A paper just out makes the dramatic claim that you can control a robot using thought alone, Avatar style, thanks to a 'mind reading' MRI scanner. But does it really work?
Dutch neuroscientists Patrik Andersson and colleagues bought a robot - an off-the-shelf toy called the 'Spykee' - which is equipped with Wifi and a video camera. The controlling human lay in the scanner and real-time fMRI was used to record brain activity. The video feed from the robot was showed on a screen in the scanner, completing the human-robot loop.
Participants controlled the robot with their brain. Specifically, they had to focus their attention on one of three arrows - forward, left, and right - shown on the screen.
During an initial training phase they focussed on each arrow in turn, to provide examples of the resulting brain activity: these were then fed into a machine learning algorithm that ...
