Bringing Neurofeedback Gaming To the Masses 37
New submitter captioning writes "The Los Angeles Times reports on Throw Trucks With Your Mind, a multiplayer first-person 'gunless shooter' that uses an inexpensive, wireless EEG (electroencephalograph) headset to measure players' brainwaves and move virtual objects on screen. Depending on the strength of players' beta waves (emitted while concentrating), players toss small items like crates or catapult objects like trucks. Players can also draw things toward them by relaxing (and emitting alpha waves). Greater relaxation results in more power as well, so players learn quickly to be careful when attracting trucks. The success of Throw Trucks could lead to stronger demand for neural feedback games worldwide."
Re:They are recording the wrong signals (Score:2, Informative)
While the cerebellum is certainly involved in motor control, you cannot really say that it is 'responsible.' Most researchers studying how the human nervous system controls movement accept that the cerebellum is involved in feedback error correction, motor learning, and possibly feed-forward modulation of control to compensate for changes in body orientation. This is why people with cerebellar damage present with cerebellar ataxia [wikipedia.org] rather than loss of the ability to move.
Controlling external objects based on cerebellar EEG is further complicated by the fact that the cerebellum is a deep structure, and it is nearly impossible to actually record EEG from this tissue. The primary motor cortex on the other hand, is well known as the cortical site where motor commands originate, and is conveniently located on the superficial surface of the cortex in a strip running approximately from ear to ear. This makes the motor cortex a much more attractive target than the cerebellum.