It’s all in the Mind

By Mukul Sharma

People who believed the development of language, writing, printing and the internet were revolutionary milestones in communication, are in for a surprise: the next revolution will literally blow their minds. For starters, being able to control a computer with the mind was the ultimate goal of human-machine interaction. It’s now going to be available from next year. An Australian company plans to release an adventure game which will allow players to move items on screen using merely their thoughts. Move over Yoda.

The game comes with a helmet containing non-invasive brainwave sensors to tune into electroencephalograph (EEG) signals that are naturally produced by the brain to detect players’ thoughts and connect them wirelessly to their PCs. So when the action requires a boulder to be moved out of the way, all that the player has to do is concentrate mentally on shifting it. No keystrokes, no mouse, no joystick.

Want to make it more magical? Why not will the rock to vanish? Volunteers testing the game who did that the first time said it left them feeling totally freaked out and spooky, as if some ‘Star Wars’ kind of force was suddenly with them.

And that’s not all. Such helmets are also capable of monitoring a subject’s emotional state and facial muscle movement so that even a wink, frown or smile can be transferred automatically without any added input to onscreen personas. People who have a presence in such virtual worlds like ‘Second Life’, for example, and have to key in ‘grin’ for their avatars to do likewise now merely have to grin themselves.

Among other things it means that communication between humans and machines which has so far been limited to conscious interaction, with non-conscious communication — expression, intuition, perception — reserved solely for the human realm, is about to change forever.

More significantly, what’s also about to change is how people communicate with one another. The US Army has just awarded a $4 million contract to the universities of California at Irvine, Carnegie Mellon and Maryland to start work on developing similar ‘thought helmets’ that would harness silent brainwaves for secure communication among troops. The army hopes the project will lead to direct mental control of military systems by thought alone and the idea is to have the device evaluate parts of the brain that interpret speech, translate the activity into information that can be relayed wirelessly to someone else’s headset, and then send the other person the message.

Initially the receiver would hear a robotic voice speaking the command into his headphones but scientists plan to develop a more sophisticated version in which commands are rendered in the speaker’s voice. Ultimately, the voice too could be retranslated back into reversed EEG signals and delivered directly to the brain so that the recipient would perceive the message as a thought.

With advances in miniaturisation and nanotechnology it’s only a matter of time before the helmet functions become small enough to be implanted directly into the brain so that the headset can be done away with altogether. People are already talking about the first civilian use for such embedded ‘radio telepathy’ being used for cellphone talking.

Does this mean our thoughts would be available to everybody? Not at all; just like our talking on telephones is not for general public consumption (but yes, hacking could still be a problem). Also, like cellphone service providers that exist today, there would then be thought transference providers who would automatically route callers through a controlled gateway and if one then didn’t want to pick up an incoming or ‘missed thought’, he or she could refuse to acknowledge or answer. A social network of concurring group minds, though, would flourish who wouldn’t require any other device to communicate between themselves.

At present we have no way of telling what such a world would be like to live in but — mind it — it would be spectacularly different from the one in which we live now.