Real Life Application

The system, as can be seen clearly, has got very interesting and widespread applications limited only by the extent of our imagination or in other words limited by nothing at all. We will, in this section, see some of the interesting applications of the system in our life that have been realized and many others which we are hopeful to accomplish in coming years.

A very common application that many people today are aware of is “lie detectors”. It works on detection of percentage of alpha waves in the brain waves, which as discussed earlier dominate when person is relaxed. Another application is detection of a word or a sentence being thought or heard by a person.

Fig: Brain wave and spectrum corresponding to a sentence

The system has also been put into use for some medical purposes. Using a specific model of this system, the state of brain is detected (relaxed or disturbed). It now produces its own electromagnetic waves which interfere with the brain waves to generate more of alpha waves and relax brain. Movement of paralyzed limbs has also been made possible now. Muscle stimulating electrodes are placed under skin which are controlled by signals generated by a specific form of our system which is implanted in brain. This application has been put into use over a considerable number of patients.

The concept of alpha waves has been put into use for making teaching and learning more effective.A very interesting and recent application of this system made news headlines around the world. A monkey was trained to play a simple computer game in which a dot moved in the direction in which monkey moved the joystick. A chip was implanted in monkey’s brain which served the purpose of reading the impulses in brain related to monkey’s hand movement. Now the joystick was disconnected from the computer and monkey was made to play the game again. Monkey’s brain not perceiving


Fig: Monkey’s brain waves being used to play a game

the situation generated waves as in normal condition which were transmitted by the chip to a special purpose computer which processed them and made the dot on the screen move just as before. This significant progress in this field will have wide spread effects in coming years. It can be used, for example for enabling handicapped people to do simple computer operating like checking mails etc. The limitation of this system right now is that electrodes have to be placed over or inside the brain. In coming years engineers hope to develop technology which will enable reading brain waves from a distance and even in group of people. In coming years, scientists hope to be able to harness magnetic waves of brain to produce similar results. The advantage of using them is that they can be collected at a distance from a person. Today scientists also imagine to have made a satellite which goes around the earth reading the brains of people from such a distance. Sounds unimaginable but can be made true in coming years.

Yet another very interesting application of this system that can be thought of is programming the brain itself. We simply need to decode the language that brain uses. After that it would not be difficult to create electromagnetic waves which after interfering with brain waves would make a person think the desired way. Defense agencies of some countries are suspected to be supporting such a project with the ambition of controlling minds of entire countries in a situation like war.

A very interesting observation was made about so called haunted houses and palaces that most of them were situated near a source of high electromagnetic activity. Doctors and scientists use this observation to strengthen their claim that brain can be controlled to an extent of making people hallucinate.