Thinking With Your Hands

This article can be filed into the "people aren't as rational as we thought" folder.  I found out that it has been known for a while that right-handers associate "good" with the right half of their vision and "bad" with the left half and left-handers have the opposite association.  When shown two options side by side, right-handers will more often choose the one on the right.  The crazy part is that people will make up reasons why the one on the right is better to justify their decision.  When the images are switched without the participant knowing, they will justify why the one now on the right is better.

The new research out of University of Pennsylvania contradicts the common belief that this favoring of the right side was hard-wired in the brain since birth.  They showed that when the right hand of a right-handed person was temporarily handicapped with burdensome ski mittens, the participants fairly quickly developed a left-side bias.  This shows that the brain is much more elastic than we thought.  It also raises the question "if what was once thought to be a deep held belief can be reversed in a matter of minutes with a simple glove, what does that say about the rest of our supposedly deep held beliefs?"

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/03/110310131006.htm

Copy-Cat Online Training Helpers

Researchers at North Carolina State University did a study and found that virtual avatars are most useful when they physically resemble the person using them. They did the test with an online educational training system.  Participants performed much better when the virtual helper shared the same communication style and had similar physical characteristics.

This confirms the belief that while opposites may attract, they rarely stay together.  Relationships are built upon commonalities and shared beliefs.  This information could be used to create better training systems but could also be expanded to create more emotionally engaging advertisements and video games.  You can add this to an ever growing list of "bran hacks" that marketers can use to manipulate people.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/03/110302101658.htm

Driving With Your Mind

I read a cool article about Berlin researchers developed a car you can drive with your mind.  They used new and improved EEG brain wave sensors and training software to distinguish between brainwaves for "accelerate", "brake", "turn left", and "turn right".  They hooked the device directly to the car control system and the test subject was successfully able to navigate a course using thought alone.

They also did a second experiment which I think is even cooler.  They used a hybrid autonomous/mind-control vehicle that drove most of the way on its own and only used mind-inputs to determine which way to turn at an intersection.  This is like having your own chauffeur drive you around where ever you want to go.  You just occasionally give instructions and he handles all the details of the actual driving.  I could see this as a viable stepping stone between human-controlled vehicles and completely autonomous vehicles, assuming of course that we don't need to wear ugly helmets to properly read brain signals.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110218083711.htm

Brain Mouse

Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh are performing experiments with brain-computer interfaces.  There have already been multiple studies of monkeys controlling a robotic arm by thought and some experiments on human epilepsy patients who already had the motor areas of the brain exposed, thus allowing the temporary implantation of a brain-computer interface that let the patients move a mouse cursor and play games by thought alone.

The exciting part of the current research is that the scientists are ready to start testing brain-computer interfaces on people who actually need them.  They will soon begin testing the devices in conjunction with robotic prosthetic limbs on paralyzed patients.

This technology, if it gets off the ground, can make so many Hollywood movies come to life.  We could have Avatars or Surrogates that we control from a distance.  We could have robotic hands like Anakin Skywalker or Will Smith in I, Robot.  We could have fully roboticized exoskeletons like Iron Man.  I'm keeping my fingers crossed that I'll live to see any of these actually happen and I think I have a pretty good chance.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110217124913.htm

Robot Phones

Cynthia Breazeal gave a good TED talk on the rise of personal robots.  She and her team at the MIT Media Lab are devising new ways that robots can interact with people in everyday tasks.  One of the more interesting experiments involves attaching a smart phone to a small desk-top robot.  The content and emotions of a call are reflected by the robot's body language.  They found that people thought the conversations were more real when the robot's body language was changing as opposed to a simple video chat.  This could have big impacts on all kinds of long term relationships and conversations, ranging from a grandmother wanting to see her grandkids in another state to a phone interview for a new job.

http://www.ted.com/talks/cynthia_breazeal_the_rise_of_personal_robots.html