About a week ago, I saw a neuroscientist speaking at UC Irvine on the topic of connecting human brains to computers. The killer app for this kind of functionality would be a exoskeleton that quadriplegics could use to move their body parts. For instance, they would think about walking forward, and the exoskeleton would capture this “neural impulse” and move them forward. This could lead to an army of unstoppable quadriplegic warriors.

The basics of this have already been tested in monkeys who can think about moving a joystick and a computer sends the signal to a robot arm that actually does move the joystick.

One problem is that in order to capture these neural impulses, scientists have to insert receptors directly into the monkey’s brain. Obviously that can be a bit of an issue when dealing with humans who are fussy about having their brain exposed.

It turns out, other scientists are developing a helmet which uses various means to measure electrical activity in the brain noninvasively. It’s similar to what people wear when they have an EEG, but on a much more complex level. The results being…

… previous attempts at noninvasive brain computer interfaces required that users only direct the computer during certain time slots. Imagine a metronome ticking very slowly, say once a second, directing you to imagine the movement of your robotic arm starting… now. How tedious.

Iáñez and colleagues’ approach gets around this limitation by using four different models, each with assumptions that are sometimes the opposite others. This way, however a subject’s brain happens to be wired up, all the computer has to figure out is whether they mean “left” or “right” in order to direct a robot arm in two dimensions.

The technology is obviously still in the early stages, but it could lead to the ability to “write” in a word processor simply by thinking the sentences.