Thought-Controlled Computing
Power of the mind drives technology
InteraXon team harnesses brainwaves to operate video games,
gadgets and even levitating chairs
The Toronto Star
Feb 26, 2009
By: Joseph Hall
While they ready the chair you can levitate with your mind,
there's time for a little concert ...
Water squirts and pools on the floor as Steve Mann's fingers fly
across his "hydraulophone," coaxing "Twinkle,
Twinkle Little Star" out of the tadpole-shaped instrument.
"It's sophisticated frolic," says Mann, creator of the
hydraulophone, the water organ.
Mann is part of a team behind a little piece of techno Neverland
at work on Dundas St. W. In the cluttered offices of InteraXon
Thought Controlled Computing, a host of Tinkerbell-worthy gadgets
are taking flight.
"It's a pretty creative atmosphere," says lead
researcher Ariel Garten, about the fledgling firm. Perhaps the
most thought-provoking of the projects being pursued at the
funked-out facility are the games and gadgets that can be
manipulated with the mind.
Your mind can even levitate a chair and influence the accompanying
sound and music, Garten explains.
To run the mind-controlled devices, users have
electroencephalograph sensors. These sensors pick up the tiny
electronic pulses — microvolt in intensity — that buzz like
subatomic bees across your head. The pulses are the signature
signals of brain activity.
All of our thoughts, movements, and states of mind are the
products of neurochemical cascades that run along neurological
pathways in the form of electronic impulses.
"The summation of all this electrical communication can
actually be read outside of your brain," says Garten, an
accomplished artist and fashion designer, who also trained in
neuroscience. "And outside your head the amassment of all
this electrical activity is summed up ... and you can read the
general trend of your brain."
The specific "trend" of impulses the InteraXon team
capture are Alpha waves, which are generated when the mind is
"blissfully, calmly" relaxed, Garten explains.
"So you have to relax," she says as you sink back into
the cushioned chair, which dangles on a chain from a ceiling
missing a few tiles.
Breathe deeply and slowly, think of ocean waves. And on a computer
screen before you, a line measuring your Alpha wave output begins
to spike as you will your mind to relax.
When you're calmed down enough to push the spike past a tripping
line, an electronic winch begins to lift the chair.
"So, it's a really nice metaphor for a kind of meditative state,"
Garten says. "Everybody has always dreamed that as you meditate
you could ... levitate yourself."
As metaphors go, it may be nice imagery. As a practical matter, it
results from InteraXon's painstaking software programming that
allows it to capture the Alpha waves, isolate them from all other
electronic noise — from other computers, cellphones — and amplify
them into a usable electronic signal.
"All of that is nullified and we're just getting your pure
brainwave in a way that's meaningful," says Garten. And with
that isolated brainwave, Garten says, anything that can be plugged
in can conceivably be manipulated by Alpha activity.
InteraXon's main goal, Garten says, is as lofty as the chair.
"We're here to change the face of thought-controlled
computing," she says. "(It's) becoming much more common
and it's really the breaking point for this technology."
Garten describes the company as a "start up" that
launched a year ago. It has five partners, who initially financed
the company themselves, but buzz about their work has attracted
willing investors.
InteraXon is actively developing commercial games and other
gadgets for a general market.
The technology also has obvious implications for people with
physical impairments, from those who suffer from such degenerative
diseases such as ALS and Parkinson's, to those with spinal-cord
injuries. But InteraXon's focus is to bring the technology to the
general public.
And as interest heightens and technology is created — in the form
of computer games and other gadgets — the sophistication will grow
and prices fall, Garten predicts.
It's this technology-price cycle that will bring
thought-controlled computing to the field of assisted medical
devices, says Tom Chau, who holds the Canada Research Chair in
Pediatric Rehabilitation Engineering at Toronto's Bloorview
MacMillan Children's Centre.
Chau's Bloorview team creates devices to help severely disabled
kids interact with the world.
"Of course, the more this kind of technology gets developed,
the more useful it will be for our needs," says Chau.
