Cognitive Labs

This question was asked in a recent Discover Magazine article.

Labels: consciousness, ether

It's true. Most people cannot draw a circle with one hand and a square with the other at the same time.

(Try it with a sheet of paper)

The secret may be to use the sense of touch, rather than concentration.


"Most normal people cannot simultaneously draw a circle with one hand and a square with the other," says David Rosenbaum, distinguished professor of psychology and director of Penn State's Laboratory For Cognition and Action. "It is a fundamental limitation that the nervous system seems to impose on the hands for reasons that are not fully understood."

Rosenbaum thinks the key to the problem lies in the higher neural centers responsible for concentration on multiple tasks. "When you perform one task, you conceptualize it as one," he explains, “but when you have two tasks to do at the same time that you can’t think of as one, it gets complicated because the mind has to shift attention back and forth from one task to the other."

To test this idea, Rosenbaum and his Penn State colleagues, Amanda Dawson, a recent Ph.D. recipient, and John Challis, associate professor of kinesiology, set up an experiment in which participants could track moving objects with light touch and without having to concentrate on the tracking.

Volunteer participants who kept their eyes closed during the experiment tried to keep their hands in contact with two moving disks. The participants could independently trace the paths of the disks, even when the disks moved in ways that are normally very hard for people to produce on their own. For example, they could trace a square and a circle at the same time, which is normally impossible.

The disks were driven by moving magnets on the other size of an opaque pane of glass. "If the person exerted little more than a feather touch on the disks, the magnets decoupled and the experiment came to a stop. So the participants’ hands were not simply being dragged along by the magnetic force on the disks," explains Rosenbaum, whose findings appear in the November/December issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology.

Researchers say the test provides the strongest evidence yet that the reason most persons are unable to voluntarily multi-task with their two hands is that their mind gets in the way.

"We created a situation where each hand simply reacts to the motion of the object being felt, so in effect we bypassed the high-level cognitive system. The excellent performance displayed by our participants took no training whatsoever," added Rosenbaum. "Using haptics, we managed to get into the motor system through the backdoor."

Researchers say the findings could benefit people with coordination problems, and that haptic tracking might help such persons learn to better control their irregular hand movements.

Grants from the National Science Foundation, and the National Institute of Mental Health supported this work.

The Penn State Laboratory For Cognition and Action


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Labels: brain, cognitive, consciousness, multi-tasking, penn_state, right-brain

'Mental typewriter' controlled by thought alone
Fascinating report: (NewScientist) A computer controlled by the power of thought alone has been demonstrated at CEBIT in Germany. As we have speculated here, rapid advances in cybernetics are now ocurring, which will eventually change how consumers interface with computers, while the substructure of how people inter-relate online has continued to evolve quickly. Imagine reaction time that is constrained only by the power and speed of thought without any mechanical components. It would seem we are headed towards an always-connected global brain. With complete integration of components, what is the difference between telepathy and let's say, a WiFi/Bluetooth connection between your computer and your brain, with the computer/device acting as a filter and transceiver?

The device could provide a way for paralysed patients to operate computers, or for amputees to operate electronically controlled artificial limbs. But it also has non-medical applications, such as in the computer games and entertainment industries.

The Berlin Brain-Computer Interface (BBCI) – dubbed the "mental typewriter" – was created by researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute in Berlin and Charité, the medical school of Berlin Humboldt University in Germany. It was shown off at the CeBit electronics fair in Hanover, Germany.

The machine makes it possible to type messages onto a computer screen by mentally controlling the movement of a cursor. A user must wear a cap containing electrodes that measure electrical activity inside the brain, known as an electroencephalogram (EEG) signal, and imagine moving their left or right arm in order to manoeuvre the cursor around.

"It's a very strange sensation," says Gabriel Curio at Charité. "And you can understand from the crowds watching that the potential is huge."

Learning algorithms
Curio says users can operate the device just 20 minutes after going through 150 cursor moves in their minds. This is because the device rapidly learns to recognise activity in the area of a person's motor cortex, the area of the brain associated with movement. "The trick is the machine-learning algorithms developed at the Fraunhofer Institute," Curio says.

John Chapin, an expert in using implanted electrodes to control computers, agrees EEG sensing technology is advancing rapidly. "There's been a lot of progress on the non-invasive side in recent years," he said.

The German researchers hope to develop a commercial version of the device as an aid for paralysed patients and amputees.

Chapin adds that brain-computer interfaces could have a range of uses beyond the medical. "Signals from the brain give you a fraction of a second advantage," he says. The device could make a novel game controller and be used in other ways. The researchers have even begun testing the machine as a driving aid, as it can sense a sudden reaction and control a vehicle's brakes before even the driver can.

The next stage is to develop a cap that does not have to be attached directly to the scalp. This should make the device easier to use and cause less skin irritation for the wearer.

Labels: AI, CEBIT, cognitive, cognitive_labs, consciousness, mental, mental_typewriter_and_game_controller, typewriter