"Imagine being totally trapped in your body and not being able to even communicate with anybody. You'd go nuts," says computer scientist Jessica Bayliss of the University of Rochester. That can happen to tens of thousands of people suffering from neuromuscular diseases. So Bayliss is developing a technology to help them stay connected.
Her system taps directly into the mind via electrodes that generate EEGs, graphs of brain electrical activity. When someone sees an object that elicits a strong reaction— a friend waving or a lion on the loose, for example— a spike of recognition appears in the EEG one third of a second later. Bayliss's computer program can then pick out these recognition signals. In a virtual reality simulation of driving, her setup identified when a person saw a red light 85 percent of the time. That kind of quick, reliable response could enable an invalid to control an ...
