The use of cognitive neuroscience for user friendliness

Will humans always remain technology centred now that we have tasted its fruits? Innovation is not an arbitrary element of the human being, for centuries we have been able to do without, and sometimes things even changed for the worse. It is only since the gradual emergence of the experimental-method, and the great concepts this yielded during the renaissance in Central-Europe, that the idea of constant progress got embedded in the western mind (John Gray, 2008). It seems that we all have eaten from the forbidden apple tree and are now expelled from our former ‘paradise’ where things could at least remain the same for an entire year.

Floppy disks – do you still remember those? This Monday the definitive end of floppy disks was announced in De Volkskrant (Dutch newspaper). This of course is no surprise as we now have USB sticks which can store up to 256 GB instead of the floppy disks maximum of 1.44 MB. So arguing that the era of the floppy disk has come to an end seems to be a valid claim. Personally I don’t think this is a problem, since the last time I used a floppy disk is more than 10 years ago. No nostalgic feelings there whatsoever.

Imagine being able to store all your memories, your dreams and basically record your whole life on a device which works as an external hard drive. This may sound like something which you could read in a fantasy book, yet multiple projects have been set up where the initiative has been taken to create such a thing.

In foreseeable future you won’t necessarily need any applications installed on your computer anymore, as long as you have a web browser and access to the Internet.

I can still remember the first time I got to know the virtual phenomenon we call the internet. It was at the library in my old elementary school, and the librarian showed us a computer (the only one we could use) which was connected to the world wide web. To be honest, I had no clue what was going on, and definitely did not realize yet to what extent this invention would change the world.

Technological magic

As most of us are aware of, EEG, formally electroencephalography, is a method based on transforming brain wave activity into digital data, by recording electrical fluctuations produced by the firing of neurons. Initially used as a research purpose within the field of medicine, it is still being used for medical purposes such as, for instance, tracking down epilepsy and the diagnosis of coma. However, more recently the use of EEG has crossed over the medical boundary, and it is now being applied in diverse settings.

I think I landed in the future on Friday the 19^th of February. I saw things that were impossible, or at least, that was what I thought. Stepping back in to the past: in the 1940’s nobody would have thought in any way that we would now be capable of measuring EEG brainwaves and transforming these brainwaves in to computer commands. Imagine someone who is simply looking at a computer, and making a virtual cube turn without even using his hands or any other part of his outer body, only his brain. Think about how people would have reacted to something like this even further back in the past. In the Middle Ages they would probably have yelled: ‘WITCH’ and they would have burned you.