Working in Movement

We usually don't lump the activities of thinking and moving together. But the combination has popped up before in Working In Movement. More on Though Controlled Movement refers to some of the posts. Controlling devices like wheelchairs and the like is one of the most promising parts of this ability to control movement and devices with thought alone. But that might only be the tip of the iceberg.

Now a team of neuroscientists has added a new twist--two-player computer games controlled by thought. Mental Ping Pong Could Aid Paraplegics reports on a project in the Netherlands involving two people learning how to mentally move a cursor in a game of Pong. (Pong, a kind of simulated table tennis, was among the first popular computer-based games. A history of the game is here. Each of the "players" learns how to move the game's paddles inside an fMRI machine. They then play the game against another fMRI trained player.

Previous research has taught people to control a cursor by picking up electrical signals from the brain. But the superior sensitivity of the fMRI makes finer control possible. Since fMRI basically works by picking up magnetic signals from oxygen bound to iron in the blood stream, it can detect small differences in blood flow in different areas of the brain. Most of the subjects in the project learned how to switch things on and off in 3 45-minute sessions.

The potential application to controlling wheelchairs or communication devices is exciting, to say the least. But there are another promising possible applications. From the article:

The technology might even help people with mental disorders such as depression or schizophrenia, which are caused by excessive activity in parts of the brain. If patients were able to visualize the activity of troublesome brain areas, Goebel believes they could learn to steer their brains away from the patterns of activity that cause their symptoms.

Interesting idea, to say the least.