J2D3

Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation and Reception (TMSR)

This article describes some various exciting potential applications of TMS, Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation. It’s being used to treat brain disorders including: Already, magnetic stimulation is being used in clinical trials for countless neurological disorders, including “reducing “voices” heard by people with schizophrenia; smoking cessation; obsessive-compulsive disorder; depression; post-traumatic stress disorder; and various types of pain.” All this reminded me of how I believe “the interface” will disappear at some point in the future… it will “melt into air.”

Stimulating The Brain Makes The Fingers More Sensitive


Transcranial magnetic stimulation alters sensory perception and activity in sensory cortical areas. (Photo: Dinse et al.)

The KVM interface - the Keyboard you are typing on, the Video screen you are staring at, and the Mouse… this interface’s days are numbered. Already we are finding that our cellphones are becoming increasingly useful… we take laptops over desktops… and various forms of PDAs proliferate. Still we feel limited, we feel our richest online communication experiences occur while seated at some kind of KVM interface. Even our increasingly feature-rich cellphones, as small and portable as they are, still follow the KVM philosophy, just physically reduced - as if with a shrink-ray. I will never get a Blackberry because it’s absolutely idiotic to type on those tiny keyboards.

It’s important to acknowledge that speech recognition will continue to improve, as will as natural language response generation, leading to rich voice conversation experiences with robots. This is exciting, but thinking a step beyond chatting on the phone with robots to.. thinking with robots…. In this scenario language itself is a kind of bottleneck, if you dare. So how can we achieve a more direct control-response feedback loop between our minds and our machines?

It will happen with some (greatly) advanced TMSR. TMS (no R) is a technique used in the treatment of certain brain disorders. In TMS, an electrical field is induced in a specific area within the brain in order to affect neural stimulation in a precise, controlled manner. Obviously, the future holds increasingly precise TMS capabilities, as well as finer resolution electromagnetic imaging systems designed to actively monitor brain activity simultaneously. Adding this Reception capability - the R in TMSR - is the next step toward creating a direct, non-invasive brain-to-computer interface. Maybe it would look like something out of the so-so sci-fi movie, Last Days… a kind of helmet that provides the electromagnetic brain pattern stimulation and reception hardware… but unlike the one in Last Days, this one would connect the signals wirelessly to the net. No casette tapes or memory chips or whatever they had in that movie…