Neurotech gone pervasive

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This Is Your Brain on Busi­ness (For­tune):

“…here’s a sign of how quick­ly things move in neu­ro­science: Ear­li­er this year, anoth­er para­plegic man, Rodri­go Hüb­n­er Mendes, became the first per­son to dri­ve a race car sole­ly with his mind.

Some might even argue that mind con­trolled dri­ving is not as impres­sive as mak­ing par­a­lyzed peo­ple move their limbs—since for neu­ro­sci­en­tists, con­trol­ling objects thanks to cut­ting-edge brain-com­put­er inter­faces has become quite com­mon. What is note­wor­thy in Hüb­n­er Mendes’ dri­ving per­for­mance is that the device he employed to con­trol the race car – a portable and wire­less wear­able head­set mon­i­tor­ing brain­waves man­u­fac­tured by Emo­tiv, a San Fran­cis­co-based com­pa­ny that I advise—can be ordered online for the price of an X‑Box console.

In fact, it’s already being used by thou­sands of gamers to move their avatars in vir­tu­al worlds with their mind, free­ing their hands to shoot mon­sters. Oth­ers use the head­set to mon­i­tor their sleep or med­i­tate. The auto­mo­tive indus­try is using it to mon­i­tor the lev­el of atten­tion of dri­vers and have cars stop auto­mat­i­cal­ly or sound an alarm when the dri­vers start falling asleep. It is being used in oth­er sec­tors where atten­tion to infor­ma­tion is a life-and-death mat­ter, by air­line traf­fic con­trollers and nuclear plant oper­a­tors. What was sci­ence fic­tion not so long ago is now just a cou­ple of clicks away from everyone’s mailbox.”

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