If the idea of turning consumers into true cyborgs sounds creepy, don’t tell Intel researchers. Intel’s Pittsburgh lab aims to develop brain implants that can control all sorts of gadgets directly via brain waves by 2020.
The scientists anticipate that consumers will adapt quickly to the idea, and indeed crave the freedom of not requiring a keyboard, mouse, or remote control for surfing the Web or changing channels. They also predict that people will tire of multi-touch devices such as our precious iPhones, Android smart phones and even Microsoft’s wacky Surface Table.
Turning brain waves into real-world tech action still requires some heavy decoding of brain activity. The Intel team has already made use of fMRI brain scans to match brain patterns with similar thoughts across many test subjects.
Plenty of other researchers have also tinkered in this area. Toyota recently demoed a wheelchair controlled with brainwaves, and University of Utah researchers have created a wireless brain transmitter that allows monkeys to control robotic arms.
There are still more implications to creating a seamless brain interface, besides having more cyborgs running around. If scientists can translate brain waves into specific actions, there’s no reason they could not create a virtual world with a full spectrum of activity tied to those brain waves. That’s right — we’re seeing Matrix creep.
A former soldier who handed a discarded shotgun in to police faces at least five years imprisonment for “doing his duty”.
Paul Clarke, 27, was found guilty of possessing a firearm at Guildford Crown Court on Tuesday – after finding the gun and handing it personally to police officers on March 20 this year.
The jury took 20 minutes to make its conviction, and Mr Clarke now faces a minimum of five year’s imprisonment for handing in the weapon.
In a statement read out in court, Mr Clarke said: “I didn’t think for one moment I would be arrested.
“I thought it was my duty to hand it in and get it off the streets.”
The court heard how Mr Clarke was on the balcony of his home in Nailsworth Crescent, Merstham, when he spotted a black bin liner at the bottom of his garden.
In his statement, he said: “I took it indoors and inside found a shorn-off shotgun and two cartridges.
“I didn’t know what to do, so the next morning I rang the Chief Superintendent, Adrian Harper, and asked if I could pop in and see him.
“At the police station, I took the gun out of the bag and placed it on the table so it was pointing towards the wall.”
Mr Clarke was then arrested immediately for possession of a firearm at Reigate police station, and taken to the cells.
Defending, Lionel Blackman told the jury Mr Clarke’s garden backs onto a public green field, and his garden wall is significantly lower than his neighbours.
He also showed jurors a leaflet printed by Surrey Police explaining to citizens what they can do at a police station, which included “reporting found firearms”.
Quizzing officer Garnett, who arrested Mr Clarke, he asked: “Are you aware of any notice issued by Surrey Police, or any publicity given to, telling citizens that if they find a firearm the only thing they should do is not touch it, report it by telephone, and not take it into a police station?”
To which, Mr Garnett replied: “No, I don’t believe so.”
Prosecuting, Brian Stalk, explained to the jury that possession of a firearm was a “strict liability” charge – therefore Mr Clarke’s allegedly honest intent was irrelevant.
Just by having the gun in his possession he was guilty of the charge, and has no defence in law against it, he added.
But despite this, Mr Blackman urged members of the jury to consider how they would respond if they found a gun.
He said: “This is a very small case with a very big principle.
“You could be walking to a railway station on the way to work and find a firearm in a bin in the park.
“Is it unreasonable to take it to the police station?”
Paul Clarke will be sentenced on December 11.
Judge Christopher Critchlow said: “This is an unusual case, but in law there is no dispute that Mr Clarke has no defence to this charge.
“The intention of anybody possessing a firearm is irrelevant.”
“I’ve done a Christian [-based] training program; I have a Muslim training program and a Jewish training program coming up, also a Hindu program coming up. I trained 200 Christian ministers and lay leaders here in Nashville in a version of the slide show that is filled with scriptural references. It’s probably my favourite version, but I don’t use it very often because it can come off as proselytising.”
Nobel winner adapts fact-based message to reach those who believe they have a moral duty to protect the planet in Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis
Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth sequel stresses spiritual argument on climate
by Suzanne Goldenberg
Al’s Gore’s much-anticipated sequel to An Inconvenent Truth is published today, with an admission that facts alone will not persuade Americans to act on global warming and that appealing to their spiritual side is the way forward.
In his latest book, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis, the man who won a Nobel prize in 2007 for his touring slideshow on disappearing polar ice and other consequences of climate change, concludes: “Simply laying out the facts won’t work.”
Instead, Gore tells Newsweek magazine in a pre-publication interview, that he has been adapting his fact-based message – now put out by hundreds of volunteers – to appeal to those who believe there is a moral or religious duty to protect the planet.
“I’ve done a Christian [-based] training program; I have a Muslim training program and a Jewish training program coming up, also a Hindu program coming up. I trained 200 Christian ministers and lay leaders here in Nashville in a version of the slide show that is filled with scriptural references. It’s probably my favourite version, but I don’t use it very often because it can come off as proselytising,” Gore tells Newsweek.
Gore’s book arrives at a time of intense international scrutiny of America’s moves on the environment ahead of an international meeting on global warming at Copenhagen, now just more than a month away.
It draws on the scholarly approach Gore developed for Inconvenient Truth. Since 2007, the former vice-president has been calling experts together from fields ranging from agriculture to neuroscience to discuss possible solutions to climate change.
The book draws on 30 such “solutions summits”, as well as Gore’s countless telephone conversations with scientists at America’s best institutions. According to the book’s press release, “Among the most unique approaches Gore takes in the book is showing readers how our own minds can be an impediment to change.”
New polling last month showed a steep decline in the numbers of Americans who share Gore’s sense of urgency in acting on climate change.
The book aims to reach those Americans by familiarising readers with emerging alternative energy sources, such as geothermal, biomass and wind power, as well as the possibilities of making cleaner coal power plants, and developing a more efficient and responsive “smart” electrical grid.
Gore also explores how deforestation, soil erosion, and the rising world population are multiplying the effects of rising greenhouse gas emissions.
Much of the material was developed through the series of brainstorming sessions organised by Gore. Since 2007, the former vice-president has been calling experts together to discuss possible solutions to climate change. He has also held countless telephone conversations with scientists at America’s best institutions.
“He is one of the only politicians that takes the time to actually talk to scientists who are producing the cutting-edge stuff and he comes in with questions. He doesn’t ask us how our results impinge on a particular policy he actually asks about science,” said Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist at Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who spoke to Gore along with colleagues four or five times for the book. “Nobody that we have dealt with has ever taken as much time to understand the subtlety of the science and all the different complications and what it all means as Al Gore.”
Those conversations led Gore to politically inconvenient conclusions in this new book. In his conversations with Schmidt and other colleagues at the beginning of the year, Gore explored new studies – published only last week – that show methane and black carbon or soot had a far greater impact on global warming than previously thought. Carbon dioxide – while the focus of the politics of climate change – produces around 40% of the actual warming.
Gore acknowledged to Newsweek that the findings could complicate efforts to build a political consensus around the need to limit carbon emissions.
“Over the years I have been among those who focused most of all on CO2, and I think that’s still justified,” he told the magazine. “But a comprehensive plan to solve the climate crisis has to widen the focus to encompass strategies for all” of the greenhouse culprits identified in the Nasa study.
The former vice-president has been working behind the scenes to try to nudge the White House and Congress to move forward on a 920-page proposed law to cut America’s greenhouse gas emissions and encourage its use of clean energy sources like solar and wind power.
On Saturday, he told the German newspaper, Der Spiegel, he was “almost certain” Obama would attend the negotiations. The White House has so far refused to make a commitment.
But Gore has also been confronted with almost daily fresh reminders of the difficulties of prodding Americans to action.
The proposed legislation has set off a ferocious debate about the costs of dealing with climate change – with conservative Democrats and Republicans saying reducing America’s use of oil will deepen unemployment and hurt average American families.
Republicans in the Senate have threatened to boycott a session today that had been called to move forward a draft of a 920-page proposed law to deal with climate change.
Progress on the bill is seen as crucial to getting a binding deal at Copenhagen. Barbara Boxer, the chair of the Senate’s environment and public works committee, said yesterday she was ready to move ahead without any Republican participation.
__________ Glenn Beck-Lord Monckton Debate Global Warming
The system, developed by a team at the University of Southampton, is said to be the first technology that would allow people to send thoughts, words and images directly to the minds of others, particularly people with a disability.
It has also been hailed as the future of the internet, which would provide a new way to communicate without the need for keyboards and telephones.
“This could be useful for those people who are locked into their bodies, who can’t speak, can’t even blink,” said the lead scientist Dr Christopher James.
The scientists claimed the research proved it could eventually be possible to create a system where people sent messages through their thoughts alone, although they conceded it was many years away.
Scientists used “brain-computer interfacing”, a technique that allows computers to analyse brain signals, that enabled them to send messages formed by a person’s brain signals though an internet connection to another person’s brain miles away.
According to Dr James, during transmission two people were connected to electrodes that measure activity in specific parts of the brain.
The first person generated a series of zeros and ones, where they imagined moving their left arm for zero and right arm for one.
After the first person’s computer recognises the binary thoughts, it sends them to the internet and then to the other person’s PC.
A lamp is then flashed at two different frequencies for one and zero, the Times reported.
The second person’s brain signals are analysed after staring at this lamp and the number sequence is picked up by a computer.
“It’s not telepathy,” Dr James told the paper.
“There’s no conscious thought forming in one person’s head and another conscious thought appearing in another person’s mind.
“The next experiments are to get that second person to be aware of the information that is being sent to them. For that, I need to get my thinking cap on, so to speak.”
Technology futurists love to talk about the Singularity as the point in time when technology starts to progress so rapidly that machine intelligence melds with and surpasses human intelligence. It is to futurists what the Rapture is to fundamentalist Christians.
Those who welcome or fear this eventuality are gathering this weekend in New York City for the fourth annual Singularity Summit. Speaking at the summit are some of the better-known tech soothsayers, including author and programmer Ray Kurzweil; Steve Wolfram, the founder of the novel search engine Alpha; and Aubrey de Grey, an expert on anti-aging science. Also giving talks are Australian philosopher David Chalmers, whose idea inspired the Matrix film series, and Pay-Pal co-founder Peter Thiel, who has donated in the six figures to the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, the organization putting on the event. Last year, the summit drew 1,000 curious academics and entrepreneurs in San Jose, Calif. (See our story on the 2007 Summit here.)
Michael Vassar, the president of the institute, gives the Singularity just under a 25% chance of happening by 2040 and a 70% chance by 2060. When we do cross that line, Vassar says nothing will be the same. “Humans living in the post-Singularity world will be as powerless as jellyfish are in today’s world,” he says. His odds don’t take into account the chances of the world plunging into rapid technological decline due to a nuclear war or a worldwide collapse into barbarism.
Vassar’s six staffers at the Singularity Institute, including Kurzweil, publish papers with titles such as, “Uncertain Future Project,” “Global Catastrophic Risk Project” and “Economics and Machine Intelligence,” and have developed software that supposedly predicts technology’s trajectories and generates odds on the occurrences of global catastrophes like nuclear war and global warming.
Singularists fall into optimist and pessimist camps. Optimists, such as Kurzweil, look forward to living in an age in which human intelligence is enhanced by brain implants that extend our memories, enhance our senses and allow us to solve problems faster and with greater accuracy.
The pessimists, and Vassar is one of them, see threats to humanity from the rise of an unfriendly machine intelligence that will want to enslave humans (think The Matrix) and use our brain matter for endless computation, much as we’ve used computers in the past 60 years.
Vassar says he and his colleagues at the Singularity Institute are working on seeing that a Matrix-like future never happens. Institute research fellow Eliezer Yudkowsky coined the term “Friendly AI” to describe an AI that could be built to have a moral conscience. One of the institute’s chief goals is to encourage other scientists to create this Friendly AI. (Read “Vassar’s Machine Minds” in the AI Report.)
Many computer scientists and engineers remain very skeptical of the Singularity and the cargo-cult enthusiasm that surrounds it. They don’t believe in humanity’s ability to reach a point at which technology will be so complex as to render us inconsequential. It’s also likely that for economic reasons, technical progress and computer hardware performance will never accelerate at the speed required to reach the Singularity.
Will Wright, the creator of The Sims videogame series, has gone on record saying that machines will never achieve the kind of intelligence and creativity of which humans are capable. But he does believe that machines will one day be able to make themselves more intelligent, effectively reprogramming themselves until the first real AI achieves its own sort of sentience, one that is very alien to our own human cognizance.
Ariel Rabkin, a third year Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkley’s Computer Science program, doubts that many technical people take the Singularity seriously. “Human-comparable AI is really hard,” he says, “And we’re nowhere close to achieving it.” He adds, “I can tell you that nobody I work with at Berkeley or elsewhere has ever mentioned it. And just to be clear, I don’t just mean, ‘We don’t talk about it in courses.’ I mean, nobody mentions it, at all, ever. We don’t think about it.”
But the Singularity continues to pique the curiosity of the layman. Over the next 12 months, Hollywood will release several movies with trans-humanist themes, such as Jonathan Mostow’s Surrogates, James Cameron’s Avatar, Barry Ptolemy’s Transcendent Man and The Singularity is Near, with a script by Ray Kurzweil. In a time when the publishing industry is struggling, Better Humans LLC has just launched a new magazine called H+ covering the trans-humanism scene for fans of radical technological change.
It’s possible that because the Singularity is a relatively new idea, it’s embraced mostly by the youth and dismissed as a counter-cultural trend by an older generation of professors and scientists. “I’m the older side of the Singularists,” says Vassar, who is 30 years old.
The Singularity probably won’t destroy humanity in our lifetime, but it’s productive to keep asking the question of whether technology is serving us or if things are the other way around.
HOLLYWOOD — Taken at face value, Bruce Willis’ new sci-fi thriller Surrogates sports a premise every bit as outlandish as the wig he wears during much of the movie. In the film’s near-future setting, humans have withdrawn from everyday life almost completely. Instead, they hole up in their homes and send robotic versions of themselves, called “surrogates,” into the real world.
The remote-control androids, which look vaguely like the robots from 1973’s Westworld, perform the operators’ jobs and interact with other surrogates. Willis stars as both a fresh-faced surrogate and its worn-out operator, who chafes at the lack of personal interaction in his life.
“In this movie, people stay at home in their underwear wired into this fantastic massagelike chair device for 16 hours at a stretch and operate this idealized version of themselves that they can control like a puppet,” said Surrogates director Jonathan Mostow as he previewed snippets of the film in his editing bay on the Disney lot last month.
During the Wired.com video interview above, Mostow expounds on surrogate technology and elaborates on the human/machine dynamic in the PG-13 film, which opens Friday. “If your brain waves say, ‘OK, raise your hand up like this,’ then that’s what the robot does,” he said.
Human-machine interfaces have been explored before in movies, from Sleep Dealer’s node workers, who jack in to a network to operate machines remotely, to The Matrix’s humans-as-batteries paradigm.
Pure sci-fi, right? Not entirely. Chad Cohen, science producer for Discovery Studio’s upcoming Discovery Channel series Curiosity, says Surrogates draws from real-world technology to sell its central concept.
“There is certainly a lot of research out there relating to neural interfaces that would help audiences make the leap and buy the premise,” he said. In fact, as the movie starts, it uses news clips citing real scientific experiments to set up its story line.
Case in point: Last May, University of Pittsburgh scientists implanted a monkey with electrodes that empowered the subject to move a mechanical arm and grab food using willpower alone.
“It’s almost like Luke Skywalker using the force to grab his lightsaber,” said Cohen. “From there, it’s not such a stretch to think that one day researchers might help paralyzed people control prosthetic arms.”
Another real-world example of brain-wave-activated robotics comes from Duke University Medical Center scientists, who wired a rhesus monkey with electrodes. When the monkey strode on a treadmill in North Carolina, its cortex prompted a 5-foot humanoid in Japan to start walking.
“We can read signals from the motor and sensory areas of the brain, decode them, and send them this bipedal robot that actually starts walking like a monkey,” Duke neuroscientist Miguel A. L. Nicolelis told Scientific American.
And not unlike Surrogates‘ humans who operate their robotic counterparts from the comfort of home, Hiroshi Ishiguro has built a neuromechanical replica of himself that lets him engage the real world by proxy. Ishiguro’s doppelgänger, dubbed Geminoid, gives lectures in venues thousands of miles from the scientist’s Osaka home office.
The type of advanced remote-control robots imagined in Surrogates likely won’t materialize in the real world for decades, if at all. Yet on a metaphorical level, Mostow, who earlier delved into big-screen robotics when he directed Terminator 3, believes people have already become overly attached to technologies that threaten to make in-person face time obsolete.
Pointing to the near-addictive quality of social networks like Facebook and Twitter, Mostow says: “What this movie is really about is what it means to live in a digital age where we’re connected to all these machines, yet we’re also so isolated from each other.”
________
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“Within ten years, you’re gonna have the world of the surrogates…”
University of Wisconsin-Madison biomedical engineering doctoral student Adam Wilson has successfully tested a “brain wave monitor” to Twitter publishing interface, allowing him to compose a message merely by thinking and publish it to the arguably too-popular microblogging service.
Either the gates of Hell have begun to open or this is a grad student who really knows how to publicize his work by riding the bandwagon of popular culture. Both are probably true.
We get a fair number of press releases from Universities about graduate research and we usually don’t write about them. This one was freakish enough that we decided to.
Technically, what Wilson did was come up with an interface combining an Electroencephalogram, or brain wave monitor, with an on screen keyboard for selecting letters. The system lights up each key on the keyboard but is able to notice a difference in brain activity when the desired letter for input is lit. Wilson compares it to clicking through multiple letters when texting on a mobile phone.
Once you’ve found a new way to input text – what are you going to do with it? Use it to Twitter, of course!
Clearly, there’s some gimmickry going on in the news of Wilson’s interface. Who knows if this is better or worse than saying that a technology is developed to assist physically disabled people when it’s really going to be used by the military? Wilson does say that the technology will be helpful for people with active brains but immobile bodies. Now they’ll be able to Twitter, among other things, he says. Fair enough.
Here at ReadWriteWeb we’re proud to have the #1 Google search result for the phrase “Internet brain implant” for our post The Internet Brain Implant: Why We Should Say No. Today could be a good time to go re-read that post. New interfaces are cool, but the sanctity of free, independent thought is very important. Wilson’s work is no brain implant, but it does seem like an important thing to check in with ourselves about.
To be fair, Twitter is clearly a revolutionary technology that we use throughout every day. Anyone who wants access to that tool ought to have it and Wilson’s work may increase access.
We presume many more uses for his work will be found if proven commercially viable. For now, though, we can remember today as the day we learned about the man who Tweeted with his mind.
Social networks such as Twitter may blunt people’s sense of morality, claim brain scientists.
New evidence shows the digital torrent of information from networking sites could have long-term damaging effects on the emotional development of young people’s brains.
A study suggests rapid-fire news updates and instant social interaction are too fast for the ‘moral compass’ of the brain to process.
The danger is that heavy Twitters and Facebook users could become ‘indifferent to human suffering’ because they never get time to reflect and fully experience emotions about other people’s feelings.
US scientists from the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California (USC) say the brain can respond in fractions of seconds to signs of physical pain in others.
But they show it takes longer to activate processing of social emotions such as admiration and compassion, which are critical for developing a sense of morality.
The study raises questions about the emotional cost of heavy reliance on a rapid stream of news snippets obtained through television, online feeds or social networks such as Twitter.
The impact could be most damaging for youngsters whose brains are still developing.
USC researcher Mary Helen Immordino-Yang said ‘For some kinds of thought, especially moral decision-making about other people’s social and psychological situations, we need to allow for adequate time and reflection.
‘If things are happening too fast, you may not ever fully experience emotions about other people’s psychological states and that would have implications for your morality.’
Mature celebrity users of Twitter such as Stephen Fry, Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand are behind the growing popularity of the site used by around 10 million people worldwide.
Barack Obama used it as a tool during last year’s US presidential elections to talk directly and quickly – only 140 characters can be posted at any time by website or mobile phone – to thousands of followers.
But a new study led by Antonio Damasio, director of the USC’s Brain and Creativity Institute, suggests that digital media may be better suited to some mental processes than others.
The study used compelling, real-life stories to induce admiration for virtue or skill, or compassion for physical or social pain, in 13 volunteers.
The emotions felt were verified by researchers in a series of interviews before and after, conducted using a careful protocol.
Brain imaging showed the volunteers needed six to eight seconds to fully respond to stories of virtue or social pain.
However, once awakened, the responses lasted far longer than the volunteers’ reactions to stories focused on physical pain.
The study will appear next week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Online Early Edition.
Manuel Castells, holder of the Wallis Annenberg Chair of Communication Technology and Society at USC, said ‘Damasio’s study has extraordinary implications for the human perception of events in a digital communication environment.
‘Lasting compassion in relationship to psychological suffering requires a level of persistent, emotional attention.’
‘In a media culture in which violence and suffering becomes an endless show, be it in fiction or in infotainment, indifference to the vision of human suffering gradually sets in.’
Although normal life events provide opportunities to feel admiration and compassion, the researchers fear heavy social networkers may not have time for traditional ways of developing a moral sense such as reading books and seeing friends.
The study showed physical and social pain both engage the posteromedial cortex, the region of brain related to the sense of self and consciousness, but in different areas.
Professor Damasio said ‘The brain is honouring a distinction between things that have to do with physicality and things that have to do with the mind.
‘When it comes to emotion, because these systems are inherently slow, perhaps all we can say is, not so fast.’
He said humans ’separate the good from the bad’ largely thanks to the feeling of admiration.
It is also deeply rooted in the brain and the sense of the body, the study found, engaging primal neural systems that regulate blood chemistry, the digestive system and other parts of the body.
Prof Damasio called it proof, pending replication of the findings, that social emotions have deep evolutionary roots.
He said ‘People generally don’t think of emotions like admiration and compassion as having forerunners in evolution.
‘We reveal that these emotions engage the basic systems of our physiology.’
The accelerating pace of technological progress means that our intelligent creations will soon eclipse us–and that their creations will eventually eclipse them
Sometime early in this century the intelligence of machines will exceed that of humans. Within a quarter of a century, machines will exhibit the full range of human intellect, emotions and skills, ranging from musical and other creative aptitudes to physical movement. They will claim to have feelings and, unlike today’s virtual personalities, will be very convincing when they tell us so. By around 2020 a $1,000 computer will at least match the processing power of the human brain. By 2029 the software for intelligence will have been largely mastered, and the average personal computer will be equivalent to 1,000 brains.
Once computers achieve a level of intelligence comparable to that of humans, they will necessarily soar past it. For example, if I learn French, I can’t readily download that learning to you. The reason is that for us, learning involves successions of stunningly complex patterns of interconnections among brain cells (neurons) and among the concentrations of biochemicals known as neurotransmitters that enable impulses to travel from neuron to neuron. We have no way of quickly downloading these patterns. But quick downloading will allow our nonbiological creations to share immediately what they learn with billions of other machines. Ultimately, nonbiological entities will master not only the sum total of their own knowledge but all of ours as well.
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As this happens, there will no longer be a clear distinction between human and machine. We are already putting computers—neural implants—directly into people’s brains to counteract Par kinson’s disease and tremors from multiple scle rosis. We have cochlear implants that restore hear ing. A retinal implant is being de veloped in the U.S. that is intended to provide
at least some visual perception for some blind individuals, basically by replacing certain visual-processing circuits of the brain. A team of scientists at Emory University implanted a chip in the brain of a paralyzed stroke victim that allowed him to use his brainpower to move a cursor across a computer screen.
In the 2020s neural implants will improve our sensory experiences, memory and thinking. By 2030, instead of just phoning a friend, you will be able to meet in, say, a virtual Mozam bican game preserve that will seem compellingly real. You will be able to have any type of ex perience—business, social, sexual—with anyone, real or simulated, regardless of physical proximity.
Researchers say the “immersive” aspect of games such as World of Warcraft means that the brain is particularly engaged and can absorb complex issues
Online computer games could be used as a powerful teaching tool for children as they are so popular and engaging, scientists claim.
Researchers believe interactive games such as World of Warcraft and Second Life could be adapted so that children learn skills from them that could be transferred to real life.
They believe that the “immersive” aspect of the games in which the player suspends his belief means that the brain is particularly engaged and can absorb complex issues.
The games real life feel also means that students could effectively carry out “work experience” on the computer learning techniques and skills they can apply back in reality.
Researchers believe that the games, which they say are more active than passive traditional learning, could be most useful for science based subjects with students able to carry out imaginary experiments and improve their ability to “learn to learn”.
“Compared with a similar, paper-based curriculum that included laboratory experiences, students overall were more engaged in the immersive interface and learned as much or more,” said Professor Chris Dede, an academic in Learning technologies at Harvard University in the journal Science.
Games such as Whyville and the ecology game River City have already been developed specifically to teach children and students but scientists believe established popular video games could be adapted so that players could be “dosed” with knowledge.
Much like “flight simulators” they are so “real” that many life skills can be learned from them. Early tests of these learning games have shown unusual levels of student engagement.
Dr Merrilea Mayo, director of Future Learning systems at the Kaufman Foundation, said the games can also help close the gap between under and over-achieving children.
“Unlike lectures, games can be adapted to the pace of the user,” she said
“Games also simultaneously present information in multiple visual and auditory modes, which capitalises on different learning styles.
“Although the field is still in its embryonic stages, game-based learning has the potential to deliver science and maths education to millions of users simultaneously.
“Unlike other mass-media experiments in education (e.g., TV), games are a highly interactive.”
The new research is likely to add to the debate about the pros and cons of video games.
Last year the culture minister Margaret Hodge called for a film-style classifications for games such as World of Warcraft which is said to have 10 million users worldwide.
There have also been concerns that the games are addictive and that children’s education and lives are being disrupted by them.
Matrix creep: Mind Trip Intel wants into your brain. (Image Warner Bros.)
Al Gore. Photograph by Graeme Robertson
University of Wisconsin-Madison biomedical engineering doctoral student Adam Wilson has successfully tested a “brain wave monitor” to Twitter publishing interface, allowing him to compose a message merely by thinking and publish it to the arguably too-popular microblogging service.
