Biofeedback has been used in medicine on and off again for a while. It's hard to learn how to control processes in your body for which you have no feedback. But if you're hooked up to a machine which gives you feedback you can learn to control things we usually think of as beyond our will. You can learn to control your heartbeat at will. Migraine sufferers can learn to draw blood into their hands and relieve the migraine symptoms. But it's not clear exactly what's relieving the symptoms, the type of brain activity necessary to control blood flow or the blood flow or both or perhaps neither. That among other things is why it's not established medical practice.
I hope there is a way to program it to do different tasks- for example move the mouse on the screen or type text. Such tasks are not that hard some ML might be able to figure out which signals respond to which intentions per person.
I would have killed for one of these when I was a kid.
But I wonder what health effects, if any, these devices will have? It sounds like the manufacturers will imply beneficial effects, much like they do with the Brain Age games -- despite little evidence for either. We really have no idea what long-term effects these devices will have, especially for children.
I'd like to hear an opinion from a developmental psychologist about what something like this could do to infants. Basic physical intuition -- things fall when you drop them, things persist when they leave your line of sight, etc. -- is learned, not innate. I can imagine a kid getting really screwed up if "things move when I imagine them moving" got integrated into his world model during this period.
Then again, perhaps the day will come where this stuff is so ubiquitous that you need to absorb it during the critical period in order to get by :-)
Anyone care to daydream about the possibilities and consequences as this becomes ubiquitous and evolves?
Building thermostats decide temperature using a hedonistic utilitarian function? Waiting room TV's that find the best channel for the people in the room on their own? Hacker news karma happens automatically via your mind-over-matter device?
MOM becomes the abbreviation du jour as mind over matter is too wordy, so mom domain names get more popular.
No, what we need is a cheap EEG device that exposes its raw data and comes with a basic API. A closed system will live or die on the quality of the release software. An open one will be slower to take off, but see much broader use.
