For the unfamiliar, a tweet in all caps announcing SPELLING WITH MY BRAIN seems unnecessarily shouted and profoundly obvious; after all, it’s not your hand that can spell, is it? But no hands were involved, only thoughts, and this is what somebody thought onto Twitter.
This message was actually the fourth sent via an EEG (electroencephalography) device that looks like something Doc Brown from Back to the Future would slap on somebody’s head. The first message the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Adam Wilson sent was a simple origin tweet, SENT FROM BCI2000, which is the actual name of the EEG device, the first letters standing for brain-computer-interface.
(Back to the Future is as far as we’re going. We’re not mentioning the Borg or Terminator or Skynet or the Matrix, got it? Played out, but one supposes a reference to D.A.R.Y.L. is still appropriate.)
The BCI2000, which researchers hope one day will help “locked-in” people—those who can’t move their bodies—to communicate works similarly to texting on a mobile phone—but it looks more like how one types their name into a high scores screen.
By reading electrical brain impulses, a person controls the cursor on a screen and can select letters. It’s still early, and the top speed so far appears to be eight letters per minute, meaning it could take a while to post a single tweet. The researchers expect it will be several years until a device useful to the disabled is created.
Here’s a video of the BCI2000 in action.
News of the Brain-Twitter-Interface has likely put a damper on the smug pride of the guy who created the Chair-Twitter-Interface, which detects and tweets communication from the other side of the body.
One only hopes when the Brain-Twitter-Interface is perfected in a few years, users won’t be accidentally tweeting what they think all the time. (What’s on your mind? The boss’s daughter is smokin’ hot!) No need to make it that user friendly.