Want To Control A Friends Arm With Your Brain?
What’s Happening?
These days, a lot of crazy events and ideas are being born, good and bad. Unfortunately, at the moment, we are living through a challenging time in human history. As we are at home in quarantine, people will have a point in time where they do get bored. Now, what if I told you that while you are at home, or anywhere, you can control your friends, parents, siblings, or kids’ arm with your brain?! That’s right, with some cool technology, you can do this!
How Does This Work?
Let’s get straight into this! First of all, how does this work? Well, there is a new technology that is and will change the world. This is BCI (Brain-Computer Interfaces). Brain-Computer Interfaces is a technology that allows you to transfer brain waves and brain signals into a computer!
You might be wondering what being able to read someone’s brain waves has anything to do with being able to control their arm? Well, lets first see how our arm moves.
So we have around 80 Billion neurons in our brain which send signals from our brain to the rest of our whole body! To be able to move your arm specifically, something called a readiness potential occurs. It is a voltage that is measured at the motor cortex in your brain. Once that potential goes to a certain voltage, a synapse occurs in your brain. That then starts a response goes down your corpus callosum, down to your spine and then down to your lower motor neuron, then into the axons in your arm to the muscles which then trigger them to contract and that is what causes your arm to move.
Signals travel from your brain, all the way down to your arm through nerve cells, Nerve cells have long portions which are known as axons. They carry signals from your brain around your body. Nerve cells are very big. One nerve cell can be the size of about half of your body, this is why it is hard to repair them if they are damaged. Electrical signals are generated by the movement of ions, they are mainly sodium ions and are all positive cells which allow them to generate electricity. Electrical signals from your brain can travel at the speed of 150 Miles a second which is 540 kilometers an hour! We can also measure our muscle frequency by just putting electrodes on our arm.
Who Is Doing This?
Something cool scientists did to see if human actions came from our subconsciousness or consciousness. They hooked up some people’s brains with computers to be able to measure their readiness potential in their brains. Our thoughts of moving our arm come from the subconscious and when we think about that, it goes into our consciousness which then signals our brain to do something we want to do. So it is quite cool how thoughts originated in our subconsciousness. Everything we do is generated by something that we technically don’t even control! THAT’S INSANE!
However, when the patients, knew that they were detecting their subconsciousness, they were able to trick the computers by subconsciously thinking about moving a leg, the computer was able to pick it up and predicted it, but the patients knew what was going on, so they moved their arm instead, this is SO COOL! We as humans think we can’t control our subconsciousness and our decisions when we actually can and we can trick computers!
I don’t mean to confuse you, but then, the question becomes, when the patient tricked the computer, they were able to do it by thinking of something that they weren’t going to do, so would that be consciousness or subconsciousness? They were able to do it cause they controlled what they thought. However, subconsciousness is something a human can’t control. The computer was able to detect one’s subconsciousness” quote-unquote because then it would know that the person was going to move their arm in any given scenario as the human would always give a sign of what it would do.
So, that can only mean two things. One, the machine can predict subconsciousness and what will happen soon and the moment suppose 5 seconds later but can’t process in real-time on the spot to be able to know if the human changes its mind and the actions it will do. Or two, that we haven’t reached the potential to calculate subconsciousness and that we can only predict the consciousness of a person, even then, we can process it fast enough to predict changes in the mind of someone.
How Can We Do This?
I know, I know. The burning question, how can I control someone’s arm with my brain??? So we have learned how we can transfer brain waves into computers. So when we get these signals from our brain, they are all in the form of electrical impulses. They are sent to your muscles in your arm. We can pick up those brainwaves by connecting those electrodes to computer software. Now, if we hook up those electrodes to a human to human interface, it will decode the brainwaves in the computer, then transfer it to the other person who you put electrodes on. The person who receives the signals needs an extra electrode on their ulnar nerve. It is a nerve that runs from your arm and connects to three fingers in your arm. By processing the data and transferring it into the other person’s ulnar nerve, we can send direct brain signals from one brain to another person’s arm and the human can control a third arm! So yeah, that is how you control someone’s arm with your brain and take away control of their arm! This just shows how the human brain has so much potential to control so much more than we think we can! This also shows how far humanity has come to and how much we will be able to do soon.
Article Written By Arqish Minhas
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