Nice cap. I had seen it while surfing the Net ( don't know what the site it was), then took the pic to my computer. I called it Вraincap, which literally seems to be correct.



A week later, I was surfing the Net in search for news about ANN, when I got a phone call - one of my co-workers strongly suggested me go to the site of University of Maryland, where he had read read a curious article that, he hoped so, would be of interest to me. I did. The article proved to be higly informative. I adduce some key excerpts below. And the technology was called 'Вrain Cap'. I smiled as remembered the previous nice stuff, then thought seriously this way. In fact, the idea in making the knitted brain-shaped cap is the kind of model of brain ( at least visually) to put over human head - thus making a prototype of a brain-body interface that may be treated touchpad-like from outside. Funny or even surrealistic at first look. Ideal way to control other's mentality, if the idea of brains-over-head-interface has no alternative purpose.

Quite on the contrary in the article below: the brain by producing thoughts ( that are actually electro-magnetic waves; they in its turn get intercepted, decoded though computer, then as being more distinctive or even boosted signals go to the motor apparatus in order to prompt any action.



'College Park, Md. - "Brain cap" technology being developed at the University of Maryland allows users to turn their thoughts into motion. Associate Professor of Kinesiology José 'Pepe' L. Contreras-Vidal and his team have created a non-invasive, sensor-lined cap with neural interface software that soon could be used to control computers, robotic prosthetic limbs, motorized wheelchairs and even digital avatars.
"We are on track to develop, test and make available to the public- within the next few years - a safe, reliable, noninvasive brain computer interface that can bring life-changing technology to millions of people whose ability to move has been diminished due to paralysis, stroke or other injury or illness," said Contreras-Vidal of the university's School of Public Health.
The potential and rapid progression of the UMD brain cap technology can be seen in a host of recent developments, including a just published study in the Journal of Neurophysiology, new grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Institutes of Health, and a growing list of partners that includes the University of Maryland School of Medicine, the Veterans Affairs Maryland Health Care System, the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Rice University and Walter Reed Army Medical Center's Integrated Department of Orthopaedics & Rehabilitation.
"We are doing something that few previously thought was possible," said Contreras-Vidal, who is also an affiliate professor in Maryland's Fischell Department of Bioengineering and the university's Neuroscience and Cognitive Science Program. "We use EEG [electroencephalography] to non-invasively read brain waves and translate them into movement commands for computers and other devices"


' Contreras-Vidal and his team have published three major papers on their technology over the past 18 months, the latest a just released study in the Journal of Neurophysiology in which they successfully used EEG brain signals to reconstruct the complex 3-D movements of the ankle, knee and hip joints during human treadmill walking. In two earlier studies they showed (1) similar results for 3-D hand movement and (2) that subjects wearing the brain cap could control a computer cursor with their thoughts.'



'During the past two decades a great deal of progress has been made in the study of direct brain to computer interfaces, most of it through studies using monkeys with electrodes implanted in their brains. However, for use in humans such an invasive approach poses many problems, not the least of which is that most people don't' want holes in their heads and wires attached to their brains.
"EEG monitoring of the brain, which has a long, safe history for other applications, has been largely ignored by those working on brain-machine interfaces, because it was thought that the human skull blocked too much of the detailed information on brain activity needed to read thoughts about movement and turn those readings into movement commands for multi-functional high-degree of freedom prosthetics," said Contreras-Vidal. He is among the few who have used EEG, MEG or other sensing technologies to develop non-invasive neural interfaces, and the only one to have demonstrated decoding results comparable to those achieved by researchers using implanted electrodes.'