Remote broken and you’re too lazy to get off the couch to change channels?
Does your remote keep disappearing from your designated remote-spot only to end up in Detroit, forcing you to worry about the repercussions of income inequality and poverty?
Is this day 100 of your sit-on-your-a** marathon and you’re just one day from beating your last record?
Enough of the excuses, let’s face it, pushing those darned buttons is getting WAY too tiring.
Have no fear. You’ll soon find that it’s an issue of Mind over Matter… literally!
The British Broadcasting Channel (BBC) brought you fantastic authors like George Orwell, who was inspired to write his distopian-nightmare scenario handbook 1984 by his time working for it. The room where one’s worst nightmare could be created to force him into subservience was called room 101- his room at the BBC. Of note, the BBC decided to put a spin on his take on the room. In 1984, Big Brother also happens to be watching everybody via special TV-screens that broadcast propaganda 24/7… I’m getting goosebumps.
Now the BBC is bringing us mind control of a different sort. Apparently. Working together with a British tech company called This Place, as opposed to that place, they have created a prototype brainwave reading headset that works with the BBC’s iplayer service. The head of business development for the BBC’s Digital division had this to say:
It’s an internal prototype designed to give our program makers, technologists and other users an idea of how this technology might be used in future.
10 BBC staff were made to wear the device, and use only their minds to switch channels- more focused individuals seemed to get the knack for it faster than those who could not concentrate as well, though all test subjects have successfully do so eventually.
The device measures the electrical impulses of the brain. When focused, the thought interface cycles through every program or channel until the user selects it based on a calibrated brainwave- the channel will then play until the user focuses again on searching for another channel. So if this device can read your focused brainwaves, what happens when version 2.0 can read all of your brainwaves? Nice to see the BBC hasn’t changed its tact.
Russell Plunkett, the innovations director at This Place, highlighted the need of the mind to be free of clutter before the tech will work. Basically, keep your mind free of other thoughts and focus solely on chanting “The BBC”. He said:
To do this, I am going to meditate by closing my eyes and focusing on deep breaths.
Yeah, I’d rather keep pressing buttons. Easier, and I get to keep thinking about how sh** TV programs are. Also, I don’t have to pray to my BBC overlords and play the Slot Machine of Doom before finding the channel I want.
Salhan believes that the tech could be key to creating different methods of human-machine communications. Or machine-human communications. Having your TV project Ads right into your mind coming up next.
Integration of the tech with other gadgets could even lead to improvements and different uses for them. Such as spying on your mind.
Of course, people who truly lack the ability to manipulate objects in the real world with their bodies might stand to benefit from the tech. Unfortunately, it will likely be used by a plethora of able-bodied people who are wowed by the “cool factor” and the fact that “everybody is doing it” and society eventually turns into brains floating in jars being monitored by propaganda-spewing TVs.
1984 was written three decades too early. It’s why we don’t have Michael J. Fox on a hover-board yet.
Sources: Fossbytes
This Article (BBC’s Newest Invention Lets You Change Channels With Your MIND) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author(CoNN) and AnonHQ.com.
