[HN Gopher] Mind reading technology: helmet aims to unlock brain...
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Mind reading technology: helmet aims to unlock brain's secrets
Author : carride
Score : 33 points
Date : 2021-06-16 14:52 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bloomberg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bloomberg.com)
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| The justice system is about to get a lot simpler.
| shoto_io wrote:
| Wrote it elsewhere already:
|
| _> Devices are also going out to Harvard Medical School, the
| University of Texas, and the Institute for Advanced Consciousness
| Studies (a California lab focused on researching altered states)
| to study such things as Alzheimer's and the effect of obesity on
| brain aging, and to refine meditation techniques._
|
| _> Once their Kernel helmets arrive, Boas and his colleagues
| plan to observe the brains of people who've had strokes or suffer
| from diseases such as Parkinson's. They want to watch what the
| brain does as individuals try to relearn how to walk and speak
| and cope with their conditions._
|
| As far as I understand the whole thing, the helmet is supposed to
| replace existing, clunky, not mobile version of brain scanners.
| Pokepokalypse wrote:
| >The first Kernel helmets are headed to brain research
| institutions and, perhaps less nobly, companies that want to
| harness insights about how people think to shape their products.
|
| so . . . scammers scamming scammers?
| uberdru wrote:
| "The helmets, he says, will allow people to finally take their
| mental health seriously." Anyone else having Theranos flashbacks?
| slver wrote:
| Theranos had real value proposition. They just lied about
| having the tech.
|
| In this case I don't see the value proposition. Just bunch of
| marketing speak.
| 77pt77 wrote:
| Theranos was vaporware.
|
| This is vacuumware.
| [deleted]
| Barrin92 wrote:
| > _"If you went to a cardiologist and they asked you how your
| heart feels, you would think they are crazy," Johnson says. "You
| would ask them to measure your blood pressure and your
| cholesterol and all of that." "_
|
| Depending on what condition you're suspected to have that's a
| perfectly reasonable question, but that aside this showcases the
| tendency for reductionism that has become prevalent.
|
| The _mind_ is not equivalent to the brain, and neither is
| comparable to a mechanical device. The better analogy to the
| statement from Johnson is, if you wanted to inspect software you
| certainly would not start to turn transistors on your hardware
| upside down, or if you wanted to get insights into a Dostoevsky
| novel you wouldn 't start to inspect printer-ink on the pages.
|
| For some purely physical ailment of the brain better scanning
| techniques may very well be a good thing, but 90% of what his
| project seems to be about has little to do with the physical
| brain and a lot to do with studying emergent phenomena of the
| human mind, in which case getting lost in brain chemistry is
| probably not that helpful, and at worst seems to lead to a sort
| of ML-powered craniometry.
| aerodog wrote:
| Batman Forever?
| sxp wrote:
| Johnson was on the Lex Fridman podcast recent and discussed the
| helmet there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YbcB6b4A2U
|
| The most interesting thing is that one of their helmets, Flow, is
| using IR backscatter sensing rather than the electric or magnetic
| sensing that most other BCI devices (including their other
| helmet, Flux) use.
|
| The system is still pricey at $50-100k or $3.6k/mo, but they're
| also planning on selling a simplified version at $5k:
| https://docs.kernel.com/docs/how-much-does-a-flow-system-cos...
| slver wrote:
| So what is this tech good for in the first place.
| tudorw wrote:
| If I was wearing one I could wait until I'm in a flow state
| and write something witty, instead I just knocked out this
| worthless quip.
| meowface wrote:
| It's a little like asking "what is this tech good for in the
| first place" when the internet started becoming a thing. And
| many people did ask such a question.
|
| There are almost limitless possibilities. For example, if
| such a device were good and sensitive and accurate enough, I
| bet you could create some software that would let you quickly
| compose and produce music in a DAW via thoughts. And perhaps
| also even something more abstract like semi-implicit or
| subconscious "intentions" or notions. And if you might ask
| "okay, but what would that be good for?", I could write a
| whole essay I suppose.
|
| (Disclaimer: I've been waiting for years for something to
| come out that would let me try to build something like this.
| I'm sure it'll likely still be a while before it's possible
| to make and practical for consumers to buy and use, but I
| think it could potentially happen within our lifetimes.)
|
| It'd be much harder, but I think you could maybe even program
| certain things via thoughts. Maybe only a limited subset of
| things to start with, like visualizing a web page and having
| the basic skeleton, shapes, and colors quickly filled in, but
| if you look on the span of centuries, maybe eventually full
| programs, too.
|
| I'm not sure at all if this would actually be the case, but
| maybe some people could potentially achieve a very high WPM
| if their thoughts were converted into text. Much higher than
| anyone could type by hand. Especially if it were something
| where you were reciting text/speech from memory, so that it
| could happen at your raw speed of thought, rather than
| writing an essay where you have to think about what you
| actually want to say as you're doing it, in which case it
| might be fairly close to your typing or handwriting speed.
|
| Maybe this particular iteration of it won't be that great or
| that useful, but some future thing definitely will be.
| protoduction wrote:
| Having worked on BCI tech a little bit as a student assistant
| (which were not fNIR based though) there were a few
| directions:
|
| * Medical settings in which patients are slowly losing the
| ability to move or communicate, being able to look at a
| keyboard to type messages to your loved ones or perform basic
| actions (e.g. turning music on) make a terrible situation a
| tiny bit better.
|
| * Entertainment/gimmicks: you go to Disneyland and you put on
| a cap/helmet and suddenly you can interact with objects just
| by looking at them (they have a flickering light next to them
| that pulses in a certain binary pattern) - it's like magic.
|
| The second usecase is very difficult today though, the tech
| that I worked with (+5 years ago) needed to be trained for
| every new user and a training time of 10 minutes was
| considered very short. That of course makes the Disneyland
| usecase more difficult. Also you need to make sure you don't
| move or blink too much - maybe fNIR has less issues with
| that.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| When the first sentence of an "article" contains the company name
| and the price of the product, it is an advertisement. Did
| Bloomberg charge for this ad? Who had the idea to have the CEO
| shirtless wearing the helmet?
| anonymouse008 wrote:
| I had super high hopes when Bryan was developing a MEG (magnetic
| and electrical signals) helmet... now that it's basically fNIR
| with some fancy scattering, nodding to you Dr. (infrared
| basically), he's left my hopes high and dry.
|
| BOLD signals are great, but they are based on oxygenation of
| blood, which is a latent, and at best a second order effect for
| metabolic activity, which is then reference to be brain
| activity...
|
| I'll have to dig up the studies, but if you've been paying
| attention on HN and elsewhere we are starting to find that
| 'strengthening' neurons with a fiber like substance around it
| reduces the electrical activity required to achieve the same
| neural-result. Combine this with recent papers saying that mice
| smell a rose with a different, migrating, set of neurons each
| time... and you end up thinking, damn... this really isn't the
| right approach to BCI / mind reading.
| asgraham wrote:
| > 'strengthening' neurons with a fiber like substance around it
| reduces the electrical activity required to achieve the same
| neural-result.
|
| I think you're talking about myelination, which is a result
| that's been around for quite a while. Myelination probably
| wouldn't confound this kind of "brain reading" because it's
| relatively stable, i.e. changes occur over the course of days
| at a minimum. Any "brain reading" will have to account for
| changing neural efficacies, as that's what learning is, and the
| tricky stuff would be learning on the scale of seconds or
| minutes (e.g. changes in synaptic efficacy) rather than things
| like myelination.
|
| That being said, while the conventional wisdom is that myelin
| is stable over the course of months/years in the adult brain,
| perhaps it's results suggesting more ongoing plasticity that
| are the more recent results you're referring to (a general
| trend in recent neuroscience). If so, I'd love to see those
| studies.
|
| Disclaimer: I'm soooo skeptical of this kind of extracranial
| signals being used for "unlocking the brain's secrets." There's
| lots you can do with those signals, sure, just look at the past
| decades of EEG research. But they seem to be wanting to go far
| deeper with fundamentally the same technology, which seems like
| a dicey proposition to me. So while I think there are lots of
| potential critiques of this technology, I just don't think
| myelination is the critique to go with.
| namlem wrote:
| The article was sparse on the details, does the Flux helmet not
| use OPM-based MEG? I agree that it is by far the most promising
| technology for neuroimaging, though I wasn't aware of anyone
| working on it aside from a couple of university labs in
| England.
|
| We're never going to get the kind of fidelity we need for
| advanced diagnostics (much less mind reading) with fNIRS or
| fMRI. Bringing down the cost of MEG tech is the only realistic
| way forward.
| Bukhmanizer wrote:
| From the vague claims, weird mysticism, and lofty goals, I would
| be very careful about this product. It smells very much like bs.
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