Mind Control for the Masses—No Implant Needed

#News(General) [ via IoTGroup ]

When Sid Kouider showed up at Slush, the annual startup showcase in Helsinki, wearing an ascot cap and a device he claimed would usher in a new era of technological mind control, no one thought he was crazy.
The quest to meld mind and machine dates back to at least the 1970s, when scientists began, in earnest, to drill into peoples’ skulls and implant the first brain-computer interfaces—electrodes that translate brain cell activity into data.
That’s where Kouider comes in.
His startup, NextMind, makes a noninvasive neural interface that sits on the back of one’s head and translates brain waves into data that can be used to control compatible software.
Kouider’s vision begins with simple tasks (sending text messages with a thought; calling up a specific photo in your camera roll with passing thoughts) and ends somewhere close to science fiction (controlling every device in our world, like the sorcerer in Fantasia).
Going the nonsurgical route comes with some trade-offs, namely all that skin and bone between your soggy brain and any device that’s trying to read the neural signals it emits.
For that, devices like NextMind’s do the trick.
I had a chance to try out the NextMind device during a demo in December, a few weeks after Kouider gave his Slush talk.
He had taken a flight from Paris to San Francisco and carried the device casually in his bag.
The NextMind device is basically a dressed-up electroencephalogram, or EEG, which is used to record electrical activity in the brain.
It’s not so different from the tools Kouider used as a professor of neuroscience before he ran NextMind.
The NextMind device uses these, along with a proprietary material that Kouider says is “very sensitive to electrical signals.” (He wouldn’t tell me what, exactly, the material is.)
Kouider placed the device on my head; it comes with little comb-like teeth that brush through hair to hold the device in place, right on the back of the skull.

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