Sony Building a Brain Beam?
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Sony has been granted a patent on a technology that could potentially allow you to experience media much like the Matrix. It’s not quite the same; remember the nasty plug in the back of Neo’s head? Well, those won’t be necessary. Sony’s plan is to find a non-surgical procedure to beam information directly into your head with ultrasonic pulses, stimulating senses artificially.
These pulses will produce and stimulate sensations, including vision, sounds, smells, tastes, and feelings. Naturally, since this is Sony, we can guess their hopes for this technology are entertainment. Nevermind 3D movies. Don’t bother with HDTV and oversized big screens. Forget dreaming about holographic projections. Brainwave modifiers are the new TV. Put on a helmet or maybe just sit in a wired up chair, and plug your brain into a media feed. Maybe you remember the commercials for Sony’s popular Playstation 2 game system that showed futuristic visions on the Playstation 9, with gamers walking through video game worlds instead of just watching them. This may be the sort of technology which can place you inside the game itself.
Aside from being an elaborate toy, this technology could have fantastic potential for helping those with disabilities. It could artificially restore vision to the blind or hearing to the deaf. Current procedures to restore sight are very expensive and require unpleasant surgery. Patients need to get implants inserted into their brain that trigger electric impulses, causing pseudo-sensations. Once the implants are in, a patient may later have to get the implants modified as technology advances or just adjusted, requiring more surgery. These implants may have been part of the inspiration behind Sony’s idea, showing proof of the concept of triggering sensations with electric impulses.
Using a device that fires the impulses using ultrasound from outside of your head is experimental new territory though. So far, there hasn’t been any solid work on it. The closest research is in a process called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). TMS when used in repeated pulses is called rTMS, and it can be used at lower and safer levels with longer lasting results, sometimes lasting up to a few months. rTMS is being tested for a variety of uses, including combating depression, increasing creativity or cognitive patterns, stopping stuttering problems, and replacing ECT (popularly known as electroshock therapy).
The TMS procedure sends a magnetic wave of activity through the brain, which depending on the wave’s frequency can either accelerate or suppress processes in the areas it sweeps over. By nature, it’s not very precise. Using TMS for the purposes of creating exact sensations would be something like using a sledgehammer as a flyswatter. As one example, stimulating the same part of the brain in a number of subjects caused some to feel a presence, others to feel something mystical, others to feel a connection to the world, others to feel at peace, and yet others to feel they met God and had a religious experience. The greatest side effect while testing TMS so far have been grand mal seizures, though five of the seven cases occurred prior to regulations that now control the experiments. Granted Sony’s researchers will be using a more precise wave not based on magnetism, this should still be a consideration for Sony’s researchers considering their technology will similarly be stimulating the brain in perhaps unpredictable ways.
Next: The Patent and the Machine >>
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