You may one day in the not-extremely-distant future control your
computer and other devices just by thinking. At Intel's Tech
Heaven event in Manhattan on Wednesday, the company demonstrated
software under development that can tell--under very controlled
circumstances--what a person is thinking by reading brain waves.
The chipmaker has been working with Carnegie Mellon University
and the University of Pittsburgh to develop software and an
interface to convert brain waves scanned from MRIs into
something recognizable by computers. Though still in the early
research stages, the technology looks promising to researchers.
In a preliminary test conducted by Intel Labs senior researcher
Dean Pomerleau, the system scanned a person's brain to record
its activity while showing the person certain words,
specifically concrete objects like "barn" and "house" and
"screwdriver." The scans revealed that some words produced a
very similar pattern of brain activity, while other words
generated quite different levels of activi