Goodbye, Button Mashing

Despite my semi-irrational fear of MMORPGs and mind-reading, I'm always happy to see signs that humankind will be able to control stuff with their brains.

Next on the roster for manipulation of this sort (here I always thought it would be cyborg limbs) it's video games! And you won't even need surgery.

In this newly designed device, a series of sensors placed on a special headset will record your intentions, emotions, and even (ugh) facial expressions in order to help you better interact with a virtual world.

Particularly nifty is how they got the device to figure out what you want -- it's surprisingly intuitive -- they just put people in the same situations over and over again and tried to figure out what their brain waves had in common.

So, getting a game to know which direction you want to walk in just by thinking about it is pretty awesome, but you may be surprised to know that that's not what this is even for. So what is the darn thing supposed to do? And why the hell does it want to know your emotions? The answer is crazier than you might think.

So it can cater to them.

Homing in on these revealing brain waves allows the EPOC system to quickly deduce a player's emotional qualities and react to it by, for example, changing the music of a game in real-time to match the user's tension or throw in more villains in case a player seemed to get bored of a certain world.

This three hundred dollar headset is going to read your mind just so it can throw more monsters at you when you're bored? Oh, come on! I want a full package. Supposedly the full body movement stuff is still in the planning phase.

I get the impression that primarily this headset does the realistic-expression-mimicking thing for online avatars, so it's primarily a tool for extra-realistic online social interaction. It has thirty different presets that it tries to select out from the signals you give it, so it's not an exact replication of the one-of-a-kind look on your face at a particular moment, but it's still probably going to be closer to your real expression than, say, your WeeMee on AIM.

Look out, Second Life. Things are about to get a whole lot creepier.

Decisions

Ever get stressed about the free will question? Do we make our choices ourselves, or do chemical reactions make them for us and just kind of force us to play along?

In an experiment that tested people's brains while they were making a (notably pointless) choice, scientists were able to monitor unconscious sectors of the people's minds to figure out what decision they would make seven seconds before they thought that they actually decided. In other words, even though people consciously confirmed their choices as ones made purposefully, the readings suggested their unconscious minds sorted things out and then their conscious minds just went along with the committee.

So just what does that mean, exactly? It doesn't mean we have no free will, necessarily. Just because our conscious minds have a monopoly on our sense of self doesn't make them any more legitimate than the rest of our brains. Well. You know. I guess.

To be honest, even the scientists involved in this experiment got a little squirmy about it. From the article:

Haynes and colleagues now show that brain activity predicts -- even up to 7 seconds ahead of time -- how a person is going to decide. But they also warn that the study does not finally rule out free will: "Our study shows that decisions are unconsciously prepared much longer ahead than previously thought. But we do not know yet where the final decision is made. We need to investigate whether a decision prepared by these brain areas can still be reversed."

So, we learn for sure from this experiment that stupid decisions such as choosing a hand for button pushing are prepared in advance for our conscious minds to receive, but we don't know for sure whether that choice, once prepared, couldn't be rejected consciously if we had some legitimate reason.

We also don't know if consciousness plays a part in more important decisions that might bring morals, emotions, or anticipation of future events into play in a complicated way. Decisions that might have consequences.

But it is one of those spooky suggestions that point towards a world where we might only be passively watching ourselves and trying to make sense of it all.

Maybe. To me, it's more likely that it's just a sign that we're a little bit bigger than the conscious selves that float in our heads analyzing ourselves and the things around us. There's a lot going on behind the curtain. The hidden stuff belongs to us too, though. Don't panic.