Tales from the bleeding edge of brain wave reading |
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Welcome to Decrypted, Digital Trends' daily newsletter guiding you through the latest news in the world of tech, with insights from our senior writers. |
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OpenBCI, a startup based in Brooklyn, New York, burst onto the scene in 2015 with a couple of Kickstarter projects that aimed to build brain-computer interface projects for researchers on a budget. Between them, they raised a shade under $400,000 and launched the company. Now, OpenBCI is back with its most ambitious project to date: A virtual reality- and augmented reality-compatible, sensor-studded headset called Galea, announced this month.
Galea, which will initially ship sometime in 2021, is one of a growing number of portable EEG headsets that monitor electrical activity on the scalp and relay this information to a computer.
However, the promise of Galea is about more than just EEG. The headset will reportedly include multiple sensors — not just electroencephalogram, but also electrooculography (EOG), electromyography (EMG), electrodermal activity (EDA), and photoplethysmography (PPG). This means that it will gather data from not just the brain, but also the wearer's eyes, their heart, their skin, and their muscles, making it possible to "objectively measure" a range of internal states via the body's biological responses to stimuli. According to OpenBCI, this should allow Galea to accurately quantify engagement metrics including happiness, anxiety, depression, attention span, interest level, and more — all in real time.
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Imagine you're nearing the end of your life. Your situation is dire, but you're not ready to let go. Modern medicine can't help you, so scientists digitize your brain and transfer your consciousness onto a computer so that you can continue on in the digital realm. Perhaps, as seen in the Black Mirror episode "San Junipero," you're transported to a digital city where you can mingle with other digital versions of people and live out your life as if nothing ever changed.
It sounds like science fiction, and as things currently stand, it is. Despite recent advances in both neuroscience and computing, we're nowhere near being able to digitize a human brain — but many futurists are hoping we'll get there within the next few decades. There's even a nonprofit organization called the 2045 Initiative that's dedicated to making it happen by (you guessed it) 2045.
Is such a thing even possible, though? To get an answer, we spoke with Susan Schneider, associate professor of philosophy and cognitive science and director of the A.I., Mind and Society (AIMS) Group at the University of Connecticut. She tells Digital Trends that people who believe we could one day literally transfer our minds to a computer may be misunderstanding the human mind. |
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How A.I. bumblebee brains could usher in a new era for navigation |
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Artificial intelligence is a discipline that, historically, has rewarded big thinkers. James Marshall, professor of computer science at the U.K.'s University of Sheffield, thinks small.
That's not intended as a slight, so much as it is an accurate description of his work. His startup, Opteran Technologies, has just received $2.8 million to continue pursuing that work. Where others are focused on building A.I. with human-level intelligence, pushing even further into the realms of "artificial general intelligence," Marshall has his sights set on something a whole lot smaller than the human brain. He wants to build an artificial honeybee brain.
Why? Previous research has suggested that honeybees are able to solve challenges such as the traveling salesman problem (in their case, finding the shortest route between flowers discovered in a random order) in a fraction of the time that it would take the world's top supercomputers. Building a honeybee brain in silicon could therefore help develop sophisticated navigation tools that could be lightweight, ultra-low-powered, and orders of magnitude more efficient than the deep learning approaches," said David Rajan, CEO of Opteran. The company's technology could power future drones, autonomous vehicles, and various robots. |
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