Tuesday 30 September 2008

Pic of the day: Picture swiped from their website. It's the least they can do for free advertising! You put this headband on your forehead, and it reads your brain and stuff. No, really.

Neural impulsivity

I'm itching to buy this gadget, but I'm holding out so far. I already bought the 1-terabyte harddisk, and will buy a replacement for the bedroom desktop machine later, so perhaps that will dull the edge of the tech desire.

The thing is a Neural Impulse Actuator. It reads the weak electromagnetic impulses from your brain, your eye muscles, and facial muscles. You can assign these to other inputs such as mouse click or a certain key on your keyboard. Whenever you play a game and you thinkthat particular way, the key is pressed. It is supposed to be faster than first sending the command to your hand which then locates and presses the key. It is probably also less likely to cause repetitive stress injury, a pretty good argument for some of us.

Of course, much of my interest in it is pure scientific curiosity. My experience with meditation made me more aware of how brain states can be recalled and restored to a remembered state. Being able to experiment on this with a direct and precise feedback on the screen would be very interesting.

There have been many interests in my life that have flourished and then withered, usually with little or no effort from me. I simply realized that they don't really have any value for me. I suppose this would eventually happen with the Neural Impulse Actuator too. But right now, it is all I can do to keep from ordering one. I guess that is a kind of neural impulse too...

It costs around $200 here in Norway at the moment, but that is included the dreaded Scandinavian 25% sales tax. Also, it only works under 32-bits Windows. Not Mac, not Linux, not the new faster and more secure 64-bits Windows. Then again this is also true for Dragon NaturallySpeaking, and that has not stopped me. Wait, it is is not going to stop me in the near future. More about that when it has happened! Watch this space and pray I survive to tell you more about my exciting life!