Brain Signals Can Control the World

By Malcolm Ritter
Associated Press

To somebody peeking into this little room, I’m just a middle-aged guy wearing a polka-dotted blue shower cap with a bundle of wires sticking out the top, relaxing in a recliner while staring at a computer screen.

But in my mind’s eye, I’m a teenager sitting bolt upright on the black piano bench of my boyhood home, expertly pounding out the stirring opening chords of Chopin’s “Military Polonaise.”

Not that I’ve ever actually played that well. But there’s a little red box motoring across that computer screen, and I’m hoping my fantasy will change my brain waves just enough to make the box rise and hit a target in the other corner of the screen.

Some people have learned to hit such targets better than 90 percent of the time. During this, my first of 12 training sessions, I succeed 58 percent of the time.

But my targets are so big that I could have reached 50 percent by random chance alone.

Bottom line: Over the past half-hour, I’ve displayed just a bit more mental prowess than you’d expect from a bowl of Froot Loops.

Trying to control a computer with help from a blue shower cap is one of the early steps toward a complex but straightforward technological goal: to use electrical signals from the brain as instructions to computers and other machines, allowing paralyzed people to communicate, move around and control their environments literally without moving a muscle.

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