!sdcrdcf!trwrb!trwspp!spp2!urban
From: urban@spp2.UUCP (Michael Urban)
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: Re: *IF*
Message-ID: <340@algol.spp2.UUCP>
Date: 14 Jun 88 15:17:21 GMT
References: <8806110522.AA06810@bu-cs.bu.edu> <8806111528.AA14519@bu-cs.bu.edu>
Reply-To: urban@algol.UUCP (Michael Urban)
Organization: TRW Inc., Redondo Beach, CA
Lines: 31

In article <8806111528.AA14519@bu-cs.bu.edu> bzs@BU-CS.BU.EDU (Barry Shein) writes:
>Recently I heard a rumor of a project where a computer had been hooked
>to an EEG ("brain waves".) Apparently, after some training (think of
>the word "red" and tell it you are now thinking of the word "red", it
>records the EEG patterns, etc), the machine would guess with some
>accuracy that you were currently thinking of a particular word out
>of the learned set.
>
>I have no idea if this story was total fiction or not, it was word of
>mouth.
>

There was a project at UCLA in the mid '70s called the Brain Computer
Interface Lab.  They had subjects sit in an isolation box with
electrodes on their heads watching a screen with a "mouse" in a maze.
The computer did some kind of rapid pattern recognition on the
EEG and with some training the subjects were able to cause the mouse to
go Left or Right.  

Disclaimer:  I was not involved in this project; their lab was next
to the ARPANET facility.  I may remember this entirely wrong.  I
certainly cannot tell you what variety of machine they were using
to process EEGs.  They were using an Imlac PDS-1 as the display device
(and their lab was thus a nice place to go to play Spacewar).  You
should believe nothing in the previous paragraph without an implicit
"as I remember it" inserted.
-- 
   Mike Urban
	...!trwrb!trwspp!spp2!urban 

"You're in a maze of twisty UUCP connections, all alike"