Mind-controlled cursor may be easier than previously thought


This image shows the changes that took place in the brain for all patients participating in the study using a brain-computer interface. Jeremiah Wander, UW




"What we're seeing is that practice makes perfect with these tasks," Rajesh Rao, a UW professor of computer science and engineering and a senior researcher involved in the study, said in a school news release. "There's a lot of engagement of the brain's cognitive resources at the very beginning, but as you get better at the task, those resources aren't needed anymore and the brain is freed up."

Rao and colleagues, who call this "distributed cortical adaptation," published their findings online Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They say that the electrodes on the volunteers' brains picked up the signals that directed the cursor to move and sent them to an amplifier and then laptop for analysis, which in just 40 milliseconds resulted in updated cursor movement on the screen.

Brain-computer interfacing, sometimes called mind-machine interfacing, is an emerging field that holds tremendous promise for those who are paralyzed or cannot speak -- or, let's be honest, for avid gamers. And while previous work has already demonstrated success by humans as well as monkeys using these interfaces, this is the first to actually map neurological signals throughout the brain as the task is being learned.


The better researchers understand the brain's involvement in learning and mastering these tasks, the better the resulting interface may be. And while the current hardware involved is, at its best, pretty darn invasive (devices placed on heads instead of implanted onto brains do a poorer job of picking up neural activity), who knows what kind of headbands the future holds.

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