Can technology read your Mind?
May 12th 2011 20:18
An old technology is providing new insights into the human brain.
The technology is called electrocorticography, or ECoG, and it uses electrodes placed on the surface of the brain to detect electrical signals coming from the brain itself.
"This is both very exciting and somewhat frightening at the same time. It really goes pretty close to what people used to call mind reading."
- Gerwin Schalk, ECoG researcher, Wadsworth Center
Doctors have been using ECoG since the 1950s to figure out which area of the brain is causing seizures in people with severe epilepsy. But in the past decade, scientists have shown that when connected to a computer running special software, ECoG also can be used to control robotic arms, study how the brain produces speech and even decode thoughts.
In one recent experiment, researchers were able to use ECoG to determine the word a person was imagining.
"This is both very exciting and somewhat frightening at the same time," says Gerwin Schalk, a researcher who studies ECoG at the New York State Department of Health's Wadsworth Center in Albany. "It really goes pretty close to what people used to call mind reading."
So perhaps it's not surprising that Schalk's research is funded by both the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Army.
The key to all of the new uses for ECoG is software, designed in part by Schalk, that helps scientists decode the electrical signals coming from the brain.
The brain uses those signals every time we wiggle a toe or form a thought. But the signals also provide a real-time broadcast of precisely what the brain is doing, and Schalk's software allows scientists to eavesdrop on this broadcast.
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