A few feet away is a ping-pong ball in a clear tube called the Force Trainer. The idea is to use your thoughts alone, as recognised by the wand on your forehead, to lift the ball. Your brain’s electrical activity is translated into a signal understood by a little computer that controls a fan that blows the ball up the tube. Levitates it. As if by magic. It’s mind over matter.
All you have to do is concentrate. On anything. The harder you concentrate, the higher the ball goes. A musician says he played a song in his head and focused on a particular chord change. A former high school tennis star focused on his 120-mph serve. One woman brought the image of a candle flame to mind. The ball rose.

A sound erupts—first a groan, then a woooo. The ball spins, slowly at first, then faster. Concentrate, concentrate. And then the ball rises inside the tube. Up it lifts, two inches, four inches—a foot! You giggle and your concentration is broken; the ghostly sound fades and the ball drops back into its nest with a gurgle. You have just controlled a physical object with your mind.

Competing mind-over-matter toys from Mattel and Uncle Milton Industries are coming this fall to a store near you. They are the first “brain-computer interfaces” to enter the consumer mainstream.
The question everyone has about these gizmos is whether they are parlour tricks like Magic 8 Balls or Ouija boards. Evidence in favour of them being for real is that some people are worse than others at controlling them—certainly not a marketing feature.

Lawyers and other multitaskers, for example, tend to have a terrible time focusing their brain waves, says Johnny Liu, of NeuroSky, the creator of the mind-over-matter headset. But there are those to whom controlling the device comes effortlessly and instantly, as if single-mindedness is the person’s natural default position.
Nine years ago, scientists created the world’s first telekinetic monkey. Belle, a cute little owl monkey in the lab of Miguel Nicolelis at Duke University, was the first to control tangible objects, long distance, with her thoughts.

How do you make a monkey telekinetic? First you get her into a computer game. She knows that if a light suddenly shines on her screen and she moves her joystick left or right to hit it, she gets a drop of juice. Then the researchers drill a hole in her head. They take a device the size of a baby aspirin, out of which come many superfine wires, and lower it into Belle’s motor cortex—the portion of the brain that plans muscle movement. The object is to line up each wire with an individual neuron to detect its firing.

Then comes the big moment in telekinesis. When Belle resumes her game, the scientists put the signal from her brain on the Internet and pipe it 600 miles north to a robotic arm at MIT. Sure enough, it starts dancing like a ballerina in exactly the same fashion as Belle’s arm.

WORK is advancing rapidly. Four profoundly paralysed humans equipped with a “BrainGate” implant created by the biotech firm Cyberkinetics have demonstrated their ability, with just their thoughts, to check and send e-mail; turn televisions, lights and appliances on and off; and control a wheelchair. Monkeys equipped with brain-controlled artificial arms have learned how to guide food to their mouths. A monkey in Nicolelis’ lab recently controlled a humanoid robot in Japan. But the most spectacular work has centered on neural control of mechanical arms, hands and legs. The goal of a programme funded by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is to soon produce intelligent artificial limbs controlled by your nervous system that will allow you to pitch a fastball, thread a needle or play a piano.

AS A MIND-reading location, your forehead has only one significant advantage. “It’s a horrible place to get signals. But that’s the only place most people do not have hair,” says Stanley Yang, chief executive of NeuroSky. “Hair is not conductive.”

NeuroSky is in the forefront of turning brain-computer interfaces into cheap consumer items. It’s selling brain-reading hardware and software headsets to all comers—including Christmas competitors like Mattel’s $80 Mindflex and Uncle Milton’s $130 Force Trainer, both of which involve levitating a ping-pong-like ball. NeuroSky has its sights set on providing brain-wave sensors for the automotive, health-care and education industries.

The prospect for mind controlling matter dates to 1875, when Richard Caton discovered that you could peer into the workings of the brain by detecting its electrical impulses. In 1929 came the first electroencephalograph—the EEG machine.

NeuroSky gets the device to focus on the correct signals from the forehead—that extremely noisy brain area—filtering out everything else. “The sensors you are seeing today are first generation,” says Yang. “You have to wear it. The second generation can sense your brain waves and other bio-signals from a distance. Like sensors in your car seats that can go through clothes without touching you.”

Yang wants the car to know if you are falling asleep. Or drunk. Or wishing the air conditioning would go on, or the music would play more softly. He is talking with the Japanese telephone company NTT DoCoMo about cellphones. Its brain lab has looked at over 300 mind-over-matter products, he says.
_Joel Garreau, LATWP