In the last few weeks I’ve attended two very different events related to consumer BCIs; the “Wearables” session at MWC in Barcelona and the “BCI for the masses” panel at IBT in Tel Aviv. The wearables session at MWC was, as you might expect, mainly about fitness trackers and watches. Pebble, Fitbit and Misfit/Swarovski presented […]
This year at SfN we had 20 posters and 2 nano-symposia featuring tDCS in the title from a similar number of labs. On the face of it this is very good for the field that so many labs are exploring the technology but I think it’s interesting that only 3 directly address the parameters of […]
We all know that we are extremely social animals but just how far does this go? Many believe that human intelligence evolved to solve our complex social problems rather than ecological problems as was previously assumed. Robin Dunbar lays this out in his 1998 paper “The Social Brain Hypothesis”. You may have heard of Dunbar’s Number, […]
A couple of weeks ago I took part in a neurodesconferencia event for Brain Awareness Week called “Hackers Cerebrals”. The idea was to talk about control, or loss of control, from the point of view of what the neuroscience tells us. Usually when we talk about this we make a point of saying that of course […]
Last month Max Tegmark from MIT published a paper on consciousness. The curious thing here is that Tegmark is a physicist and they don’t traditionally get mixed up in theories of consciousness. His paper though is very timely as it reflects a growing movement in neuroscience towards a fundamental shift in how we view the […]
Over the last few years we have been very involved in the discussion around what we call human computer confluence. One of the central themes is the “disappearing interface” where a combination of pervasive computing, smart systems and AI lead to a scenario where there is no obvious visual interface with our computing artefacts, either […]
One of the holy grails of EEG, along with dry electrodes, is the idea of single-channel EEG. Or rather, useful single-channel EEG. It’s very easy to record EEG from a single channel but making sense of the data and building a useful application around it is not. The reason that single-channel EEG is so attractive […]
In a recent Wired article the author looks at what they got right in Ender’s Game about communicating with aliens. Basically it comes down to this: communicating with an alien race would be very difficult if not impossible. Not in the technically difficult but trivial sense of translation but more fundamentally. He uses the example of a […]
Recently Stephen Hawking apparently said “I think the brain is like a programme in the mind, which is like a computer, so it’s theoretically possible to copy the brain onto a computer and so provide a form of life after death.”, which understandably generated a fair amount of noise on Twitter and elsewhere. I think […]
At our recent HC2 Summer School we had a talk from Atau Tanaka on Embodied Sonic Interaction and how we might explore “possibilities of actions in the technologically augmented everyday”. An important part of this idea is the psychological basis for affordance and the potential for musical and sonic affordance. In another talk Joe Paradiso […]