"TIME MAGAZINE" (JULY 1, 1974- page 37)
"MIND-READING COMPUTER"
The experiment looks like some ingenious test of
mental telepathy. Seated inside a small isolation
booth with wires trailing from the helmet on her head,
the subject seems deep in concentration. She does not
speak or move. Near by, a white-coated scientist
intently watches a TV screen. Suddenly, a little white
dot hovering in the center of the screen comes to
life. It sweeps to the top of the svreen, then
reverses itself and comes back down. After a pause, it
veers to the right, stops, moves to the left,
momentarily speeds up and finally halts - almost as if
it were under the control of some external
intelligence.
In fact, it is. The unusual experiment, conducted at
the Standford Research nstitute in Menlo, Park,
California, is a graphic display of one of the newest
and most dazzling breakthroughs in cybernetics.* It
shows that a computer can, in a very real sense, read
human minds. Although the dot's gyrations were
directed by a computer, the machine was only carriying
the orders of the test subject. She, in turn, did
nothing more than think about what the dot's movements
should be.
Brainchild of S.R.I. Researcher Lawrence Pinneo, a 46
year-old neurophysiologist and electronics engineer,
the computer mind-reading technique is far more than a
laboratory stunt. Though computers can solve
extraordinarily complex problems with incredible
speed, the information they digest is fed to them by
such slow, cumbersome tools as typewriter keyboards or
punched tapes. It is for this reasons that scientists
have long been tantalized by the possibility of
opening up a more direct link between human and
electronic brains.
[Brain Waves]
Although Pinneo and others have experimented with
computer systems that respond to voice commands, he
decided that there might be a more direct method than
speech. The key to his scheme: the
electroencephalograph, a device used by medical
researchers to pick up electrical currents from
various parts of the brain. If he could learn to
identify brain waves generated by specific thoughts or
commands, Pinneo figured, he might be able to teach
the same skill to a computer. The machine might even
be able to react to those commands by, say, moving a
dot across a TV screen.
Pinneo could readily pick out specific commands. But,
like fingerprints, the patterns varied sufficiently
from one human test subject to another to fool the
computer. Pinneo found a way to deal with this problem
by storing a large variety of patterns in the
computer's memory. When the computer had to deal with
fresh pattern, it could search its memory for the
brain waves most like it. So far the S.R.I. computer
has been taught to recognize seven different
commands-up, down, left, right, slow, fast and stop.
Working with a total of 25 different people, it makes
the right move 60% of the time.
Pinneo is convinced that his barely passing grade can
be vastly improved. He foresees the day when computers
will be able to recognize the smallest units in the
English language-the 40-odd basic sounds (or phonemes)
out of which all words or verbalized thoughts can be
constructed. Such skills could e put to many practical
uses. The pilot of a high-speed plane or spacecraft,
for instance, could simply order by thought alone some
vital flight information for an all-purpose cockpit
display. There would be no need to search for the
right dials or switches on a crowded instrument
pannel.
Pinneo does not worry that mind-reading computers
might be abused by Big Brotherly governments or overly
zealous police trying to ferret out the innermost
thoughts of the citizens. Rather than a menace, he
says, they could be a high-civilizing influence. In
the future, Pinneo speculates, technology may well be
sufficently advanced to feed a computer directly back
into the brain. People with problems, for example,
might not don mind reading helmets ("thinking caps")
that let the computer help them untangle everything
from complex tax returns to matrimonial messes. Adds
Pinneo: "When the person takes this thing off, he
might feel pretty damn dumb."
---
Now, please visit:
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Parthenon/5862/pan19remote.html
(click on: "Mind Reading Machine"- Alan Yu; it was
posted again last week)
If you are in a hurry, read this excerpt:
In 1975 a primitive mind reading machine was
tested at
the Stanford Research Institute. The machine used
a computer
which recognizes a limited amount of words by
monitoring a per-
son's silent thoughts. This technique relies upon
the discovery
that brain wave tracings (EEG) show distinctive
patterns that
correlate with individual words - whether the words
are spoken
aloud or merely subvocalized (thought of).
( Walter Bowart: Operation Mind Control. 1978 p.
268.)
This kind research indeed prove that they should
have had the ab
