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Posts Tagged ‘eeg’

Users must teach themselves how to associate brain signals with specific tasks, causing neuronal activity that the brain scanners can pick up. Then they can make music.

It’s a pretty unique use of brain-computer interfaces, which are already being used to do things like drive cars, control robots and play video games. The device was developed by Eduardo Miranda, a composer and computer-music specialist at the University of Plymouth, UK. A composer by trade, Miranda said he was captivated by the idea of using a musical brain-controlled interface for therapeutic purposes. “Now I can't separate this work from my activities as a composer,” he told Nature News.

Patients with neurodegenerative disorders like Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s can use music to walk to a rhythm or even to trigger memories or emotions. But stroke patients or those with locked-in syndrome can’t interact with music beyond just listening to it. With this system, patients with physical limitations might be able to use music for therapy, too — truly making music the medicine of the mind.

Like other brain-computer interfaces, a user calibrates the system — and his or her brain — by learning to associate certain brain signals with a stimulus. While wearing an EEG cap, patients focus their attention on four small buttons on a computer screen, each of which triggers a series of musical notes. The user must direct his or her gaze at the target corresponding to the action he or she would like to perform, Miranda and colleagues explain.

Miranda and computer scientists at the University of Essex tested the system on a patient with locked-in syndrome, who learned the system in about two hours and was soon playing notes along with a backup track.

By varying levels of concentration, she learned to vary the amplitude of the EEG, which allowed her to choose among the different notes, like striking piano keys.

A future version of the system would not require calibration, relying on advanced algorithms to sense a user’s neuronal response to each button, the researchers say.

The work is reported in the journal Music and Medicine.

[Nature News]

Films could be indexed by the emotional responses they elicit

In the video below, Robert Oschler of Android Review demonstrates EmoRate, a software program that catalogs his emotions. It captures his reactions to the "Sintel" trailer, from the Durian open-source movie project.

EmoRate uses the Emotiv 14-electrode mind-reading headset, which wirelessly connects to a computer. The EEG reads and tracks your facial expressions, which allows it to track your emotions. This allows the computer to respond to your emotions and lets you affect the computer's actions.

The computer tracks four primary emotions --  happiness, sadness, anger and fear -- and catalogs when they occur. The catalog acts as a "silicon extension" of memory.

Once the catalog is built, you can search by emotion. Like a Mr. Skin for fear, the program will tell you precisely when a fear-inducing scene appears on screen.

The best part: You can search for scenes by emotion, just by remembering the scene and the emotion it conjured.

As Oschler explains, he recalls a fearsome scene in the trailer when a baby dragon is snatched away from the heroine. As he thinks about the moment, the fear meter rises, and the computer searches the catalog for fear-inducing scenes.

Watch the video:

[Android Review]

If the test works in real life, authorities will be able to pluck information from terrorist "chatter" and study the brain waves of terror suspects to confirm information about an attack in advance, such as date, location and weapon.

Even when the researchers had no advance details about mock terrorism plans, the technology still identified critical concealed information, according to J. Peter Rosenfeld, a psychology professor at Northwestern. Given a few details, the system works flawlessly, the researchers say.

The team used a mock terrorism scenario in which the subjects planned an attack in a major city. They were given information about weapons and bombs, and they had to write a letter about their plans to encode the information in memory.

Then, researchers attached electrodes to the "suspects" and measured their P300 brain waves, a type of cortical activity that occurs when meaningful information is presented to a person with guilty knowledge. It has been debated as a replacement for polygraphs.

In one test, the subjects sat in front of computer monitors that showed the names of various cities, including Boston, Chicago, Houston, New York and Phoenix. The city the participants chose for the attack presented the greatest P300 response, the study says.

Throughout the test, when the researchers knew some details about the planned attacks, they were able to correlate the terrorists' P300 brain waves to guilty knowledge with 100 percent accuracy.

Even more interesting, they were able to identify concealed information even when they had no advance knowledge, Rosenfeld says. Just by studying brain waves, they were able to identify 10 of 12 terrorists and 20 out of 30 crime-related details.

The protocol could be used to predict concealed knowledge and identify future activity, he says, providing an example of a suspicious person entering a building.

"You suspect that they're terrorists, and you have some leads from the chatter. You've heard they're going to attack one city or another in one fashion or another on one date or another," he says. Our hope is that our new complex protocol -- different from the first P300 technology developed in the 1980s -- will one day confirm such chatter in the real world."

[R&D Magazine]

A couple of recent studies have shown that a small minority of vegetative patients might be more aware than they seem. Now, Damian Cruse, with the Medical Research Council's Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, UK, thinks EEG machines will be able to help these patients communicate.

The team asked six healthy volunteers to wear electroencephalography (EEG) devices, which connect electrodes to a person's head. They were asked to respond to an audible tone by imagining that they were squeezing their right hands or wiggling the toes of both feet. The researchers found that the volunteers' brain responses were clearly different -- the hand-squeezing activated the left-hand side of the brain and the toe-wiggling produced a response in the center of the brain.

They then tested the procedure on a patient with locked-in syndrome, who was almost completely paralyzed but retains some control of his eye movements. His brain responses were the same. Finally, they tested the procedure on a patient who had been declared vegetative two years earlier. They watched the EEG signals and were able to deduce which movement the patient was imagining.

The same team had studied 23 vegetative patients over four years and found four patients were able to consistently respond to yes or no questions by changing their brain activity. They were asked to imagine playing tennis when they wanted to give one response, or walking around the house when they wanted to give the other.

Since the patients were responsive, they are not technically vegetative, the researchers say. Proof that they can communicate -- that they're not brain-dead -- would have major implications for family members' and doctors' decisions about their care.

[ the Economist]

This new kind of video game is a direct response to new challenges American troops are facing in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. With major combat operations over, more soldiers are spending more time on the ground with civilians, immersed in unfamiliar cultures and dealing with foreign languages and customs. The OSD wants to teach them how to keep their cool.

As such, the Pentagon is seeking games that respond directly to the cognitive and physiological cues of the trainees. The game then makes adjustments to the gameplay not only to keep it interesting and motivational for the player, but to create challenges that are more realistic for soldiers on the ground. For example, a first person shooter teaches a trainee how to kill, but not how to settle a family dispute in a Pashto-speaking village. The simulator aims to train them in these kind of high-pressure, non-combat situations. According to the solicitation:

"Trainees will be able to speak to and interact at any level with indigenous non-player characters (NPC), complete with voice recognition, speech, and facial gestures. The characters will react according to how the trainee interacts with them. Further the game will track how the local population reacts to these interactions. The game will adapt to changes in local population response. For example, if a player comes in and insults the local tribal leader the game scenario will change and the trainee will find that future interactions with the local population are more difficult and more hostile."

The OSD wants the game to be customizable depending on rank and status (commanders might learn culture-specific ways to deal with tribal elders, while grunts will learn the proper protocols for approaching and speaking to women in public spaces in a traditionally Muslim city) as well as fire team-immersive, allowing up to four live players in a simulation at a time. As any Call of Duty fan will tell you, there are plenty of games out there that prepare a limber mind for the ins and outs of warfare; this one might actually help soldiers learn how to win the peace.

[DoD Small Business Innovation Research via Danger Room]