Physical Thoughts

 

It has long been a dream of brain researchers to harness the power of the mind to move matter. Now a team of scientists at Germany's University of Tubingen, have found a way to teach paralysed patients to communicate through sheer thought. Using the aptly named "thought translation device," patients amplify and dampen their brain waves in a way that allows them to select letters on a video screen and spell out messages. "For the first time," says Niels Birbaumer, a Tubigen neurobiologist, "we have shown that it is possible to communicate with nothing but one's own brain" (and, to be fair, a pile of electronics), "and to escape at least verbally, the locked-in state."

Thoughts, intentions and memories are not mere ephemera with no physicality. They are instead, electrical signals that are easily picked up by an electroencephalograph (EEG). The Tubigen team, place one electrode behind the patient's ear and one on his scalp. The electrodes detect brain waves. Wires carry the electrical signals to an EEG, which plucks out a single type of wave from a sea of noise. It takes hundreds of hours of practice, but after painstaking training patients learn to modulate this wave: when they hear an audio tone, they concentrate on changing the strength of this brain wave through a technique that neuroscientist Edward Taub of the University of Alabama at Birmingham calls passive attention. Although he can't describe precisely describe how the patients do it, "somehow they learn to put their [brain waves] under voluntary control." Once they do, they are ready to spell, by choosing letters from those displayed on a video screen.

Birbaumer is trying to speed up the system, now about two characters per minute. But the scientists have dreams beyond the ABC's. "If someone can learn to control the amplitude [of his brain waves]." Says Taub, " that response can operate any aspect of the environment a programmer can hook up." In other words, the electronics can be wired so that the brain waves control light switches or a wheelchair. Even more visionary is the possibility of going wireless. Is the electronics are sensitive enough, they might be able to grab the brain waves out of the air. And then thinking will really make it so.

From a Newsweek article on the Mind