A side-project of mine recently has been building out this stack:
- Recording audio in proximity to me, and transcribing it
- Grabbing EEG data from cheap sensors on my own head
- Mapping it against the transcription
With a view to eventually train transformer models which might reliably understand, from EEG signals, what words I am thinking. The existing studies on this method don’t seem to show any drop off in efficacy at mind-reading (lol) as the dataset gets larger.
(If anyone wants to invest some seed money so I can justify spending more time strapping things to my head, do hit me up.)
Crucially, the Muse headband the article talks about doesn’t have a microphone. This seems (slightly!) better for user privacy, but it seems like it would hamper training somewhat, depending on your aims.
A less privacy-respecting company in this space with a popular wellness device could do some pretty dark stuff - it doesn’t really bear thinking about. A sleep tracker app with companion EEG sensor device, for example, could reasonably request microphone access without most users batting an eye.
That's kind of the motivation for trying a no-MEG, (comparatively) large dataset, ML approach - it strikes me as exactly the kind of problem to which transformer models might be particularly well-suited, if it's even possible to find a hint of anything in that noise at all.
>Are you a person who feels bloodflow/tension in brain parts
What you're feeling is muscle tension tighten and release in your head/face/neck/scalp, which does effect blood flow.
But there are nerve endings all around the scalp, everywhere in the face and neck, ears, that organ that picks up sound, eye nerves? So some hypersensitivity might create some cerebral geolocationish triangulation of where vessels dilate and constrict? Or are blocked by clots, which gives the flow and dilation a different shape and timing, which also changes clock sync of what usually fires together at much more specific rates than during the blockade.
I'm asking. I'm curious and have not done a preliminary consultation with AI, yet ( why do I feel the need to say this? Probably the sustained increased oxygen supply. Lot's of additional neurogenesis going on in my head atm--19 months on nose plasters )
I used to have annoying TLE attacks which changed thinking patterns and nudged inner dialogues in and out of conversations with people. Even when I was super smooth after weeks of continuous stretching and mobility exercises ( hold two minutes, don't be a noob ) ... but that's about the only somewhat relatable example which I mentioned elsewhere some time in the past.
Some people report tensions on the inside of their foreheads even though the particular and surrounding facial nerves are quantifyably ( there's probably a correct term for that ) chill, when taking certain medications.
The continued development of technology will worsen the situation.
—Spicy Secret Santa
https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurit...
Peter Thiel and his ilk would use it to reprogram anyone who doesn't conform to there thinking. He even bragged about it before being indirectly called the antichrist in his interview with Ross Douthat.
Multiple attempts to contact any kind of support have gone unanswered, and according to Reddit the founders appear to have quietly disappeared, which pisses me off more than a little bit. This thing was not cheap.
It's a shame this book by my MSc dissertation supervisor isn't coming out until next June, because I'm pretty sure there's a bunch of stuff in there about this kind of neurobollocks: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/479845/neurobollocks-by-devl...