Whenever you recognize someone or something--your mother, the Space Needle, an iguana--it's because certain neurons in your brain light up with activity almost exclusively in response to that one thing. You may pretend you don't know who Heidi Montag is, but somewhere in your gray matter, your brain cells are proving you wrong. Researchers at CalTech used this principle to create a spooky game in which subjects manipulated a computer screen with their minds.
The research, like previous work in this field, was done on epileptic patients who'd had electrodes temporarily buried in their brains to study their seizures. (Pragmatic researchers figure that as long as patients are sitting around the hospital with wires coming out of their heads, they might as well make themselves useful.)
For each of 12 electrode-implanted subjects, the researchers repeatedly flashed over 100 familiar images on a screen while monitoring the activity of their neurons. ...
