The Cyborg in Us All
From: New York Times Magazine - 09/14/2011
By: Pagan Kennedy

Within the next decade there is likely to emerge a new kind of brain implant
for healthy people who want to interact with and control machines by thought.
One technology under development is the electrocorticographic (ECoG) implant,
which is less invasive than other devices and capable of riding on top of the
brain-blood barrier, sensing the activity of neuron populations and
transmitting their communications to the outside world as software commands.
Research to study the potential of ECoG implants is being funded by the U.S.
Defense Department as part of a $6.3 million Army project to create devices
for telepathic communication. Carnegie Mellon University engineer Dean
Pomerleau says he is most eager to see a "two-way direct-brain interface"
that would "revolutionize human experience." Gerwin Schalk, a pioneer in ECoG
development, proposed in a 2008 paper in the Journal of Neural Engineering
that humans could be trained to think in computer-recognizable patterns to
generate bursts of thought that function as software code. An even less
invasive brain-machine interface than the ECoG implant is being researched at
Dartmouth College, where scientists are creating an iPhone linked to an
electroencephalography headset. 

Read the entire article at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/18/magazine/the-cyborg-in-us-all.html

Links:
Gerwin Schalk
http://www.wadsworth.org/resnres/bios/schalk.htm

Turning the Mind into a Joystick
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/09/18/magazine/14Mag-cyborg.html?ref=magazine

Justin Williams
http://www.engr.wisc.edu/bme/faculty/williams_justin.html

Dean Pomerleau
http://deanpomerleau.tripod.com/
http://www.pittsburgh.intel-research.net/people/pomerleau/
http://www.ri.cmu.edu/person.html?person_id=241