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. 

But it is not the past that is important here, but rather the future possibilities of this knowledge. Imagine for example what this would do for the gaming industry, your gaming capabilities will no longer be measured by the reaction time of your fingers but by direct measurement of the reaction of your brain. Perhaps, in a few years, gamers will no longer be sitting behind the screen fiercely pressing buttons, but in stead they will be staring fiercely at the screen. This might result in games making people more and more intelligent, since you are directly training your brain. Sounds amazing doesn’t it, becoming smarter through gaming? Imagine as well what this would do for the mental health care, these EEG headsets can be connected to a program that can detect deviating brain waves, in which we might find the cause of certain mental health problems, and we could get better at helping these people.

It all sounds great, thinking what this might do for our world. By the time that we all are old or dead, people will control their computers, their televisions, and their personal robot merely by thinking.  Nobody would have to get up any more, they would have a robot connected to them and they just have to lie in bed, connected to the headset and by mere thinking they would be able to control their robot, which makes me think if it would still be fair to call the robot a machine for maybe we have then become the machines who control the robots who walk around in the real life. Not only can minds control machines, but would the machines become able to control minds? What if this knowledge gets used for all the wrong purposes? Imagine this knowledge was available during the 1940’s, during the Second World War, don’t you think it would be rather intimidating that they can read your brainwaves, and if I may put it this far: ‘read your mind’? 

This invention could do great things, but as many new inventions, it can do terrible things as well. Maybe the movie ‘The Matrix’ (Wachowski, 1999)  is not that surreal anymore, and we will be in that state in another few thousand years. But on the other hand, people were very skeptical on the computer as well, and maybe had the same fears, and it is on that same concept that I am typing this blog now. I think we just have to wait and see what will happen…