14 DAY TRIAL // Controlling the world around us with our thoughts alone has been a fantasy of man for a long time, but we aren't any closer to achieving that than two thousand years ago. Technology, however, is an entirely different matter.
Technopathy is the power to manipulate technology and machinery just by thinking and willing it. It is also totally fictional. A superpower you might find in comics or science fiction books.
That doesn't mean that gaining some measure of mind control over technological devices is completely out of the question in real life.
If we don't naturally possess or have the means to gain that ability, we can give technology the ability to respond to our minds instead.
Older concepts, before we learned that the brain gives off so-called brainwaves, involved cybernetic implants in our spines and/or brains.
In some cases, these are actually viable. In fact, not long ago, a woman beat full paralysis with a prosthetic wired to her brain.
Now, researchers at Brown University and a Utah company, Blackrock Microsystems, have created a wireless device that makes the brain-machine interaction wireless.
The BrainGate is ready for commercialization
While it's not completely independent of a brain implant, the BrainGate device does pick up signals without having to physically plug into anything.
While a person does need to wear the device on their head, the signals are transmitted through radio by a second device, an implant that amplifies the faint electrical spikes emitted by neurons.
Circuits then digitize the information and leave it to a radio to beam everything to a receiver, over a distance of a few meters. This means you can think of moving a mouse cursor over the screen and it will happen.
The transmission speed is of 48 Mbps, which is the same as on a residential Internet connection. As for power, only around 3 milliwatts are used, provided by a battery.
What brain-machine interfaces usually involve
A large hole in the skull, for one thing. Also, a receiving unit connected to a large sensor rack by means of cables that stretch across whole rooms. It's no wonder that the Brown University researchers and Blackrock Microsystems company needed 10 years to come up with the current technology. They had a lot of design conventions to get over, and needed some technologies that only became available in the interim.
BrainGate is actually the name of the consortium of designers and researchers who made the device, but we suspect it will become the product name now that it can be commercialized.
Now, hospitals just need to start doing human tests. Even if the BrainGate ends up doing little besides enabling mind-controlled wheelchairs and robotic prosthetics, it will still change the lives of many people for the better.
