Using the Brain to Control Video Games

Neurologists, Neurosurgeons, and a Biomedical Engineer have teamed up to conduct an experiment where a teenage boy plays video games, hands free, only with his brain. The boy, a 14-year-old who suffers from epilepsy, is the first teenager to play a two-dimensional video game, Space Invaders, using only the signals from his brain to make movements. Getting subjects to move objects using only their brains has implications toward someday building biomedical devices that can control artificial limbs, for instance, enabling the disabled to move a prosthetic arm or leg by thinking about it.

With approval of the patient and his parents and the Washington University School of Medicine Institutional Review Board, Leuthardt and Moran connected the patient to a sophisticated computer running a special program known as BCI2000 (developed by their collaborator Gerwin Schalk at the Wadsworth Center, New York State Department of Health in Albany) which involves a video game that is linked to the ECoG grid. They then asked the boy to do various motor and speech tasks, moving his hands various ways, talking, and imagining. The team could see from the data which parts of the brain and what brain signals correlate to these movements. They then asked the boy to play a simple, two-dimensional Space Invaders game by actually moving his tongue and hand. He was then asked to imagine the same movements, but not to actually perform them with his hands or tongue. When he saw the cursor in the video game, he then controlled it with his brain.

"He cleared out the whole level one basically on brain control," said Leuthardt. "He learned almost instantaneously. We then gave him a more challenging version in two-dimensions and he mastered two levels there playing only with his imagination." In 2004, Leuthardt and Moran led a team who were the first to perform this research on four adult patients. They were anxious to get data from a teenager to see if there are any differences between how teens and adults operate.

"It's exciting to be able to look at age differences and see what that tells us about the brain," said Moran, who said the team plans to test more pediatric subjects. "No one has ever seen if brain signals from children are different. We'll try to determine if teenagers have different frequency distributions when their cortex becomes active. We might question if the frequency alterations are different, will that make a difference in performance?"

Leuthardt said it is too early to make comparisons between adults and teenagers because they have only one set of teenage data. "But we observed much quicker reaction times in the boy and he had a higher level of detail of control - for instance, he wasn't moving just left and right, but just a little bit left, a little bit right," he said.

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