Five Incredible—and Real—Mind-

Control Applications
Welcome to a dawning era of brain-controlled devices and actions.
BYBRIAN HANDWERKFOR NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

PUBLISHED AUGUST 29, 2013

• 7 MIN READ

Scientists achieved the first remote human-to-human brain interface

this week, when Rajesh Rao sent a brain signal over the Internet that
moved the hand of colleague Andrea Stocco—even though Stocco was
sitting all the way across the University of Washington's campus.

Using one human brain to direct another person's body via the Internet
was an amazing breakthrough. But other feats of mind control are
already realities, particularly in the realm of human machine interfaces
(HMIs).

Here are some amazing examples of what our brains can already do.

Compose and Play Music

Yes, music composition always took place in the brain. But now
musicians might be able to eliminate the need for tools and interfaces
like sheet music—or even playing an instrument—by simply creating
music directly with their thoughts.

Electroencephalography (EEG) headwear devices record the electric

signals that are produced when the brain is at work and can connect
them wirelessly to a computer. Their wearers can also train their minds
to associate a set of EEG brain signals with a specific task.

For example, thinking about pushing a button on the computer screen

produces a brainwave pattern that computer software can then
recognize and associate with that task.
To make music, such thoughts are associated with notes or sounds to
create a language of musical thought that's produced directly from the
brain. With this established, users can simply think musical scores to
life and play them via the computer.

For an example of the way the mind can create music and other forms
of art, check out the MiND ensemble (Music in Neural
Dimensions) from the University of Michigan.

Screen Mobile Phone Calls

Like a tough personal secretary, Ruggero Scorcioni's Good Times

app filters the incoming calls of busy mobile phone users by simply
monitoring the state of the user's brain.

Earlier this year, Scorcioni won an AT&T Mobile App Hackathon with
the iOS app, which uses the cuddly Necomimi Cat Ears brainwave-
reading headset to monitor brain activity and reroute calls to voicemail
when it perceives that the user's brain is busy with other tasks. If the
user's brain is in a receptive state, it lets the call through.

With $30,000 in Hackathon prize money in hand, Scorcioni is fine-

tuning his prototype, which he views as a first step in the way our brain
states might directly control mobile devices and our individual
environments. Someday it might enable more brain-driven mobile
device features that require no user input, like his Good Tunes concept,
which would read brainwaves and then play music best matching the
wearer's personal preferences for their current brain state.

Create a 3-D Object

Can wishing for something make it so? Well, not quite. But a Chilean
company has announced the first object to be created by thought alone
—paired with the growing power of the latest 3-D printing machines.

George Laskowsky, the chief technical officer of the Santiago-based

startup Thinker Thing, created the first-ever such object in January
2012.
The Thinker Thing system employs an Emotiv EPOC EEG headset to
map its wearer's brainwaves. Then the company's own software, called
Emotional Evolutionary Design, displays "building block" shapes on a
computer screen.

From a basic beginning, the shapes change and "evolve," while the
user's emotional positive and negative reactions to each change are
monitored by the headset. As the software processes brain feedback, the
well-received shapes and changes are kept and expanded, while the
disliked ones fade away. The process is repeated until a final object is
produced according to the thought preferences of the designer.

The company's Monster Dreamer project  gave schoolkids the

opportunity to use the software to create the monster of their dreams,
or nightmares, in a matter of minutes.

Drive a Wheelchair—And a Car

For the disabled, the ability to move about using the power of their
minds could be life changing. To that end, scientists have worked for
years on wheelchairs and other devices that could restore mobility to
those who had lost control of their own bodies but still had sharp
minds.

By 2009, Japanese scientists at Toyota and research lab

RIKEN announced a thought-controlled wheelchair  that used an EEG
sensor cap to capture brainwaves and turn them into directional
commands in just 125 thousandths of a second—with 95 percent
accuracy.

At Lausanne, Switzerland's Federal Institute of Technology, scientists

have added "shared control" to the concept . Their chair's software
analyzes the surrounding area's cluttered environment and blends that
information with the driver's brain commands to avoid problems like
collisions with objects.

The system also eases the strain of command because users needn't
continually instruct the chair—the software processes a single
directional command and automatically repeats it as often as needed to
navigate the space.

German engineers at the Free University of Berlin have attempted to

take this concept on the open road with a car that can be partially
controlled by the driver's thoughts. The team took an autonomous
Volkswagen Passat, one of the emerging breed of driverless vehicles ,
and outfitted it with a computer system and software designed to work
with Emotiv's commercially available EEG brain-scanning headset.

Drivers were trained to produce recognizable thought commands, like

"turn left," by manipulating a virtual cube on a screen. The onboard
computer then analyzed and converted those thoughts to commands
recognized by the car itself each time they were thought by the driver.
(See the successful results here .)

The "BrainDriver" application is not roadworthy yet, the team cautions

on their website. "But on the long run, human machine interfaces like
this could bear huge potential in combination with autonomous
driving--for example, when it comes to decide which way you want to
take on a crossroad, while the autonomous cab drives you home."

"Bionic" Limbs

In some instances, human machine interfaces are becoming part of the

human body. One new prosthetic even provides a sense of "touch" like
that of a natural arm, because it interfaces with the wearer's neural
system by splicing to residual nerves in the partial limb.

The prosthetic sends sensory signals to the wearer's brain that produce
a lifelike "feel," allowing users to operate it by touch rather than by
sight alone. This ability enables tasks many take for granted, like
removing something from inside a grocery bag, and knowing how hard
to grip items with the prosthetic hand.

Researchers at Case Western Reserve University, now working with the

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), developed the
prosthetic, which can be seen in action here  and was unveiled in May
2013. DARPA is a leader in the development of advanced prosthetics, in
part because more than 2,000 U.S. Service members have undergone
amputations since 2000.

Another DARPA-backed prosthetic arm flips this script by efficiently

transmitting information from brain to arm, rather than vice versa,
through a technique called targeted muscle re-innervation. The
procedure rewires nerves from amputated limbs to enable more natural
brain control of the prosthetic—and make possible some amazing
abilities.

In this video taken at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, former

Army Staff Sgt. Glen Lehman, who was wounded in Iraq, demonstrates
his ability to manipulate the arm with his mind, drink coffee, and
bounce a tennis ball with a prosthetic limb. In some cases, experts say,
prosthetics can already offer more functionality than heavily damaged
human limbs