Robots and focus.
I read an article this week of a robot scientists have designed that can be controlled by human brain signals. The human, in this case a paralyzed individual, wears a skull cap with electrodes that picks up and amplifies the electronic signals emitted by the brain.
This is difficult, but fairly straight forward. The subject thinks about something like moving a finger and the scientists isolate the brain signals associated with that thought process. They write some code that translates the received signals into action commands for the robot. When the subject thinks about moving the finger the robot finger moves.
The problem they have is all the noise in a human brain. When we think about walking, we don’t just think about walking. We think about a thousand other things as well as the walking. Sometimes when we are walking we don’t even think about walking at all. This makes it difficult to tease out the command ‘to walk’ because our brains don’t work that way.
When we think about walking we don’t focus on it consistently. We just initiate it and then leave it to some lower level automated process to keep it going. Initially in these experiments on human thought controlled automation the human would be forced to keep sending that strong signal. To keep focusing on the task consistently. That is hard to do and tiring for the human.
The breakthrough they had recently was instead of having the human focus on the task the whole time they just kick the task off and the robot keeps doing it until the human says to stop. For instance the command to start walking. The robot would keep walking until the signal to stop walking. Instead of having to send a continuous ‘walk’ signal the whole time.
This impressed me because this is why I hate swimming. When I run or bike I get to the point where I stop thinking about running or biking and it just takes care of itself. My mind is free to wander and explore. Not so with swimming.
When I swim as soon as I stop thinking about hand and body position I sink and inhale water. In much the same way I am forced to continuously focus on the task of swimming because when I stop focusing on it I cease to swim.
My struggles with swimming may be that I just haven’t done it enough for it to become mindless. Maybe at some point an automatonic response will happen and I’ll swim without thinking about it.
Maybe someone will design a robot to do my swimming for me.