Hey you. Yeah, you, listen in close; we've seen the future here at
CeBIT. If you thought that the idea of controlling your gaming rig
with only your mind was just a bit too Tomorrowland, then you
haven't laid eyes on the "brain-computer interface" developed by
Austria's Guger Tecnologies (g.tec).
We're happy to report that in a game of thought-control vs.
Engadget man-editor, we were totally pwned at Pong. 10-to-4 if you
must know. Our competition sat smug in his stool thinking about
where he wanted his paddle to go, as we flailed about helpless with
mouse and keyboard in a wake of alpha waves. At least we didn't
have to smear gel on our scalp and wear a funny hat -- ha! The
system works by cleverly measuring fluctuations in electrical
voltage in the brain and then translating them into computer
commands. The technology has already been commercialized into the
size of an iPAQ Pocket PC for hospitals and research institutes. It
costs about $5,000 with a 99 - 100% level of accuracy for "trained
subjects." We had our hat handed to us by a person who just started
using the system, yesterday. Hell, that's a shorter learning curve
than Graffiti.
Although the technology shows great promise in controlling
prosthetics and assisting the disabled with communications, we
found ourselves (and our new best scientist friends, Christoph
Guger and Ingo Niedermayer) eagerly discussing its use as a Second
Life controller and of course, in robotics. Be sure to click the
read link below for all the details; check the gallery for the
gore.
There was nothing very interesting in Katherine P. Rankin’s
study of sarcasm — at least, nothing worth your important
time. All she did was use an M.R.I. to find the place in the brain
where the ability to detect sarcasm resides. But then, you probably
already knew it was in the right parahippocampal gyrus.
What you may not have realized is that perceiving sarcasm, the
smirking put-down that buries its barb by stating the opposite,
requires a nifty mental trick that lies at the heart of social
relations: figuring out what others are thinking. Those who lose
the ability, whether through a head injury or the frontotemporal
dementias afflicting the patients in Dr. Rankin’s study, just
do not get it when someone says during a hurricane, “Nice
weather we’re having.”
Sana Inoue and Tetsuro Matsuzawa of Kyoto University showed a
computer screen grid of nine numbers to six chimpanzees. The chimps
were previously trained to recognize the ascending nature of the
numbers. They were also shown to nine college students. When
subjects touched one of the numbers, all of the others vanished.
They then had to touch the squares in the order of the numbers that
used to be there.
When the numbers flashed for just four-tenths of a second or less,
one of the chimps beat all of the college students.
Here's the press release from 'Current Biology', a publication
of Cell Press:
Young chimps top adult humans in numerical
memory
Young chimpanzees have an “extraordinary” ability to
remember numerals that is superior to that of human adults,
researchers report in the December 4th issue of Current Biology, a
publication of Cell Press.
“There are still many people,
including many biologists, who believe that humans are superior to
chimpanzees in all cognitive functions,” said Tetsuro
Matsuzawa of Kyoto University. “No one can imagine that
chimpanzees—young chimpanzees at the age of five—have a
better performance in a memory task than humans. Here we show for
the first time that young chimpanzees have an extraordinary working
memory capability for numerical recollection—better than that
of human adults tested in the same apparatus, following the same
procedure.”
Chimpanzee memory has been extensively
studied, the researchers said. The general assumption is that, as
with many other cognitive functions, it is inferior to that of
humans. However, some data have suggested that, in some
circumstances, chimpanzee memory may indeed be superior to human
memory.
In the current study, the researchers
tested three pairs of mother and infant chimpanzees (all of which
had already learned the ascending order of Arabic numerals from 1
to 9) against university students in a memory task of numerals. One
of the mothers, named Ai, was the first chimpanzee who learned to
use Arabic numerals to label sets of real-life objects with the
appropriate number.
In the new test, the chimps or humans were
briefly presented with various numerals from 1 to 9 on a
touch-screen monitor. Those numbers were then replaced with blank
squares, and the test subject had to remember which numeral
appeared in which location and touch the squares in the appropriate
order.
The young chimpanzees could grasp many
numerals at a glance, with no change in performance as the hold
duration—the amount of time that the numbers remained on the
screen—was varied, the researchers found. In general, the
performance of the three young chimpanzees was better than that of
their mothers. Likewise, adult humans were slower than all of the
three young chimpanzees in their response. For human subjects, they
showed that the percentage of correct trials also declined as a
function of the hold duration—the shorter the duration
became, the worse their accuracy was.
Matsuzawa said the chimps’ memory
ability is reminiscent of “eidetic imagery,” a special
ability to retain a detailed and accurate image of a complex scene
or pattern. Such a “photographic memory” is known to be
present in some normal human children, and then the ability
declines with the age, he added.
The researchers said they believe that the
young chimps’ newfound ability to top humans in the numerical
memory task is “just a part of the very flexible intelligence
of young chimpanzees.”
###
The researchers include Sana Inoue and
Tetsuro Matsuzawa, of Kyoto University, Japan.
This is a great article from the now defunct Canadian magazine 'HorizonZero'. The zine was a multimedia web magazine about digital art and culture in Canada. This article is from issue 15 published in 2004 - but this is the first time I've seen it. This article was written by Andrew Brouse.
A Young Person's Guide to Brainwave Music Forty years of audio from the human EEG by Andrew Brouse
It is mid-August 2003. In the midst of a sweltering heat wave, James Fung and other students of University of Toronto "Cyberman" professor Steve Mann are hectically preparing sophisticated electronic and computer technology for a unique sonic and visual event: an improvised collective musical piece created interactively from the brainwaves of audience participants. REGEN3: Regenerative Brainwave Music will be orchestrated by feeding tiny micro-voltages gathered from forty wired performers into a responsive EEG network: a "cyborg collective" comprising the cybernetic interactions between performers, musicians, electronics, and computing machines. Norbert Wiener, the originator of cybernetics, would be impressed.
Unfortunately, the planned performance coincides with the largest blackout in North America's history. Major cities from New York to Toronto are effectively shut down. Pre-empted by the failure of a far more massive network - the North American power grid - this networked performance of music and minds has to wait for another day.
Music of the Mind
Two weeks later on August 30, 2003, Steve Mann and James Fung do manage to gather together the needed human energies to present REGEN3 / Regenerative Brainwave Music. [http://regen.eyetap.org Using hardware from Thought Technology [www.thoughttechnology.com and the PD interactive programming environment, [www.crca.ucsd.edu/~msp/software the brainwaves of the audience-performers are channelled into the creation of an interactive sonic and visual environment, where the participants' brainwave patterns create the music and lighting effects for the evening.
Readers having sensations of déjà-vu are not entirely mistaken: this event was only the most recent salient example in the history of brainwave music in which diligent visionary individuals, artists and scientists, have worked together to synthesize hybrid works of art-science. Since 1965, when Alvin Lucier composed the first piece of music using human brainwaves as a generative source, brainwave music has undergone a fascinating evolution. To fully appreciate the directions this music is taking today, it is helpful to reflect upon the history of bioelectricity, brainwaves, and the context in which brainwave music has evolved.
Bioelectricity
Brainwaves are a form of "bioelectricity", or electrical phenomena in animals or plants. The history of research into bioelectricity began around 1780 with Luigi Galvani, who discovered that he could cause muscles in a frog's leg to contract by applying an electrical current to exposed nerves. This work was followed by that of Emil Heinrich Du Bois-Reymond, considered the founder of modern electrophysiology, who in the 1840s began to measure biological currents in electric fish and later in humans via electrodes embedded directly in his own arm.
In 1875 the British neurophysiologist Richard Caton succeeded in measuring brain electrical activity using electrodes implanted directly in the brain tissue of rabbits and monkeys. At the time, it was not believed to be possible to extract meaningful data by measuring more non-invasively, with electrodes placed on the human scalp. (Electrical implants directly into the brain were not widely used on humans for obvious ethical reasons.)
History of Brainwaves
Human brainwaves were first measured in 1924 by Hans Berger, at the time an unknown German psychiatrist. He termed these electrical measurements the "electroencephalogram" (EEG), which literally means "brain electricity writing". Berger published his brainwave results in 1929 as Über das Elektrenkephalogramm des Menschen ("On the Electroencephalogram of Man"). The English translation did not appear until 1969.
Berger is a complex and enigmatic figure in the history of medical science. He had a lifelong obsession with finding scientific proof of a causal linkage between the psychical world of human consciousness and the physiological world of neurological electrical signals. He pursued this quest in the most methodical, disciplined scientific manner possible, determined to explain observed telepathic phenomena in terms of theories of the conservation of energy. Yet Berger's belief in this hypothesis stemmed not from his research itself, but from a personal subjective experience. Berger had almost died in an accident in his youth. The very same day he received a sudden unexpected telegram from his family inquiring into his health. Berger believed that his family had received some sort of telepathic communication from him at his moment of near-death.
Sonification of Brainwaves
Initially, Berger's work was largely ignored. It was not until five years after his first paper was published (when E.D. Adrian and B.H.C. Mathews verified Berger's results) that his discovery began to draw attention. In their 1934 article in the journal Brain [http://brain.oupjournals.org , Adrian and Matthews also reported successfully audifying and listening to human brainwaves which they had recorded according to Berger's methods. This was the first example of the "sonification" of human brainwaves for auditory display.
Music from Brainwaves
If we accept that the perception of an act as art is what makes it art, then the first instance of the use of brainwaves to generate music did not occur until 1965. Alvin Lucier [http://alucier.web.wesleyan.edu/ had begun working with physicist Edmond Dewan in 1964, performing experiments that used brainwaves to create sound. The next year, he was inspired to compose a piece of music using brainwaves as the sole generative source. Music for Solo Performer was presented, with encouragement from John Cage, at the Rose Art Museum of Brandeis University in 1965. Lucier performed this piece several more times over the next few years, but did not continue to use EEG in his own compositions.
Spacecraft
In the late 1960s, Richard Teitelbaum [http://inside.bard.edu/teitelbaum was a member of the innovative Rome-based live electronic music group Musica Elettronica Viva (MEV). In performances of Spacecraft (1967) he used various biological signals including brain (EEG) and cardiac (EKG) signals as control sources for electronic synthesizers. Over the next few years, Teitelbaum continued to use EEG and other biological signals in his compositions and experiments as triggers for nascent Moog electronic synthesizers.
Ecology of the Skin
Then in the late 1960s, another composer, David Rosenboom [http://music.calarts.edu/~david/ , began to use EEG signals to generate music. In 1970-71 Rosenboom composed and performed Ecology of the Skin, in which ten live EEG performer-participants interactively generated immersive sonic/visual environments using custom-made electronic circuits. Around the same time, Rosenboom founded the Laboratory of Experimental Aesthetics at York University in Toronto, which encouraged pioneering collaborations between scientists and artists. For the better part of the 1970s, the laboratory undertook experimentation and research into the artistic possibilities of brainwaves and other biological signals in cybernetic biofeedback artistic systems. Many artists and musicians visited and worked at the facility during this time including John Cage, David Behrman, LaMonte Young, and Marian Zazeela. Some of the results of the work at this lab were published in the book Biofeedback and the Arts (Aesthetic Research Centre of Canada, 1976). A more recent 1990 monograph by Rosenboom, Extended Musical Interface with the Human Nervous System [ http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/LEA/MONOGRAPHS/ROSENBOOM/rosenboom.html , remains the definitive theoretical document in this area.
Simultaneously, Manford Eaton was also building electronic circuits to experiment with biological signals at Orcus Research in Kansas City. He initially published an article titled Biopotentials as Control Data for Spontaneous Music (Orcus) in 1968. Then, in 1971, Eaton first published his manifesto Bio-Music: Biological Feedback Experiential Music Systems (Orcus; republished in 1974 by Something Else Press), arguing for completely new biologically generated forms of music and experience.
Corticalart
In France, scientist Roger Lafosse was doing research into brainwave systems and proposed, along with musique concrète pioneer Pierre Henry, a sophisticated live performance system known as Corticalart (art from the cerebral cortex). In a series of free performances done in 1971, along with generated electronic sounds, one saw a television image of Henry in dark sunglasses with electrodes hanging from his head, projected so that the content of his brainwaves changed the colour of the image according to his brainwave patterns.
Brain-Computer Interface
Unbeknownst to these various composers, Jacques Vidal, a computer science researcher at UCLA, was working to develop the first direct brain-computer interface (BCI) using a batch-processing IBM computer. In 1973, he published Toward Direct Brain-Computer Communication (Annual Review of Biophysics and Bioengineering Vol. 2). Incidentally, the computer used in Vidal's research was one of the nodes on the nascent Arpanet, precursor to the Internet. Vidal has recently revisited this field in his speculative 1998 article Cyberspace Bionics. [www.cs.ucla.edu/~vidal/bionics.html
Burst of Alpha
Throughout most of the 1970s there was a burst of activity in brainwave music and art. Parallel to the work in Toronto, the Montréal group SONDE, along with Charles de Mestral, did some brainwave performances. At Logos in Ghent, Belgium, real-time brainwave triggered concerts were presented in 1972 and 1973. In Baltimore the Peabody Electronic Music Consort did performances. Rosenboom and others continued their work at Mills College.
Toward the end of the 1970s, biofeedback and brainwave research fell into a period of quiescence due to many factors, primarily a lack of funding and of sufficiently powerful computers. Almost nothing happened in the field for about ten years.
BioMuse
Then in 1990 two scientists, Benjamin Knapp and Hugh Lusted, began working on a computer interface called the BioMuse. [www.biocontrol.com/biomuse.html It permitted a human to control certain computer functions via bioelectric signals including EEG and EMG (electromyogram: a measure of muscle-related bioelectricity). In 1992, Atau Tanaka [www.sensorband.com/atau/ was commissioned by Knapp and Lusted to compose and perform music using the BioMuse as a controller. Tanaka continued to use the BioMuse, primarily as an EMG controller, in live performances throughout the 1990s. In 1996, Knapp and Lusted wrote an article for Scientific American about the BioMuse called Controlling Computers with Neural Signals. [www.absoluterealtime.com/resume/SciAmBioCtl.pdf
Current Work
During the past five years or so there has been a renewed interest in brainwave music and a resurgence in its performance. Much of this new work is naive in the sense that the musicians are not fully cognisant of the rich history of brainwave music and research which has preceded them. There has also been something of a bifurcation between those using hobbyist "biofeedback" equipment or techniques and those preferring to take a more rigorous "scientific" approach. Nonetheless, current advances in Brain-Computer Interface technology, along with advanced digital signal processing and more sophisticated aesthetic theoretical foundations, will inevitably drive the field forward into a new era of possibilities and music not yet imagined.
Below is a sampling of some of the new and promising projects currently underway.
Music and Art
Artist/musician Neam Cathode showed Cyber Mondrian [www.oboro.net/archive/exhib0001/neam/neam.html at Montreal's Oboro Gallery in 2001. This work incorporated Mondrian-like generated images with synthesized sound that was controlled using the Interactive Brainwave Visual Analyzer or IBVA system. [www.ibva.com
Paras Kaul, the so-called "Brain Wave Chick", [www.brainwavechick.com/ has been using the IBVA system in her own brainwave music at George Mason University for many years.
Jessica Bayliss has a background in music technology, and has been working on Brain-Computer Interfaces for real-time control of computers at the Rochester Institute of Technology. [www.cs.rit.edu/~jdb/research/bci.sigproc.html
Eduardo Miranda runs the Neuromusic lab at the University of Plymouth, [http://neuromusic.soc.plymouth.ac.uk/neuromusic.html where researchers are trying to further earlier research into brainwave music using the latest advances in Brain-Computer Interfaces.
Andrew Brouse is a multidisciplinary musician, composer, artist, and technologist. He has worked in the contemporary intermedia arts and music for over fifteen years. He currently lives in Montreal.
I just wanted to drop a big note
apologizing for the lack of updates to the blog - I have a lot of
catching up to do. We were busy moving into our new office and
finishing construction. I'll try to post any news that we may have
missed during the past two weeks.
The following is a study used lucid dreamers to determine the
subjective measurement of time in dreams - by Daniel Erlacher and
Michael
Schredl from Germany.
Time required for motor activity in lucid
dreams
Daniel Erlacher - Institute for Sport and
Sport Science, University of Heidelberg, Germany
Michael Schredl - Sleep laboratory,
Central Institute of Mental Health, Mannheim, Germany
Summary
The present study investigated the
relationship between the required time for specific tasks (counting
and performing squats) in lucid dreams and in the waking state.
Five proficient lucid dreamers (26-34 years old, M = 29.8, SD =
3.0; one woman and four men) participated in this study. The
results showed that the time needed for counting in a lucid dream
is comparable to the time needed for counting in wakefulness, but
motor activities required more time in lucid dreams than in the
waking state.
Introduction
The relationship between subjectively
estimated time in dreams and real time has intrigued scientists for
centuries (cf. Hall, 1981). Maury (1861) reported a long and
intense dream about the French revolution which ended with the
dreamer in the guillotine and the sleeper waking up with a piece of
his wooden bed top having fallen on his neck. Because of the
logical line of dream action, Maury (1861) hypothesized that the
dream was generated backwards by the arousing stimulus. Nowadays,
the hypothesis is widely accepted that the subjectively experienced
time in dreams corresponds with the actual time (overview: Schredl,
2000). This relationship was first experimentally demonstrated by
Dement and Kleitman (1957). In this study, the participants were
awakened in a random order either after 5 or 15 minutes of REM
sleep. After awakening, participants were asked to estimate whether
the elapsed sleep interval was 5 or 15 minutes. From 111
awakenings, 83 % judgments were correct. Furthermore, the elapsed
time of the REM period correlated with the length of the dream
report (from r=.40 to r=.71). The latter findings were replicated
by Glaubman and Lewin (1977), as well as by Hobson and Stickgold
(1995). Rosenlicht, Maloney, and Freiberg (1994) found only small
differences between time of REM sleep and the reported length of
dreams. Overall, these studies support the idea that dreams take
the same amount of time the actions would take in waking.
Lucid dreams might be particularly
applicable to study time intervals in dreams, because lucid
dreamers are able of executing prearranged tasks in their lucid
dreams and mark the beginning and the end of the task with eye
signals that can be measured objectively by electrooculogram (EOG)
recording (cf. Erlacher, Schredl, & LaBerge, 2003). The term
“lucid dream” designates a dream in which the dreamer,
while dreaming, is aware that she or he is dreaming and she or he
can consciously influence the action in the dream (Tholey &
Utecht, 1997; LaBerge, 1985). In a pilot study, LaBerge (1985)
showed that time intervals for counting from one to ten in lucid
dreams (by counting from one-thousand-and-one to
one-thousand-and-ten) are close to the time intervals for counting
during wakefulness.
We hypothesized, that there is no
difference between the time needed for counting or performing a
motor activity in a lucid dream and the time needed for the same
activities performed in the waking state.
This was from yesterday's New York Times - an article called
'Living Your Dreams, in a Manner of Speaking'. It talks a little
about the concept of lucid dreaming, but also focuses on a new
movie being written and directed by Jake Paltrow called "The Good
Night".
Living Your Dreams, in a Manner of
Speaking
Established sleep researchers say lucid dreaming is occasionally
reported by subjects, though it is difficult to validate
scientifically. “Yes, lucid dreaming exists,” said Dr.
Rodney Radtke, the medical director of the Sleep Disorders Center
at Duke University. “Yes, people certainly can, within their
dream, realize ‘this is just a dream’ and continue to
participate.”
“Do I believe that someone could
potentially alter or interact with their dreams in such a way that
they could change the dream? Yes,” he said. “Do I think
that you could essentially design a dream — ‘Oh, I want
to go to Honolulu and have this big hunk hit on me’?
It’s a bit of a stretch. But I can’t say it can’t
happen.”
He added: “Only in New York or
California do they worry about this stuff.”
Stephen LaBerge, a psychophysiologist and the founder of the
Lucidity Institute (lucidity.com), conducts lucid dream research
and
teaches people to do it.
“It’s kind of fun to do the
impossible,” Dr. LaBerge said. “Fly. Dream sex.
That’s what everybody likes to do. There’s also the
possibility of creative problem-solving, overcoming nightmares and
anxieties, learning more about yourself.”
A student at Stanford University, where
Dr. LaBerge conducted much of his research, wrote in The Stanford
Daily: “In one of my earliest experiences with lucidity, I
announced to an auditorium full of people that I was their god
(wasn’t I?). When they did not respond deferentially, I used
telekinesis to send one of them flying across the room.”
It can be particularly appealing to those
who have nightmares, as it allows them to realize while still
asleep that they are just dreaming.
Interest in these potential real-world
benefits and the otherworldly freedoms of lucid dreaming — as
well as the questions it provokes about the precarious nature of
reality — has spurred the invention and evolution of
seemingly wacky dream aids. There are masks with lights and sounds;
Orwellian devices that announce THIS IS A DREAM! in the middle of
the night; and pills.
At the Hawaii gathering next month,
attendees will be able to check out Dr. LaBerge’s
NovaDreamer, a mask meant to light up during REM sleep and cue the
person entangled in the sheets that he or she is dreaming. It is
based on the notion that people can make a plan while awake and
then execute it in their dreams. A light or sound is meant to
remind them of their goal of lucid dreaming without actually waking
them up. Participants may also take part in experiments with an
herbal version of a drug that impacts acetylcholine, a
neurotransmitting compound that affects memory.
As bizarre as these things may sound,
there is a scientific rationale for cueing users during REM sleep.
“REM-sleep dreams are much more visual,” said Matthew
P. Walker, the director of the Sleep and Neuroimaging Laboratory at
the University of California, Berkeley, and a former assistant
professor of psychology at the Harvard Medical School. “They
have a strong narrative that runs through them. They’re
hallucinogenic.”
There are several reasons for this,
including that the lateral prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain
involved in logical reasoning and working memory, becomes more
inactive during REM sleep, while other areas of the brain, like the
visual and emotional centers, rev up.
Scientists, however, are still trying to
discover the difference between the dreaming brain and the
lucid-dreaming brain. The leading candidate, Dr. Walker said, is
the lateral prefrontal cortex. He thinks that during REM sleep, the
activity level of this logic-oriented part of the brain begins to
rise back to waking levels, and when it does, an invisible switch
is flipped and the sleeper gains lucidity. “In the next five
years, I think somebody will demonstrate that,” he said.
Lucid-dream researchers say there are
myriad mental exercises a person can do during waking hours to try
to become cognizant while dreaming. One technique involves
performing various reality checks many times a day — such as
looking at the numbers on a watch, looking away, and then looking
at them again to make sure that night has not suddenly become day.
The theory is that if a person does this regularly while awake, he
or she will likely repeat it while dreaming and will recognize
inconsistencies — if, say, the watch is melting in a
Dali-esque way. Then the sleeper will think: “This looks
surreal. I must be dreaming.”
Michael Persinger is a neuropsychologist at Canada's Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario. His theory is
that the sensation described as "having a religious experience" is merely a side effect of our bicameral brain's
feverish activities. He has attempted to create experiments to show that when the right hemisphere of the brain
is stimulated in the cerebral region presumed to control notions of self, and then the left hemisphere is called
upon to make sense of this nonexistent entity, the mind generates what is felt as a 'sensed presence.'
Many of Persinger's studies detail the reactions that people have when their temporal lobes are stimulated with complex magnetic fields. Some of the subjects experience a 'sensed presence' in the form of the deity from the culture that they were raised in. They see the God (or spirits associated with their God - the Virgin Mary, Mohammed, etc) that they believe in. Others have had experiences that mimic the feeling that one would have during alien/UFO visitation - these people tend to be more agnostic.
In 2003 the BBC arranged for Prof. Richard Dawkins to be a subject in one of Persinger's experiments.
The patient in the video had his corpus callosum removed in order to stop his seizures due to epilepsy. The procedure prevented the hemispheres from communicating with one another in any way and caused a sort of 'split consciousness'.
To reduce the severity of his seizures, Joe had the bridge between his left and right cerebral hemisphers (the corpus callosum) severed. As a result, his left and right brains no longer communicate through that pathway. Here's what happens as a result:
There has been a surge of interest in
binaural beats during recent years, and a number of software only
products that utilize this technology have become quite popular.
What are they?
A binaural beat is generated from two tones.
Each tone is of a slightly different pitch.
One tone is presented to the left ear, and the other to the right.
The two tones combine into a single tone sensed by your brain.
This single tone pulse is the stimulating when entraining with
binaural beats.
Binaural beats are probably the most well-known stimulus used for
entrainment. They have been shown to work, but other entrainment
techniques are more effective. Our machines produce binaural beats
and dual binaural beats. They also include other audio entrainment
methods in addition to these. I've personally found the that
frequency following effect of binaural beats is quite modest, but
they do actually work and have an effect on brainwaves that can be
shown with EEG.
Here's a bit of history from Gnaural's web page, which we'll
discuss in a moment.
In 1839, German experimenter Heinrich Wilhelm Dove discovered that
playing two tones simultaneously, one in each ear, induced the
perception of a "beat frequency" when the tones were of slightly
differing frequency (generally less than 100 Hz apart). What was
interesting about Dove's discovery was the fact that there was no
acoustic mixing of the tones. The perceived beats existed solely
within the auditory system.
Heinrich Wilhelm Dove
Heinrich Wilhelm Dove discovered binaural beats in 1839. While
research about them continued after that, the subject basically
remained a scientific curiosity until 134 years later, with the
publishing of Gerald Oster's article "Auditory Beats in the Brain"
(Scientific American, 1973). Oster's paper was landmark not so
much for its own new laboratory findings, but rather that in the
way in which it identified and tied together the isolated islands
of relevant research done since Dove, in a way that gave the
subject fresh insight and relevance to scientific research.
In particular, Oster saw binaural beats as
a powerful tool for cognitive and neurological research, addressing
questions such as how animals locate sounds in their
three-dimensional environment, and also the remarkable ability of
animals to pick-out and focus-on specific sounds in a sea of noise
(what is known as the "cocktail party effect").
Oster also considered binaural beats to be
a potentially useful medical diagnostic tool, not merely for
finding and assessing auditory impairments, but also (because they
involved different neurological pathways than ordinary auditory
processing) for more general neurological conditions. For example,
Oster found that a number of the subjects he worked with that were
incapable of perceiving binaural beats suffered from Parkinson's
disease. In one case, Oster was able to follow one such subject
through a week-long treatment of Parkinson's disease; at the
outset the patient couldn't perceive binaural beats, but by the
end of the week of treatment, the patient could hear them
again.
Oster also reported (in corroborating an
earlier study) that there were gender differences in the perception
of beats. Specifically, women seemed to experience two separate
peaks in their ability to perceive binaural beats that seemed to
correlate with specific points in the menstrual cycle (one at the
onset of menstruation, one around 15 days later), which led Oster
to wonder if binaural beats could be used as a tool for measuring
relative levels of estrogen.
Until Gerald Oster's 1973 article,
binaural beats were basically considered no more than a scientific
curiosity. Oster's paper was landmark not so much in presenting
new laboratory findings, but rather in identifying and
tying-together the isolated islands of relevant research done since
Dove in such a way as to give the subject fresh insight and
relevance to scientific research. In particular, Oster viewed
binaural beats as a tool for cognitive and neurological research,
addressing how we locate sounds in our environment, and the
so-called "cocktail party effect" (e.g., the auditory system's
propensity for selective attention). Oster also considered binaural
beats to have potential as a diagnostic tool, for finding
Parkinson's disease, auditory impairments, and even for gaging
fluctuations of estrogen (the latter assertion rising from a study
he replicated that corroborated findings of gender differences in
the perception of beats).
SBaGen is
a free binaural tone generator that has been out for quite some
time now. It works great, but there is a better out now called Gnaural2.
If you don't want to download and install Gnaural 2, you can use a
version placed on the web as a Java Applet. Check it out here
You can download Soundscapes and Gnaural Example files for Gnaural
here
You can even use them with the online Java Applet version.
NextFest is Wired Magazine's four-day festival of innovative products and technologies. We blogged about MindBall last year, which is the commercialized version of Brainball. BrainBall is a game created by Interactive Institute. Players of the game have EEG sensors connected to their forehead with a strap. The electrodes in the strap read the players' brainwaves.
Brainball is a game that goes against the conventional competitive concept, and also reinvents the relationship between man and machine. Instead of activity and adrenalin, it is passivity and calmness that mark the truly successful Brainball player. Brainball is unique amongst machines since it is not controlled by the player's rational and strategic thoughts and decisions. On the contrary, the participants are dependent on the body's own intuitive reactions to the game machine.
At first glance, Brainball seems similar to a traditional two player game - two people challenge one and other and take their respective positions at each end of a table that is laid out with two goals and a little ball. The rest of the game's equipment is more special. Both players wear a strap around their forehead that contains electrodes and is wired up to a biosensor system. This system, that is used to measure the body's biological signals, is tightly fastened to the frontal lobes and registers the electrical activity in the brain - so called EEG (electroencephalogram). The players brain activity is graphed in a diagram on a computer screen so that the public can easily follow the players mental processes during the match.
Here's a picture of Buzz Aldrin beating Wired Magazine publisher Jay Lauf in a BrainBall match.
There are sites on the net that claim to
teach the ability, there's an International Remote Viewing
Association that even has conferences (there's one
starting on October 19th, apparently), the US government has funded
research in it (in the 1970's), we've even had customers buy
our mind machines to help them with remote viewing and claim great
success. I've never had any type of experiences that are anything
like remote viewing - and I'm not sure that I believe that it is
even possible - but I'm open to the idea.
What is it? I think a simple explanation for it is just the ability
for an individual to descibe locations not yet visited. The CIA and
the US Army spent millions of dollars on researching remote viewing
and other parapsychological activities and dubbed it 'Star Gate'. They began the program in 1970
(then called SCANATE - good thing they changed the name to
something that sounded cooler) at the Stanford Research Institute
in Menlo Park, Ca. This program continued in different forms using
both soldiers and civilians who were believed to posess natural
psychic abilities for over 24 years.
The remote viewing program was shut down by the CIA in 1994 because
they were convinced that remote viewing was of no practical value
to the intelligence community.
What is a sketpic supposed to believe? (That's a trick question)
There is so much controversy surrounding the people in these
programs, the programs themselves, the data from the programs, etc
etc etc - that there really isn't anything to go off of.
Unfortunately there have been no peer reviewed studies that prove
that remote viewing is a reality. darn. Research the links below
and see what you think.
What are they and how do they work? Of
course everyone reading this already knows :) But it helps to have
a quick reminder to refresh our memory every once in a while.
Having a basic understanding about these special chemicals in our
brain and how they work helps us to understand memory, learning,
behavior, addiction, how drugs work, and emotions.
First we'll quickly go over some of the most important
neurotransmitters.
Acetylcholine: The first neurotransmitter to be
identified. It allows nerve cells to communicate with each other.
Noradrenalin (Norephinephrine): Acts as a stress hormone and
affects the parts of our brain where attention and responding
actions are controlled. It is what is behind the fight-or-flight
response.
Dopamine: Plays an important role in motivation and reward,
sleep, mood, attention, motor activity, cognition and learning.
Serotonin: Believed to help regulate anger, aggression,
mood, sleep, appetite, sexuality and body temperature.
GABA:
One of the most abundant neurotransmitters. It is an inhibitory
neurotransmitter - inhibiting all sorts of activating systems.
Glutamate: Heightens sensitivity to other neurotransmitters.
An excitatory neurotransmitter involved in cognitive functions like
learning and memory.
So... Neurons pass messages along themselves using electrical
impulses, but they use neurotransmitters to pass messages to other
neurons. Neurotransmitters are released from synaptic
vesicles, flow across gaps between neurons called
synapses and then bind with a receptor on the target
neuron.
.."BrainPaint extracts a new metric on
the complexity of the EEG and feeds that back visually in a
language the brain functions in. Our brains and BrainPaint
are complex systems -- BrainPaint takes information communicated
directly from the brain and creates real-time fractal images that
the brain appears to understand."
An Image Gallery of BrainPaintings can be found here
Tor Wagner from Columbia University (and colleagues) used an fMRI
study to what parts of the brain are activated when patients
experience the placebo effect.
Click here to listen to an audio recording of Wagner
discussion the team's findings.
A company called Ambient has developed a device that intercepts signals sent to the voice box from the brain via a sensor laden neck band. They claim to be able to decode these signals and match them to a pre-recorded series of words - even when the words are voiced out-loud. Theses 'words' can then be used to control things via a computer.
They are currently using this system to direct a motorized wheelchair, allowing a paralysed person to navigate without moving or speaking out-loud. Ambient is developing the technology with the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago to help people with neurological problems operate computers and other electronic equipment despite their problems with muscle control.
This is the first time (that I know about, anyway) that a device has been able to convert electrical impulses from the brain into actual words. This is different from traditional EEG, which measures brainwaves, as it is analyzing signals outside the brain on their way to the larynx.
Audeo is currently selling a developer kit that allows researchers to develop new applications with their technology. If this works as well as they claim, the possibilities are endless.
Check out the rest of this article for a video presentation of the device.
Discussion on brain plasticity, or
neuroplasticity, has increased during the past several years. What
is it and why should we be concerned about it? Our brains can
migrate activity associated with specific functions to a different
location as a result of neuroplasticity. This is an extremely
important ability to have after a brain injury or even after normal
experience (such as aging). Neuroplasticity allows the brain to
re-wire itself as a response to changes in the environment. It is
also what is behind the learning process and memory formation.
Plasticity consists of laying out preferred pathways within the
brain for circulating important information and is the brain's
ability to adapt.
Biofeedback/neurofeedback may play an important role in the future
if specific operant condition techniques can be designed to
increase voluntary control of neuron responses that will increase
neuroplasticity.
Here is a link to a great audio interview from CBC radio
with Dr. Norman Doidge. He is the author of "The Brain That Changes
Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain
Science".
Nancy Leo, a senior at Arizona's Hamilton
High School, had her science fair research project selected as one
of 18 projects to be presented at the Sixth World Congress on
Stress in Austria.
Leo's study focuses on HRV (heart rate variability) and salivary
cortisol changes that occur during stressors in the laboratory
while using biofeedback. She found that an increase in stress
resulted in less heart rate variability and an increase in salivary
cortisol. She also found that the stress response could be changed
significantly with biofeedback.
The DANA Foundation has decided to make
their book "The Dana Guide to Brain Health: A Practical Family
Reference from Medical Experts" section on brain disorders freely
available online.
With contributions from over one hundred of the most prominent
scientists and clinicians in the United States, The Dana Guide to
Brain Health is an extensive and wholly accessible manual on the
workings of the human brain. This richly illustrated volume
contains a wealth of facts and advice, on simple yet effective ways
to take care of our brains; the intimate connection between brain
health and body health; brain development from the prenatal period
through adulthood; and how we learn, remember, and imagine.
The brain is far too important to be
excluded any longer from our daily health concerns. The Dana Guide
to Brain Health remedies this oversight with a clearly written,
definitive map to our brains that reveals how we can take care of
them in order to sustain a long and rich life.
The browseable/searchable copy of the book can be found here.
