[HN Gopher] Brain-Computer Interface User Types 90 Characters pe...
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Brain-Computer Interface User Types 90 Characters per Minute with
Mind
Author : pessimizer
Score : 105 points
Date : 2021-05-14 17:49 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.the-scientist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.the-scientist.com)
| pvg wrote:
| Recently:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27134049
| gentleman11 wrote:
| Very cool until 50 years in the future where Facebook and
| government starts researching ways to use the advanced versions
| of this sort of tech
| yonaguska wrote:
| I think you're thinking too far into the future. They'll be on
| this sort of tech much sooner than 50 years in the future.
| cobertos wrote:
| They already are, they bought CTRL-Labs which made a
| prototype wristband for reading motor neuron activation. They
| have a demo on YouTube showing it for keyboarding as well as
| for surprisingly accurate 3D hand pose estimation.
|
| CTRL-labs is the one behind https://tech.fb.com/inside-
| facebook-reality-labs-wrist-based...
| [deleted]
| scrubs wrote:
| I could really use such a device for my youngest kid. Hoping to
| see more on this.
| carapace wrote:
| It seems like a direct brain-to-speech approach would make more
| sense for this application (communication from paralyzed people.)
| This is sort of like trying to write with a theremin, eh?
|
| I'm still on the far side with this, I know, but whenever these
| BCI stories go by I am bemused. You connect a brain to a computer
| and then "train a neural network" on the computer side, that
| makes no sense. The _sophisticated_ NN is on the brain-side, yes?
| With an integrated subjective UI already, yes? You do not need
| fancy implants or hardware to "talk" to your machine, galvanic
| response and (now) micro-IMUs (inertial measurement units, one on
| each finger) are _plenty_ of bits-per-second for a subjective
| Think-to-Type experience. Use hypnosis, it 's easy, to program
| your brain to output a byte by changing the angle of your
| fingertips and then twitching the thumb to "clock" the data. Or
| just standard stenotype, it would likely be easier, eh?
|
| You don't need fancy hardware or NN software (and especially
| surgery to stick electrodes in your brain) to "talk" to your
| machine with your mind, you already have all the technology you
| need "built in" to your nervous system. It's not even difficult
| to use. Literally the first thing I learned to do when I was
| studying (self-)hypnosis was setting up a binary "yes/no" signal
| (a finger twitch) from my unconscious mind to facilitate
| communication.
|
| Anyhow, not to go on and on about it, the bottom line is when you
| connect a computer to a brain please remember that the _brain_ is
| the fancier, more powerful "device", okay? You will waste less
| time. (I am not sure why I am not able or willing to try to make
| something out of this. I can talk to my computer well enough that
| I don't bother with BCI. ANd somehow the plight of these poor
| folks doesn't move me enough to do something. Am I a moral
| cretin? I'm seriously you guys. Should I try (harder) to get
| something going with simple hypnotic BCI systems? HN?)
| milkey_mouse wrote:
| I totally agree. There is more than enough "unmapped" area on
| the motor & sensory homuncului[1] (creepy image warning) to be
| repurposed as an I/O channel by retraining the brain. In
| general, brains are plastic enough to remap senses like this[2]
| given a handful of months' work/practice. Adults are capable of
| learning ASL, for example, which uses completely different
| "output channels" from spoken language. Even when learning to
| drive, the car can start to feel like an extension of one's
| self (and I'm not a car person at all). Famously, people who
| become blind begin to develop better acuity in their other
| senses because of all the "freed up space" in the visual cortex
| (which I'm sure is an oversimplification, I'm not a
| neuroscientist).
|
| We have so much raw data coming into our brains--via sight and
| sound especially, but surprising amounts via other senses as
| well--that I see little reason to add "additional senses" or
| outputs when we have rather high bandwidth already. Heck, my
| thoughts run ahead of my speech or typing fairly often, and
| both of those are pretty low-bandwidth channels.
|
| One-hand chorded keyboards[3] are perennially reinvented by
| someone with an Arduino and a few buttons (not to belittle that
| work!) but you can't just pick up a chorded keyboard and type
| as fast as a regular one, so they are generally treated as a
| novelty. But if one spent as much time learning to use a
| chorded keyboard as they did a regular one, I'd bet they'd be
| just as fast. Perhaps the reason fluent computer users show
| little desire for better human-computer interfaces is that they
| are afflicted by a generalized form of baby duck syndrome[4].
| To mix metaphors in a really confusing way, interacting with a
| computer with a keyboard, mouse, and monitor feels like using
| GNU nano: shallow learning curve, but it tapers off quickly. I
| wish I knew the Vim of HCI: I'd be willing to practice for
| years to adapt to it, to compute more efficiently for the rest
| of my life.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortical_homunculus [2]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortical_remapping#Plasticity
| [3]: https://www.stavros.io/posts/keyyyyyyyys/ [4]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imprinting_(psychology)#Baby_d...
| simonh wrote:
| All of that involved consciously causing physiological changes
| in your body for the computer to sense. Suppose this was a
| thought interface for an aircraft pilot. Physically they're
| already fully engaged in a demanding activity, what we need is
| to open up a new channel of communication from them to the
| computer in addition to their physical input. If they're
| focusing on twitching or changing the resistivity in their
| fingertips, that's going to interfere with their using their
| fingers to manipulate controls.
|
| There are other similar situations, such as people in a coma
| that can't cause physiological changes. The point is to offload
| as much processing on to the computer, to make the process of
| communication as simple and direct for us as possible. Training
| ourselves to jump through mental and physiological hoops is the
| opposite of the point.
| lowdose wrote:
| Maybe the connections are in reality electronic stimulants to
| release dopamine, serotonine, endorphin & GABA et. al. in the
| mix of your cocktail without using pharmaceuticals. Neural link
| is a big Pharma killer dressed as a pig. Use a NN in the
| feedback loop trained on your autocomplete output.
| neatze wrote:
| How well subject can play QWAP with such interface ?
| texasbigdata wrote:
| So 10ish words per minute? Not blazing fast but for leading
| research pretty darn good! 40 WPM it probably beats the average
| human and most cell phone applications.
| spoonjim wrote:
| For someone who previously couldn't type, 10WPM probably feels
| like being able to leap over Mt. Everest.
| sonograph wrote:
| The NN in the article is based on handwriting, so comparing WPM
| to handwriting is a better apples-to-apples comparison than
| typing:
|
| > Studies compiled by Amundson (1995) show that copying rates
| using handwriting at the 1st grade level are about 5 words per
| minute (WPM) on average, but by the end of elementary school at
| the 5th and 6th grade level are about 10 to 12 WPM.
|
| Source
| https://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/departments/hiat/resourc...
| cortesoft wrote:
| 90 characters per minute is 18 words per minute.
|
| 'Words' in WPM is standardized to 5 characters
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_per_minute
| geoelectric wrote:
| Word length in characters:
|
| Zylog Z80: 1
|
| Intel 8086: 2
|
| PowerPC: 4
|
| Apple M1: 8
|
| IBM Selectric: 5
| whiddershins wrote:
| Yeah, similar to another comment, autocomplete alone could get
| WPM way up
| tobyjsullivan wrote:
| I guess the typer's experience could be a factor. I would
| expect someone to type around 10WPM - or even less - the first
| time they were placed in front of a keyboard. Getting to 40WPM
| usually takes years of practice. No evidence one way or another
| if this method could achieve the same with just practice and no
| changes to the technology.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| > Getting to 40WPM usually takes years of practice.
|
| 30-40 WPM was the target for high school computer typing
| courses in the 90s (my experience, may have been a similar
| target earlier and I don't know the target for courses
| targeting typewriters), and this was a time when computers
| weren't ubiquitous like today. It's very feasible to hit that
| target in a few months especially if you learn proper hand
| placement (hunt & peck, two finger typists, will have a
| longer ramp up time but can often still hit those speed
| targets).
| kordlessagain wrote:
| With about a word or two error every few minutes...maybe they
| could make the idea of rage run the backspace key.
| visarga wrote:
| We're going to complain about neural interface design like we
| do about web design. What are the best mappings?
| [deleted]
| melling wrote:
| Throw in some eye tracking software, autocompletion,
| specialized writing or programming software and you can do much
| better.
|
| https://www.tabnine.com/
| oblak wrote:
| Purely medical implications of such tech are more profound than I
| can imagine. And people have been imagining it for decades.
|
| Can you even imagine StarCraft or Quake matches, or better yey,
| some completely new games developed for brain computer interface?
| Man, it's VERY exciting.
| neatze wrote:
| Highly doubt such interfaces will outperform human natural eyes
| and hands.
| anonporridge wrote:
| At first...
| Nihilartikel wrote:
| As exciting as this is now, I'm very eager to see how brain-
| machine interfaces mature with findings how to best meet the
| machine half way.
|
| Decoding hand writing accurately is an approximate thing even
| when it's spoon fed to the machine via a digitizer, to say
| nothing of interpreting the movements from neural activity. What
| could be accomplished if we abandoned the familiarity of writing
| and existing glyphs and established a novel set of learnable
| 'brain semaphores' (e.g. visualize this symbol, play this sound
| on your mental speakers) that were easy enough for the user to
| practice and master with feedback, and blazing unambiguous
| markers to the probes and recognition algorithm? It's not hard to
| imagine that with deliberate practice and immediate feedback, the
| brain can develop connections for the sole purpose of the
| interface that no longer even piggyback on imagining
| motor/sensory events. Sending a keystroke would be no different
| than lifting a finger.
|
| I'm sure this isn't a novel idea, but my armchair observer
| prediction is that the field will start to move in the direction
| of purposefully designed mind-sign schemes and away from mimicry
| of physical movement as the technology becomes ubiquitous and
| less invasive.
| Hammershaft wrote:
| This concept made my sleep deprived morning just a little
| better, so thanks.
| nitred wrote:
| You've put to words what I've been thinking about for many
| years. I'm one of those people who find languages difficult and
| often find it difficult to convert my thoughts into words and
| sentences. From my perspective, 75 percent of mental effort
| goes into sentence formation and this process often derails my
| thought process.
|
| When I discovered NLP models like Word2Vec and Thought-Vectors,
| which assign vectors to words or even whole sentences/concepts,
| intuitively, it felt like that was exactly what was happening
| in my mind. It might be an illusion but I do not think in
| sentences or words, I only think in concepts and images that
| appear in my mind's eye in an instant. To form a larger idea, I
| build a chain of concepts. I am sure that eventually probes can
| pick up a clear distinct vector that uniquely summarizes the
| entire concept of what I was thinking or visualizing.
|
| And as you suggested we could start off with a smaller subset
| of semaphores or concepts or visualizations that at first are
| the easiest signals to pick up via probes. After practice,
| these signals only get crisper.
| rblatz wrote:
| Thanks for putting words to something I've been living with
| but unable to express.
| corndoge wrote:
| Can I ask if/how much you read books? I have a hypothesis I'm
| gathering data on.
| alanbernstein wrote:
| That's an interesting idea, but what makes you confident that
| any concept/image/sound you hold in your mind can be less
| squishy and vague than traditional sounds or characters?
| narwally wrote:
| Since it uses the neural signals for handwriting, I'm not sure
| this is going to allow me to achieve my dream of using emacs with
| my mind.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| You could probably put in some custom strokes for special keys.
|
| I'd like those interfaces to be less invasive. Maybe one day
| they are going to be less Neo and more Case.
| peterkos wrote:
| From my friends who studied neuroscience, the hardest part is
| getting any signal from the crazy amounts of noise. Maybe
| with the crazy amount of ML research poured into that space
| we can get one of those nice cross-disciplinary breakthroughs
| that come from similar tech (bluetooth/wireless sigproc,
| audio, etc.)
| doener wrote:
| See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27152734
| harveywi wrote:
| Now it is possible for one to literally mind one's p's and q's.
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