A startup company called ledface is working on their new web service that will turn each registered user into a node within collectively intelligent network. After acquiring the membership, users can start asking their questions and collective intelligence is supposed to answer them.

As I understood from their website, it works like this:

• you post the question
• ledface starts googling through all of its users, looking for people who are best fit to give an answer
• chosen ones form a small team to solve the question in a collaborative manner

That makes it different from current Q&A websites, where answers compete with each other to become the best one. Plus, on the Q&A services we have now, you can only hope that your question will get noticed by an expert, but ledface will take care of finding the right people.

There are no user rank and all people are anonymized, so why would you want to answer any questions here at all??? I assume that by answering, you’ll get your own questions better promoted so you can get better answers:

“one of the rewards Ledface offers is that the more you contribute, the more you “unlock” percentages of the collective brain. You’ll reach 100% only if you really get involved”

Behind ledface there is a vision of creating if not global brain, but at least collaborative environment, where people can help each other without having to think, think, think all the time about their reputation.

Personally, I’m rather skeptical because of all that blah blah on collective intelligence etc. on their blog. Any social network or Wikipedia that are numerous today can be called collective intelligence, in that sense, but only ledface seems to be riding these visions in order to promote themselves. But let’s see how it goes. Really, if they make this Q&A service work in realtime, so that anyone can think on the question together with collective mind, that may become a pre-alpha version of the emerging global brain.

Link to the official ledface website

A few weeks ago I’ve been interviewed for H+ Magazine on my project of re-engineering human consciousness with new technologies such as brain-machine interfaces, and I attach the most interesting points from the interview here. Shortly about the project:  to develop such brain-machine interface that will enable us to actually feel what is going on inside the machine, and even become aware of what is going on inside the minds of other connected people. It turns out, however, that there is much more usefulness into this project than just the potential to spy into others’ minds (don’t take me wrong – it can actually help us understand each other better!) – there is also potential for increase in our lifespan up to the immortality, and for increase in our level of spiritual freedom. If you’re interested how – read points #06 and #07. There is also discussion of the most relevant research that will provide a decent base for implementing the project – #02 and #08, and lot of other interesting stuff

#01 introduction

Ben: In your talk at the H+ Summit at Harvard University last June, you said the following provocative words: “Potentially, brain chips can also be designed to have consciousness inside them. Inserted into a human brain, such a conscious implant would expand the user’s conscious experience with its own contents. For this, however, a new kind of brain-machine interface should be developed that would merge consciousness in two separate systems  – the chip and the brain  – into single, unified one.”   OK — this is pretty interesting and exciting-sounding! — but I have a few questions  about it.  First – just to get this out of the way — what do you mean by “consciousness” when you use that word?  As you know, different researchers give the word very different meanings.

me: Yep, the word “consciousness” spans a broad spectrum of meanings.  I refer to the most common one, known as “phenomenal consciousness”, or “qualia” in philosophers’ language.  Consciousness, in this sense, is hard to define or explain but very easy to understand. Simply put, it is the ability to experience the world around us — in pictures, sounds, smells  – plus the stuff that is happening inside our brain and body — thoughts, memories, emotions and etc.

May I describe an experiment to illustrate this better: If I put you in front of a computer screen that will show some image for a very very short time (around 15 ms), you won’t be able to see anything. But still, you will be able to learn and take actions based on this image. For example, if I give you a series of puzzle-solving tasks — some solvable and some not  – and then flicker my invisible image for each unsolvable puzzle  – then after, you’ll be more likely to drop the task when exactly this image is flickered, regardless of whether the task is solvable or not. So you actually perceived the image, memorized it and made a decision based on it. And all this happened without you actually noticing anything! This effect is called “unconscious priming.”

Such experiments show something exists that is different from mere thinking, perceiving, learning, acting, and living  – something that enables us to actually experience what is going on  – i.e., consciousness.

#02 implementation

Ben: So what do you think are the ingredients that would enable a brain chip to have qualia (consciousness) inside it?  Am I correct in assuming that your hypothesized brain chip is an ordinary digital computer chip?  So that the consciousness inside the chip — the qualia — are achieved by appropriate programming?

me: I doubt the ordinary digital computer chips would be able to perform on par with the rest of the brain, given that we need a supercomputer to emulate even a single cortical column like in the Blue Brain project.  So it seems that ordinary digital chips wouldn’t integrate well into real-time conscious experience.

It is more likely that a new class of information-processing hardware  – neuromorphic chips — that is currently under active development, will be useful for the project.  These neuromorphic chips try to mimic approaches used by biological nervous systems. Probably, they’ll be effective for recreating consciousness, too.

#03 merging with a chip

Ben: Do you feel like you have a good subjective sense of what it would feel like to merge your brain-consciousness with a chip-consciousness  in that way? Would it feel like expanding yourself to include something new?  Or could it maybe feel like losing yourself and becoming something quite different?

me: It depends on the implementation of the chip! For example, we can (I hope) develop a chip that would “contain” visual qualia. Being connected to the brain, such chip will feel like a third eye, expanding our visual field to include pictures from the connected camera. This camera can be attached to one’s back  – providing a 360-degree panoramic worldview  – or it may be connected to the Internet and project to the consciousness pictures from remote places.  And implants with visual qualia will surely be helpful for blind persons, too.

But visual consciousness is by no means the only modality of consciousness: there are also sounds, smells, thoughts, and so on, and every modality is unique, very different from all others. Probably, within a chip we can even engineer absolutely new kinds of conscious modalities  – but how is it possible to imagine what these modalities will feel like?…

#04 brain-to-brain communication

Ben: Do you think it would be possible to feed one person’s  thoughts somehow directly into another person’s brain, via interfacing  the chips installed in their respective brains?  Or do you think some kind of translation or normalization layer would be required between  the two people, to translate one person’s individual thought-language  into the other person’s individual thought-language?

me: Actually, “feeding” thoughts from one brain to another, or even “translating” them is the complete opposite of the shared-consciousness concept!

Within shared consciousness we’ll be able to perceive thoughts that are going on in other brains directly, so there is no need to copy them anywhere. To explain, brain activity gives rise to unified conscious experience; but still, for this to happen, each separate neuron does not have to receive a copy of all thoughts that are being thought by all other neurons – instead, each neuron simply contributes its own part to the whole experience. The same holds when connecting minds of different people together: to bring up an experience of shared consciousness, one doesn’t require explicit transfer of thoughts from one brain to another.

But what information, if not thoughts, will be transferred through the connection then?  That’s one of the things we need to figure out!

#05 collective consciousness

Ben: Hmmm … I wonder if some of my own work on cognitive modeling may give some clues about that.   One can model memory as “glocal”, i.e. memories can be modeled as containing localized aspects, but also global distributed aspects.  The localized aspect of a memory can then trigger the activation of the global aspect, in the overall distributed mind network.  This is how things work in our OpenCog AI system. So if thoughts have localized and globalized aspects, maybe it’s the localized aspects that get passed around, causing the globalized aspects to self-organize in the minds that receive the messages…
But, getting back to the experiential aspect — do you feel like you have a good subjective sense of what it  would feel like to mentally link with other peoples’ minds in this  way?  Would it feel like becoming part of a greater whole, an  uber-mind — or more like having other people’s thoughts flit in and  out of one’s head?  Or might the character of the experience depend sensitively on the details of the technical implementation?

me: I thought about what the collective consciousness can feel like, and I can imagine three options here:

1. “Borg-like” consciousness This will feel like our experience, knowledge, and worldview have been tremendously expanded. We will have access to one another’s memories, feelings, and expertise, and therefore will be able to think more broadly, make better decisions, and generate better ideas.
2. “Background” consciousness In this option, we will experience several simultaneous streams of consciousness, but these streams won’t influence each other in any way. We will be aware of several contradictory viewpoints (coming from different brains) at the same time, but still won’t be able to make decisions or generate ideas that take into account each of the viewpoints (unless connected people will discuss with each other, of course)
3. “Emergent” or “higher-level” consciousness This one comes out of the idea that a group of people may itself constitute some kind of an organism. Just like biological cells, collected together, constitute a human being with higher levels of intelligence and consciousness than possessed by any individual cell, similarly a group of people can constitute yet another kind of being, that is capable of its own thinking and experience. Actually, recent research has shown that collective intelligence within a group of people is actually present and irreducible to the intelligence of individual group members  – this IQ arises from interactions between them. It is very possible that collective consciousness arises when people are brought together, too  – and we may potentially experience this higher level of consciousness by physically connecting our brains through BMI (brain-machine interfacing)…

Ben: Interesting possibilities!   But, I’m afraid I don’t fully understand your distinction between borg consciousness and emergent consciousness – could you clarify?

me: Emergent consciousness is different from Borg consciousness because in the Borg case, the content of consciousness is expanded  – we have more ideas, and more sources that generate ideas, more experience, and so on, inside our mind; but still experience is basically the same.

Emergent consciousness, on the contrary, doesn’t have to share much with conscious experience that we have now, because its main substrate is not neural activity but individuals and interactions between them. As a result, the content of emergent consciousness won’t necessarily include all the ideas and experiences that individuals have, since not all these ideas end up being expressed in interactions. So the transformation will be more qualitative than quantitative.

#06 collective consciousness and freedom

Ben: But, thinking more about emergent consciousness … do you think that would feel like a loss of free will?  Or, given that “free will” is largely an illusory construct anyway (cf the experiments of Gazzaniga, Libet and so forth), do you think our brains would construct stories allowing themselves to feel like they’re “freely willing” even though the emergent consciousness is having a huge impact on their choices?  Or would the illusion of free will mainly pass up to the higher-level consciousness, which would feel like IT was freely deciding things?

me: Actually, ascending onto higher (emergent) levels of consciousness, if done correctly, should feel like acquiring freedom, and not illusory.

Ben: Ah, well, that’s a relief!
I suppose that’s why you called it the “Consciousness Singularity” (in your presentation at the H+ Summit @ Harvard)….

me: If you think about it, emergent consciousness may already exist to an extent, in places where people engage in highly interactive collective information processing (e.g. Facebook).  Remember that experiments provide evidence for existence of collective, or emergent (produced by interactions between members) intelligence within groups.  And this intelligence does not require wiring brains together  – language is enough to establish the necessary brain-to-brain interactions. The same can hold for consciousness  – any group of people engaged in collective activities can produce this next level of consciousness as a result of their interactions.

Ben: Right – these are examples of emergent consciousness, but they’re fairly limited.  And when the phenomenon gets massively more powerful due to being leveraged by brain-computer interfaces and neural implants rather than just web pages and mobile phones and so forth then you get the Emergent Consciousness Singularity!

me: Yes – and if you think about it, the Consciousness Singularity, is indeed the ultimate liberation of the immortal human soul!

In our present state our freedom is very constrained by the society we live in.  Engaging in social interactions always applies some constraints on our freedom, often very significant ones. Belonging to society makes us obey various laws and traditions  – for example, not too long ago every woman had to be a housewife, and alternate careers were prohibited. Most women had nothing to do but submit to the constraint.

However, the society itself as a whole was still “thinking”  – in form of political debates and revolutions  – on the topic of women rights, and finally got to the conclusion that set the women free. You see, individual women were not free to decide their career for themselves, due to social pressure; but society as a whole is free to think and make decisions on what it would want to look like. Hence, emergent consciousness has more freedom because it has nobody else around to set rules and constraints.

Ben: Until the emergent uber-mind makes contact with the other, alien emergent consciousnesses, I suppose … then you’ll have society all over again!
But of course — then the various emergent consciousnesses could merge into an even bigger emergent consciousness!

me: …and it will be great to live to see that sort of thing happen

#07 collective consciousness and immortality

Ben: Well, you’ve also mentioned a connection between emergent consciousness and immortality, right?

me: Exactly!  If new technologies will enable us to somehow rise to this higher level of (emergent) consciousness, then we’ll ultimately become not only much more free, but essentially immortal, as a bonus. We will live as long as society exists. Just like replacing individual neurons in our brain doesn’t affect our existence as a whole, similarly we won’t be affected by the mortality of individuals anymore.

One may think that we’ll lose ourselves in that process, but losing yourself is a necessary feature of any transformation  – including such everyday activities as learning, training, acquiring new experience, and so on. And, in case of emergent consciousness, we’ll still have our old self as a part of our new self, for some time.

Ben: Hmmm – yeah, about “losing ourselves.”   You say “we” will become almost immortal in this process.  It seems clear that something that had its origin in human beings will become almost immortal, in this eventuality.  But let’s say you and me and a few dozen or billion of our best friends merge into an emergent meta-mind with its own higher level consciousness.  The immortality of this meta-mind won’t really be much like immortality of you or me personally, will it? Because what will be immortal will NOT be our individual selves, not the “Alexandra” or “Ben” constructs that control our brains at the moment.  Although in a sense our personal streams of qualia might still exist, as threads woven into a much greater stream of qualia associated with the meta-mind….  So I wonder about your use of the pronoun “we” in the above.  Do you really feel like this would be “your” immortality?

me: Sure it will be mine, but “me” will be transformed at that point — I won’t be the same “me” as before.  And you and your friends, too  – we all will transform from being separate entities into one big single entity.  So it’ll be everyone’s immortality – just in case you were worried about other people being left out!

#08 implementation

Ben: Well, I’m certainly convinced these would be interesting eventualities!  I’m not quite convinced that it would be a transformed “me” living on in this sort of emergent consciousness, as opposed to some sort of descendant of “me.”   But actually we don’t even have a good language to discuss these points.  So maybe this is a good time to bring the conversation back toward the practical.
I wonder — in terms of practical R&D work going on today, what strikes you as most promising in terms of eventually providing a practical basis for achieving your long term goals?

me: I can tell you which research areas I consider the most promising in terms of providing the sufficient theoretical basis that should be obtained before we can move onto practical developments. These research areas are complex systems science, network science and connectomics (e.g. the Human Connectome Project).Research in these areas will help us understand how to engineer a neural implant that will integrate itself successfully within a complex network of neurons; how the neural implant can fit well within the complex, self-organizing system that is the brain; and how separate, autonomous neural networks such as brains of different people can be wired together so that they will work as a system with single, unified consciousness.

Ben: Definitely an understanding of complex networks will help a lot, and may even be critical.  But what about the hardware and wetware aspect?  How do you think the brain-computer interfacing will actually work,  when your ideas are finally realized?  A chip literally implanted into the brain, with the capability for neural connections to re-wire  themselves to adapt to the chip’s presence and link into the chip’s  connectors?

me: It’s not easy to talk in concrete details about the future given that some new technology that changes everything can emerge anytime.  But I’m happy to share a few guesses.

A common guess is that some technology will be invented that will enable machines to communicate wirelessly and simultaneously with a vast number of single neurons (and their synapses) in the brain. Such technology will be a kind of ultimate solution for the BMI problem and will be useful for consciousness-expanding endeavors too. Then, we won’t even need to implant anything  – just wearing a special cap will be enough. But I doubt something like that will be invented in near future.

My guess is that novel brain-machine interface designs that are applicable to my consciousness-expanding project will emerge from synthetic biology.  Neural implants won’t be silicon-based microprocessors like we have now  – rather, they will be completely novel artificially-designed biological machines.

Neural implants made of biological substrate will integrate easily into surrounding network of biological neurons.  And by applying synthetic biology tools to this substrate, we’ll be able to engineer those functions that we need our implant to implement.  We’ll be able to tinker with the substrate so it will perform faster and better than analogous biological processors (like brains) designed by nature.  And we’ll be able to make this substrate compatible with classical silicon-based hardware.

Such a neural implant may be used as an autonomous brain-enhancer — or may serve as an intermediate layer between brain and computers, being compatible with each of them!

Ben: Hmmm….  I’m wondering now about the interface between the implant device and the brain.  Do you think you could just insert an implant, and let the brain figure out how to interact with it?  Or will we need to understand the precise means via which intelligence emerges from neural wiring, in order to make a richly functional BCI device?

me: I think it will be a compromise solution. New solutions for brain-machine interfacing will take advantage of innate brain capabilities for learning, plasticity, and self-organization. But for this, new BMI devices have to be designed in a much more brain-friendly way than now, and this will require better understanding of the brain itself. Probably, we won’t need a complete description of how neural wiring result in intelligence and consciousness — but some understanding of this process will be a necessary prerequisite for good BMI designs.

Ben: Yes, I see.  That sounds reasonably believable to me, in fact…. I’ll be pretty happy when this sort of technology leaves the realm of frontier science and enters the realm of everyday commodity!  One day perhaps instead of just an iPhone we’ll have an “iBrain”! So maybe, when the time comes, I’ll just be able to plug my iBrain into the handy cranial interface tube in the back of my head, let it burrow its way into my brain-matter appropriately, and then jack into the shared consciousness matrix, and feel my petty individual self give way to the higher emergent uber-mind [...]

many thanks to Ben Goertzel for providing me with all these thought-provoking questions! check out his homepage to get tutorials for building a smarter-than-human Artificial Intelligence (caution: will take a long time especially for novice!), musings on Singularity topic, and other cool stuff

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/conteckt88/files/

- look for file named eegRead.zip

It’s written in C++ and should complie without problems with Borland C++ Builder 6.0 – which can be downloaded from torrent.

Also, I threw there a OpenViBe driver sketch - kt88-1016-openvibe.zip – to use Contec KT88 with OpenViBe BCI software. Disclaimer: It has only basic functionality and some features like configuration still has to be done.

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I was one of those happy participants of TSC 2010 that took place in Tucson, Arizona past week. It is the biggest event dedicated to consciousness this year, with diverse participants and their approaches ranging from meditation and philosophy to neurobiology and quantum physics.

In general I liked the conference, but the thing I definitely didn’t like is that you had to pay for everything! Ok, organizing the conference costs money, but at least they could offer video recordings for free to conference participants – anyway, we paid the registation fee of 350$ already… or at least for presenters!

I skipped pre-conference workshops (they also costed some $$) on the first day. On the next day we had some introducory plenary talks (that I didn’t find so much interesting) and 7 concurrent sessions (each session is 5 consecutive talks on the same topic, all sessions are at the same time but in different rooms). My background is computer science – so firstly I went for session called “AI and computational models”, hoping to hear some fresh insights on how to create consciousness in machine.

The first two talks – by Alexaei Samsonovich and Peter Ford Dominey – were not bad! Alexei is developing an AI software that uses the same method for learning as we humans do, and therefore it might be conscious. For teaching the program basic skills he came up with quite an innovative approach – using his students as trainers.
After finishing the talk he was asked how long will it take for the software to turn into real superintelligent brain ready to enslave the poor humankind. “It depends on public interest” – he answered. Well, this answer is not enough for me – and for you too, if you want to know if real AI is possible at all or it is just a sci-fi. So I asked Alexei to give an estimate of how long will the development take in hypothetical case of unlimited money funds. “5 years” – so if some mad scientist with a lot of cash in his pocket will become really, REALLY embittered by this world… beware!

Peter Dominey demonstrated videos with some cute robots made by their lab. These robots can learn to collaborate on complex tasks, differentiate between roles and help others when needed. The robots were reasking constantly about how to do this or that – so that one participant told me secretly she would slug such robot down to iron crap in first 5 minutes! So irritating it was.

Only human could come up with such destructive idea! The robot would not – it doesn’t have emotions – it just cannot feel anger, irritation, envy and other evil spirits that rule our world.

The 3rd talk – some stuff about quantum approaches to consciousness – was disappointing – the author admitted in the beginning that he learned he is presenting something almost in the last minute.. so he didn’t too much preparation. The talk was not given – from the very beginning it transformed to discussing with audience the lack of evidence for role of quantums in consciousness.

After that I escaped slightly to the philosopher’s session “Consciousness, Representation, and Thought” held in next room. I didn’t understand what talks were about, but I have to commend to the art of performance and passion of presenters… Thanks to Philip Goff and Berit Brogaard – that is how all lectures should be taught!

Evening party had free food, paid beverages and a lot of different, interesting and boring, people to chat with. I met one girl with “NanoNeuroscience” title on her badge My first thought was that she is from Russia – here, to get your research funded all you have to do is to put this “nano-” in your proposal! But it turned out that Nancy Woolf is from Los Angeles, and her research is really about nanoscales in neuroscience.
I asked her if it is possible to make a small nanobots that would interface with your brain… the answer “no” was a little bit disappointing

Wednesday had a very interesting plenary talk from Dharmenda S. Modha. He analyzed brain connectivity with the same methods as Google uses to analyze the Internet, and found some interesting results. In particular, analysis showed there exists a central hub in the brain, massively connected to other brain areas, that includes prefrontal cortex.

There were also concurrents on Wednesday – I kept on running from one session to another but nowhere I could find any talks interesting to me. The fun moment was that some rooms were overcrowded & stuffy, while others had only a few people inside, and even those were sleeping.

On Thursday, plenary session was made interesting by talk from from Michael Proulx. I didn’t know before that it is possible to see using your ears instead of eyes.

I would also like to mention Friday’s plenary talk by Sid Kouider – he made an analysis of different theories of consciousness, which is quite useful – there is a lot of theories – and their body is growing – but how to select the right one is not yet known.

Friday evening had a poster session… there was also a poster session on Wednesday, but Friday’s session was bigger & better, and it attracted more people. Almost every poster was colorful & nice to look on, so I had to turn on my brain and look for worthy content. Amanda DaSilveira found that Brazil people are generally less aware than Americans of what is happening around! Another poster I remembered was by Amna Alfaki – it was just one big paragraph of abstract text, printed on 96×48 inch paper sheet. It really standed out from all other posters The content was also interesting – about neurons located in the heart that could have its own conscious experiences… something in support of this old soul-in-the-heart idea.

There was also a poster “Have Your Ever Thought that Memory is not Inside Your Brain?” by Eugene Ledezma in Neuroscience section

On last day a lot of people came to listen the talk by bestselling sci-fi writer Robert J. Sawyer about consciousness in science fiction. But talk turned out to be more about science fiction vs. science in general. According to Robert, sci-fi writers are scientists who just work on a bigger timescale and do not restrict themselves by taboos on personal opinions and other stupid rules imposed by scientific journal editors.

In general, the conference was ok albeit too loaded with information – it started from 8:30am (which incites on replacing some talks with good morning sleep) and went onto late evening, and even with this schedule I had to miss some interesting talks because they were on concurrent sessions. Of course I could by the recording but it is pricey!

The thing I very regret for is not taking photos… next time I’ll definitely bring a camera!

Regarding KT88-1016, I think I’ll have to abandon this project for an undefined time! Got a BCI-related job here, and anyway, everyone is going for Emotiv now. And I became disappointed now in capabilities of EEG-based BCIs – invasive approach definitely offers more!

On this interview BCI researcher Francois Vialatte answers some unpleasant questions surrounding BCI research, such as does BCI really has its future? Also we discuss current problems with publicity of science, potential hypnotic effects of BCI and possibility of entering altered state of mind while playing BCI games.

When and why did you become interested in BCI?

When I was a young Master’s degree student, I had an intuition that machine learning methods could be applied to extract information from brain signals. I had not read anything related to BCI, but was already developing my own theory. Interestingly, I discussed my idea with my roommate, who believed that my theories were some kind of fringe science, or science-fiction fantasy. Regarding dates, it would be 2002… Later on, I had the chance to join a lab where BCI is one of the main research topic.

There is an opinion that hype created by media around BCI is a big bubble which is about to blow, and BCI cannot really compete with its alternatives in any application. Anyone who invests in BCI will lose his money. What is your opinion about this?

There is a part of truth in this affirmation. The media tend to present a distorted picture of what BCI systems can do. This being said, there are certainly numerous applications where BCI will become profitable, with feasible industrial applications.

For example?

Clinical applications for paralyzed patients (especially with ALS) are the most obvious applications. Video games will most probably be a rich field to explore. I think also that neurometrics are viable applications. Somehow, what can be said about BCI is that the technology recently moved from the basic research to the applied research, so it is still far from being optimal.

But what about existing interfaces for disabled persons based on eye-tracking? Can they compete with BCI?

Nice question. Why should eye-tracking be opposed to BCI? Both technologies can be integrated (in this case we generally speak about BMI, or Brain Machine Interface). My opinion is that BCI will be integrated in the future technologies (such as combined eye-tracking/BCI systems)

But can eye-tracking become cheaper and more easy-to-use alternative to BCI?

If you really want to put the two technologies in competition, then there has to be a looser. The more “easy to use” is not the winner, but the one with the higher bit rate transfer. On this aspect, no one knows what the future will be. And there is no guarantee that BCI or eye-tracking would win or loose. This is why I would suggest industrial applications to be based on both (and also on other physiological measurements, such as ECG, etc… when possible).

What are main obstacles that prevent BCI to become widely used?

As I mentioned above, BCI recently moved from the basic research to the applied research. The last step, the development of industrial prototypes, is not completed (or only in the beginning). Some applications could already be developed, but I suppose that companies are waiting until an optimal level of research is reached. Several questions remain opened, many elements are still untested.

What is the coolest thing about BCI?

This technology is one of the most impressive application of the recent progresses in neuroscience. BCI is cool because it is nearly a science-fiction technology. This is probably the reason why it became so fashionable in the media. But to me, BCI is interesting because it let me dream of what could be done at the next step (when we will hopefully have access to more precise measurement technologies, or more accurate mathematical tools).

And something about science publicity… When I just started to using this science papers, I always wondered where is the source code section. Usually only results and description are published, for code, this is not common. What are you opinion?

I agree, it is not common to see it published, and it would be a good habit. This is a problem similar to data withholding in science. Data and code are intellectual properties, the scientist is not always the owner of these elements, and not always encouraged (or even allowed) to share them. Somehow, this is detrimental for developing countries (with less fundings, their scientists have access to less data or code than the developed countries). In other words, modern science is not international, and not public. Only its results are made public. A few journals have, exceptionally, policies asking the authors to submit their data and code together with the paper.

For check?… So the situation is that research groups just want to keep their secret to themselves?

Yes. If you keep your data and your code, then you have some kind of “intellectual trust”. This way you can keep control of your field, and avoid competition.

This not good (should be corrected)…

Yes, I agree, it should be corrected. But it needs some institutional will to move it towards the good direction: research is not directed by scientist, but by administrative policy makers, who are not totally aware of all the aspects of the problem.

Well if even Microsoft finally had to make moves towards opensource, I think for science we won’t wait for too long. But it will require some competitive pressure from independent researchers… otherwise there will be no need for institutions to change existing system.

Note that I understand that the problem is not the same in industry, but there is a hope. A company has to make money on short term, this is obvious, and if they share their code and their data (if they are the only one doing so), it is like shooting in their own foot. But for science, there is hope. If the new generation of young scientists are willing to make these changes, they can spread the idea. Furthermore, they will be the scientific leaders of tomorrow.

Let’s talk about your research in signal synchrony. It is not focused on BCI specifically but BCI improvement is one of its possible applications. But was BCI improvement the main idea from which this study started?

Well, the idea is somehow “bidirectional” improve BCI on one hand, get a better understanding of synchrony on the other hand. Synchrony should increase the reliability of BCI signal processing tasks.
Concerning other applications, I am also working on Alzheimer’s disease. In this context, we use measures of synchrony to investigate the early stages of the disease. For Alzheimer, the purpose is two-fold: obtain a better understanding of the disease, and possibly develop methods to help the diagnostic of the disease before its onset (a task also termed as early detection). Potentially, these measures have many applications. Generally speaking, if brain signal synchrony is a relevant feature for the brain, any technology involving the brain could exploit similar techniques (especially if higher cognition is involved).

So how is synchrony helpful for BCI?

Synchrony provides us with a higher level feature. Synchrony and other methods could be compared metaphorically to the use of a microscope vs. direct observation.

With synchrony more like observation – i.e. it helps us to see the forest for the trees.

Yes, synchrony gives a bigger picture. For my own research, I have to solve the problem of integrating the time, frequency, and space dimensions of EEG (space = electrodes) Fourier measures are electrode-specific, they do not indicate relationships between different brain areas. Other recent measures could be compared with synchrony, like for instance measures of information flow.

Ok, could you tell something about application of synchrony to SSVEP-based BCI?

My preferred BCI systems are the P300 and SSVEP based systems. The reason is that with this system, the subjects do not need lengthy and tiring periods of training. SSVEP produces a stable signal, with a few number of commands it can be a good choice for BCI.

But it is also quite annoying, for how long can you use SSVEP without getting your eyes tired?

It depends on two elements: what paradigm is used, and which frequencies are used. Low frequency is more tiring than high frequencies. For instance one of my subject consistently felt asleep with low frequency “hypnotic” stimuli.
Concerning the paradigm, it is much easier to concentrate on a game than on a screen with numbers. Several studies have shown that BCI systems with a friendly feedback, and especially in a game environment, are more efficient (including a study from our lab using a car driving game).

I heard that 7Hz-frequency stimulation can make person frightened to death. Is it what low-frequency SSVEP can do?

Frightened to death? This looks like an urban legend! Low frequency stimulation is extremely boring and if the fixation is too long, a little hypnotic (it sometimes gives me the feeling of having an empty mind), but I was never scared by these stimuli.
There is however another real danger, which is the risk of photogenic epilepsy. This risk is seldom mentioned in studies about SSVEP, despite being well known. The most famous case of epileptic seizures associated with repetitive flashes of lights was documented after a “pokemon” animation was aired on a Japanese channel. Radford and Bartholomew estimated that 12,000 children suffered from symptoms and/or illness due to this TV show (the symptoms included photogenic seizures, but also photogenic migraines).

Can it be that there was no epilepsy before, but after it was induced, symptoms arose and affected later life?

No, those who had symptoms had already a sensibility (the show did not create the disease), but they did not know. They did suffer from epileptic seizures though. My point is that subjects who undergo experiments with SSVEP-based BCI should be controlled for possible photo-sensibility. Without such control, there is a risk that the subject might have a seizure during the experiment. If they are prone to photosensitive epilepsy, SSVEP-BCI would be dangerous for them, if they are not, then this type of BCI is safe (photo sensitive epilepsy cannot be, as far as I know, induced in healthy subjects). Here is a link about photosensitive epilepsy.

Ok, so it is safe except some special conditions like epilepsy. Just searched Google if low-frequency can cause something bad in healthy persons, and it turned to be “Brown Note” urban legend - you were right.

Yes. Furthermore, concerning repetitive pattern stimuli like SSVEP, you should know that we are constantly exposed to similar stimuli. Computer screens flicker at about 60 Hz, neon lights also flicker, we are surrounded by such stimuli, and as far as I know no one even tried to measure the long term effect of these stimuli.

And, there are such devices sold around – “Mind Machines”: “A mind machine uses pulsing rhythmic sound and/or flashing light to alter the brainwave frequency of the user. Mind machines are said to induce deep states of relaxation, concentration and in some cases altered states of consciousness, that have been compared to those obtained from meditation and shamanic exploration.” Considering that SSVEP uses the same technique – i.e. rhythmic flashes – will we have shamanic experience each time we use it?

I am not aware of any serious publication about this kind of toys. If it did really induce an altered state of consciousness, it should be possible to measure a long term effect (which was not shown). Indeed, SSVEP can have some effect on cognitive functions.

You mentioned there was a hypnotic effect, but very little.

Yes, I did mention this in one of my publications. Synchrony is strongly altered during SSVEP stimulation. I do not rule out the possibility to induce some effect using SSVEP. For instance, one study showed an enhancement of working memory in elders after a 10 Hz stimulation. I did observe the hypnotic effect. But to do so, we need to gather several conditions:

• strong light
• long stimuli duration (> 30 sec)
• large stimuli

Effects might also depend on the stimulus frequencies and colors. I am not aware of any study in BCI using these parameters. So, in other words, you will not have a shamanic experience with an SSVEP-BCI. But the possible effects of SSVEP on higher cognitive function seem intriguing, and I would be curious to read any serious investigation about this topic (I might do one if I have time).

So mind machines might have a point despite no serious publication/effect observed yet.

Yes, my concern is to know what is the real effect (especially long term effect) of this kind of toy.

Touradj Ebrahimi

Brain of each human being is completely unique. Its structure is highly influenced not only by our DNA but also by everything we experience in our life. You can find people even with the same DNA – but life history is something that cannot be duplicated.

So brain activity is unique biometric every person has. And such biometrics are used in access control systems when security is needed. Simply, you can use your biometric as a password to gain access to resources protected from everyone except you. And brain activity has a lot of advantages over other biometrics traditionally used in access control systems (such as fingerprints). Here are the most important ones:

• Brain activity is secure. In case of fingerprints, for example, we leave biometric in every place we touch with our hands, so everyone who needs to attack the system can collect & replicate it. Brain, in contrary, is safely hidden inside a skull.
• Brain activity is changeable. You cannot influence other biometrics – your iris pattern, DNA, heart beats, fingerprints – are determined by nature and there is no easy way to modify them. If system based on these biometrics is compromised once, it is compromised forever. Brain activity, conversely, can be easily changed just by simple thought.

Brain activity can be captured by different methods. Most of them are quite expensive and require a lot of time and effort, and hence cannot be used in access control systems. EEG method is most extensively studied for person identification. Traditional devices for EEG recording are bulky & expensive too, but technology moves forward, and cheaper & more convenient devices are now developed.

EEG as potential biometric for person identification has been studied since 1998. First papers were published by Marios S. Poulos. References to these works can be found on Poulos’ website. He recorded background EEG – i.e. EEG recorded while people were resting – and used it to identify these people.

Field was also studied extensively by Ramaswamy Palaniappan. In his method, a simple picture is shown to user and then EEG is recorded during one second. Then this EEG is used to identify person. Method was tested on a huge dataset and its accuracy is more than 90%. Despite of such good performance, method is far from real-world application because it requires a lot of channels. Another potential drawback is that it based on gamma activity, which, accordingly to latest research, might be attributed to eye or muscle movements and not have anything to do with brain activity.

On the whole, today there is a good pool of studies regarding person identification by EEG. These studies show that, in most cases, we can identify person by his or her EEG with a quite high accuracy. The only downside is that these studies include only off-line analysis of EEG data, without testing how proposed method will perform when embedded in real access-control system.

But in HUMABIO project developers went so far they did the real-world testing. HUMABIO is a project which aims at developing multimodal biometric authentication system – e.g. this system will consider different biometrics: face, voice, gate, EEG, ECG – to recognize user. As a part of this project, STARFAST – a Wireless Wearable EEG/ECG Biometric System – was developed. You have to put a special cap on your head and it will record EEG for one minute. After system will be able to tell if you are legal user or impostor with 79% accuracy.

Notice thar cap used to capture EEG is wireless and does not require special preparation (i.e. gel application) – just wear on and it works. Traditional equipment to record EEG is much more cumbersome. More info about equipment – on Starlab website.

As blog’s stats shows a lot of us today are dreaming of a cheap EEG device – most traffic is coming from Google searches “cheap eeg”, “cheapest eeg hardware” and the like =) From cheap EEG devices available, cheapest are those you build yourself. Currently there are various DIY EEG hardware designs & building instructions available on the Internet. Here is a short survey on what we have.

Note: for total novices, best place to start with EEG is short intro on How EEG Machine is Made.

The most popular

ModularEEG

It even doesn’t need a mention – because it’s most popular of the EEG hardware designs, everyone who searches for DIY EEG will get it in top results. This device has 6 channels but can be expanded to 16.

State of the art

ModularEEG is good design to start from but now, as technology advances, it’s getting older and older. Here are designs that are more up-to-date.

OpenEXG-2

A 2-channel biometric signal amplifier for EEG and other biological signal processing. This design beats ModularEEG in several aspects, but a bit more difficult to build.

CEEGALS

CEEGALS stands for CogniPve Electroencephalography AcquisiPon Laboratory System. This update to ModularEEG allows to wirelessly transfer EEG signals from head to computer. Don’t click the link: site is under construction and contains almost no useful info yet. Instead, check here for some details about the project.

The Programmable Chip EEG BCI

“The purpose of this project is to create a EEG that is modernized with some of the latest hardware. The Design uses lower amplification and higher bit analog to digital converters to remove the need for filtering and amplifying.”

Alternative designs

Sound Card EEG

Site contains schematics for several designs: Single Channel FM Unit, Two Channel AM Unit, Two Channel FM Unit, Four Channel AM Unit (advanced design), Four Channel Multiplexed AM EEG Unit & Eight Channel EEG Unit. Additional info about this project is on OpenEEG website.

Homemade EEG & EKG (ECG) Schematics

From the website: ”I developed my 4-channel, dual-purpose EEG/ECG box … We combined schematics from his book Biofeedback and the Arts (available thru Frog Peak Press) with schematics from the article “Computers On The Brain” by Steve Ciarcia (in the June 1998 issue of BYTE magazine)”