Brain in Virtual Reality

Brain in VR -

The science of mind reading is Neuroscience. Or neurobiology, and this is the study of the nervous system. It dates back as old as Egypt. Neuroscience is a multidisciplinary branch, encompassing anatomy, biochemistry and several other fields a out-of-travel vagabond would know little about, but I promise to make clear how we’re implementing Neuro-mind reading into VR/AR and why.

Running an EEG is not a easy-bake oven for the wannabe-scientist, and requires professionals. They will receive measurements of waves from the brain during stimulating activity. One wave of particular interest is the P300. This brain wave is fired during the decision making process. The P300 wave has connections with intent, though not directly representing intent. Monitoring with EEG is explored much more thoroughly in Predicting Intended Movement Direction Using EEG for Himan Posterior Parietal Cortex (PPC). They investigate if EEG signals recorded from PPC can be used to decode intended movement direction. The answer is: "yes but its complex". It is a deep field, and today we will only graze the surface.

What if you were playing a video game against a robot. Let’s say NBA 2k, and the game is in VR. You have the ball. You’re dribbling up court, calling for your Power Forward to get in place, looking down the court and scanning for your opportunity. If the EEG is connected to the computer-opponent and is predicting where you’ll move, then we’d be defeated as fast as the EEG-bot can process. Or, do we evolve to trick our robotic opponents. Is neuroscience a breading ground for our greatest opponent and training grounds to defeat them. They say with the creation of every heaven is the creation of a hell.

The current brain machine interfaces (BMI) have lead Neuroscientists from University of California, San Diego and the Institute of Neural Computation to believe that the neuronal activity in the PPC can be used to interface machines with our brains. In the Primary Motor Cortex neurons fire patterns that encode direction information about limb movement. It is already known in the industry that Primary Motor Cortex plays a role in the planning for movement.

Using Psychology to enhance VR is an obvious move. We use psychology to enhance everything we can, but in VR it gets rather personal. Because both hardware and software have direct, physical access, unfiltered, to your dome, the possibilities are far greater than prior efforts to mine information from our subjects (the people). This is a good place to remind our readers that if the service is free, you are the product. Advertising tactics are going to become very invasive. Talk about getting inside your someone's head! What will happen in the horror genre, will they know my deepest fears? Remember those videos of cute puppies and then a screaming zombie appeared? That will give someone a heart attack in VR. Boom drop to the floor, dead man in a vive - there's a headline for ya! Imagine if it is a computer bug that infiltrates the game. Exploring experiences is going to be a frontier - venturing the unknown and unsafe.

What about the media in their efforts to better target us? Access to the brain will unleash a torrent of access to intimate data. Even scarier is when that information falls into the wrong hands. Anyone on the other side of that VR machine, which if you’re connected to the internet is more than 8.5 billion devices, might be watching or recording your brain. What would one do with that information?

What psychological research will we extrapolate from out of EEG and brain research? Currently, we are curing lazy eyes by retraining muscles. In this use case, there are broken paths of the neurons that are meant to transfer signals to the muscles which are physically-able, but currently without a lifeline. Scientists are re-wire the brain so the muscle works, and this concept is nothing short of pure magic-made-possible by virtual reality. So if this is the very beginning of a better the world with EEG and Virtual Reality, what amazing innovation awaits for us in the coming years?

Consumer-grade EEG headsets are available and affordable. The best use cases with the home-gear is monitoring mental state – for whatever that can serve your purpose. Right now there is not too much an EEG can do, however, it can accurately measure anxiety, nervousness, drowsiness, and a few other mental states.

This article here from Live Science tries to scare you into some Blackmirror thinking, where the side effects of VR might kills is. They warn of the side effects of VR. The immediate side effects are motion sickness, dizziness and eye fatigue. It is wise to be in good health when playing VR – you’re traveling to another universe, even if it is just teleportation, the first time can be jarring.

The scare further goes on to worry that because the rats they experimented with in VR eventually had neurons shutting down in the hippocampus that were connected to learning, memory and perception of space, they fear that will happen to us humans, as well. But the rats are rats, not humans. These rats do not have the brain power to invent virtual reality, therefore, of course their little rat brains can’t handle VR. We, however, are humans who have evolved to rule the world, and our brains made VR, figured out how to develop the technology, art and cohesiveness to bring about a virtual experience. Our brains are more complex. Our brains can handle the VR experience differently. I imagine that once once we go beyond visual displays and start wiring directly into our brains, maybe even using wifi to connect to neurons for our simulations, we will reach a new level of “bad for our brain”. This would enable us to have unthinkable tech drug bug attacks that provoke insanity and dementia. But for now we are just going to be doing data-overloads to our optic nerves, kind of like ripping straight shots – totally, and expectedly, survivable.

VR also effects the brain with time presence which is altered by cognitive overload. We only have so much attention to give and when we max-out on that attention we can offer we begin to mess up our perception of time. Think about a game you were really into and 45 minutes passed even though it felt like 10 minutes. We can manipulate our presence of time and alter our perception of it with simple tricks, like an adjustment to the audio. If we change a major key to a minor key in the right spot t will dilate time perception. Knowing how and when to dilate or contract our time perception allows new found powers and better lives. If we can lessen time, we can lessen pain. Imagine a medical therapy that is physically, and mental burdening on the individual, and then lessening the time they are in that pain. That would be wonderful, wouldn’t it? Or VR can pass time in other ways, maybe it will lull you to sleep.

The human brain is the most amazing and complex matter in the known universe and how lucky we are to all have one! The full applications of how VR and the brain are distant conversations, right now we are just doing our sniffing, getting a feel for the possibilities and learning how to interface the two. But this is an amazing feat and one of he greatest human endeavors yet. So cheers to celebrating the crane, even the lobotomized, let’s toast – an ode to the dome, for man cannot think with out it and never thinks about it!