We mentioned Emotiv nearly two years ago when Brian Crecente, editor of our sister site Kotaku, had a less than favorable interaction with the device (and we also suggested the technology could have some naughtier implications). However, Emotiv now believes that its neurosensor helmet, the Emotiv EPOC, is consumer-ready. The EPOC will be available to consumers in the US on December 21, and will retail for $299.

The EPOC is essentially a home EEG device, using electrodes to detect the brain's electrical activity. Earlier videos of people using the EPOC indicated that gameplay wasn't terribly smooth, so we'll have to wait and see if the consumer version offers satisfying gameplay, or just a neat bit of novelty. Below is a video of someone trying out the consumer version of the Emotiv EPOC that offers a good look at the device (unfortunately, the audio cuts out halfway through):

Nam Do, the founder of Emotiv, also plans to put this technology to other uses, such as focus testing. Rumor has it that he'll be working on focus testing James Cameron's Avatar to gauge if what audience members say about the movie matches up to what their brains are telling us.

Future tech: Interview with Emotiv co-founder Nam Do, and the science behind mind control [PC Magazine via Slashdot]

An upcoming paper in NeuroReport details the latest research on the remarkable abilities of naked mole rats. Mole rats, who live in underground tunnels where oxygen is low, are uniquely capable of surviving for lengthy periods without oxygen — and avoid suffering brain damage. Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago found that naked mole rats can endure more than half an hour of extreme oxygen deprivation without damage to their brain cells. At the outset, their neurons maintain function six times longer than mouse neurons do in similar circumstances. The hope is that learning more about the mechanism that preserves mole rat brains could someday prevent brain damage in victims of stroke, heart attack, drowning, and other incidences of oxygen deprivation.

This isn't the first remarkable ability the mole rats have shown. The creatures live longer than any other rodent, are apparently impervious to pain, and, as we mentioned a few weeks ago, are completely immune to cancer.

Suddenly, the choice of animal sidekick in Kim Possible makes so much more sense.

Naked Mole Rats Survive Extreme Oxygen Deprivation [LiveScience]

When he was 20 years old, Rom Houben was involved in a car accident that left him completely paralyzed. The accident didn't place him in a coma, however, and he tried desperately to communicate with those around him, but to no avail. Dr. House may have recognized "locked-in" syndrome in a few minutes, but Houben's doctors spent 23 years believing their patient was a vegetable, leaving Houben to experience nothing outside the hospital soap operas playing out in his room (apparently, his nurses were frequent gossips).

How did this happen? Houben's doctors determined that he was in a coma using the Glasgow Coma Scale, a widely used system that evaluates eye movement and motor responses. The trouble is that while Houben's body was functioning like a coma patient, his cerebral cortex was still chugging along. It took a brain scan to reveal that Houben was still fully conscious, and he is currently able to communicate thanks to a keyboard that responds to the barest tremors he can coax from his right hand.

While one would hope Houben was the unlucky winner of a terrifying medical lottery, situations like his may not be rare. Neurologist Steven Laureys, who performed the revealing brain scan on Houben, says that in 40 percent of supposedly vegetative patients he examined, brain scans revealed some level of consciousness. Both Houben and Laureys are advocating that doctors lean less on the Glasgow Scale and look more toward brain scans.

Brain scan finds man was not in a coma—23 years later [CNET]

Psychologists at the University of California in Santa Barbara and the University of British Columbia have been studying the effects of reading on cognitive functions. They had one group of subject read Franz Kafka's short story "The Country Doctor," a strange and surreal tale, and had a second group read the same story, but structured in a way that made more traditionally logical sense to readers. After reading the story, the subjects were then given a grammar learning test in which they were asked to identify patterns within strings of letters.

Subjects who read the original Kafka story identified more letter strings than those who read the more logically structured version, and were actually more accurate in their identifications, suggesting that they had better learned the patterns. The researchers believe that, in reading a story without a readily identifiable logic or structure, the subjects' brains began actively looking for patterns:

"You get the same pattern of effects whether you're reading Kafka or experiencing a breakdown in your sense of identity," [study co-author Travis] Proulx said. "People feel uncomfortable when their expected associations are violated, and that creates an unconscious desire to make sense of their surroundings. That feeling of discomfort may come from a surreal story, or from contemplating their own contradictory behaviours, but either way, they want to get rid of it. So they're motivated to learn new patterns."

The rub, though, is that the surreal experience must be unexpected to get the desired cognitive boost. Going in knowing you are going to read a strange and surreal story might not have the same effect.

Reading Kafka 'enhances cognitive mechanisms', claims study [Guardian]

Researchers at the University of Washington have been working with adult squirrel monkeys born without the ability to distinguish color. By introducing therapeutic genes for perfect color vision to the light-sensing cells at the back of the monkeys' eyes, the researchers have given the monkeys the ability to distinguish red and green. Although further research is needed, the team is optimistic that this is the first step in curing congenital color blindness, the most common form of which involves a faulty gene on the X chromosome.

But what's truly stunning about the breakthrough is that the monkeys in the study were adults. Light perception has been restored in children suffering from degenerative blindness, but researchers have long believed that adult brains are too "fixed" for sensory disorders to be treatable. That the adult monkey brains were readily receptive to perceiving color, something they had never done before, may open the door to treating a whole host of sensory conditions.

'Gene cure' for colour blindness [BBC]

A team of psychologists at the University of California, Los Angeles, conducted a study to determine the relationship between a pain susceptibility gene OPRM1 and emotional pain. They polled 122 participants about their emotional and physical reactions to social situations, especially social exclusion. They also created a virtual social exclusion scenario in which 31 of the participants were excluded during a ball-tossing computer game while researchers monitored their brain activity.

They found that the same variation of the OPRM1 pain gene that has been linked with high susceptibility to physical pain also correlates to high susceptibility to emotional pain. When participants with this rare variation were excluded from the computer game, there was greater activity in the pain-related regions of their brains than in the brains of people with more common variations of the gene.

This suggests that the gene may be responsible for a neurological mechanism that triggers pain receptors when an individual feels social rejection. And study co-author Naomi Eisenberger suggests that such a mechanism may have driven some humans to form evolutionarily beneficial social groups:

Because social connection is so important, feeling literally hurt by not having social connections may be an adaptive way to make sure we keep them. Over the course of evolution, the social attachment system, which ensures social connection, may have actually borrowed some of the mechanisms of the pain system to maintain social connections.

Still no word, though, on whether a person can, in fact, die of a broken heart.

Why a broken heart really does hurt [Telegraph via Reddit]

Wait It Out

Animorphs: The Yeerks travel throughout the universe, enslaving various species, and are currently working on their conquest of Earth. The slug-like creatures take control of their hosts by crawling in through the ear canal, but can only stay inside for three days at a time, after which they need to leave to absorb the rays from their home sun. They can put off the ray bath by having their host consume instant maple and ginger oatmeal, but too much of the stuff will drive the Yeerks insane.

“The Shadow Out of Time” by HP Lovecraft: The Yithians are not physical parasites, but can take control of another being’s body by swapping minds with their victims. They then control their victims’ bodies, learning all they can. Once they’ve gotten the information they want, Yithians generally let their victims have their bodies back. But, on at least one occasion, the Yithians have held onto another race’s bodies indefinitely.

Conquer it with Willpower

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan: Ceti eels are not themselves sentient, but nasty little critters will burrow inside its host’s brain, making it extremely susceptible to suggestion. After Khan plants a Ceti eel in Commander Chekov’s ear, Chekov resists Khan’s influence and collapses, causing the eel to slip back out of his ear. It’s not a foolproof method, though; fellow eel infectee Clark Terrell also resists Khan’s order to assassinate Kirk, but ends up shooting himself instead.

Dehydrate It

The Faculty: The faculty of Herrington High School are controlled by yet another breed of ear canal-seeking parasite, giving them the single-minded purpose of spreading the parasites to the entire student body. Fortunately, one of the students keeps around a stash of his homemade recreational drug, which happens to be a diuretic. One shot of that stuff dries up the parasites and probably leaves the victims high enough to write off the whole ordeal as a fever dream.

Angel “The Price”: A swarm of thirsty silicone slugs are the price some pay for using dark magic. The best way to de-worm an infected host is to dehydrate them, which can be achieved by consuming copious amounts of booze. But the slugs assume a limit control over the host’s body, prompting them to drink water until the slugs drain them completely dry.

Build Up Your Post-Infection Immunity

The X-Files: Purity, the fearsome Black Oil that appears throughout the series, is absorbed by humans on contact. The human host becomes a slave to the alien Black Oil, spreading the virus to others and helping the extraterrestrial colonists reproduce. There is a vaccine, albeit a weak one, which has, in some cases, reversed the infection.

Doctor Who “The Invisible Enemy”: After encountering the Swarm, an intelligent virus that controls the infected, the Doctor is repeatedly infected, although thanks to his Time Lord constitution, he is able to overcome his infections. But his companion Leela is entirely immune to the Swarm. When the Doctor finally succumbs to infection, a miniaturized Leela clone enters the Doctor’s body, giving the Doctor her immunity as they force the virus out of his body.

Remove It By Force

Stargate SG-1: The snaky Goa’uld burrow into their host’s brain, accessing its memories and taking control of its body. Removing a Goa’uld symbiote is tricky since it will poison its host if it senses its life is in danger. But a handful of species have developed methods of separating the symbiotes from their hosts.

The Host by Stephenie Meyer: The alien Souls are surgically inserted inside the bodies of other species, possessing individuals so that they can quietly conquer the planet and turn it into a peaceful, carefully controlled paradise. And a person with the correct knowledge can remove the alien in the same manner.

Lexx “Eating Pattern” and “Bad Carrot”: Lexx features a pair of mind-controlling parasites. The snake-like creature in “Eating Pattern” turns Stan into a cannibal and has to be forcibly extracted from his neck. The carrot-shaped drone in “Bad Carrot” enters through the rectum and must be expelled the same way.

Marvel Symbiotes: The alien symbiotes of the Marvel Universe offer their hosts incredible powers, but they merge not only with the host’s physical being, but with their personality as well. But the symbiotes generally have a weakness to heat, sound, or electricity, which can force them to separate from the host.

Infect the Infection

The Puppet Masters by Robert Heinlein: The inspiration for many later mind control parasites, the alien slugs of The Puppet Masters attach themselves to the backs of their hosts, bring the hosts under the aliens’ control. The slugs can be physically detached, but that is not sufficient to control the epidemic. Instead, the resisting humans infect the population with a disease that is fatal to the slugs, treating the humans once their slug masters die.

Defeat It with Alien Superpowers

Ben 10: Alien Force “Max Out”: Ben’s cousin has the misfortune of being attached to a Xenocyte, an alien leech that not only exerts mind control, but also transforms its human host into a DNAlien. But the Omnitrix, the alien device that gives Ben his powers, has a genetic repair function that reverses the melding.

New X-Men “Here Comes Tomorrow”: The sentient bacteria Sublime can also take possession of human bodies and, as John Sublime, has quietly worked behind the scenes in mutant research and living weapons development. In an alternate future, Jean Grey, using the alien Phoenix Force, destroys Sublime once and for all.

Kill the Parasite’s Master

Babylon 5: Keepers, the genetically engineered parasites used by the Drakh to control their victims, cannot be surgically removed and are only sedated by alcohol. But killing the Drakh that spawned the keeper will destroy the parasite without harming the host.

In The Faculty the infection also ends with the destruction of the alien queen, and in the Doctor Who episode “The Invisible Enemy,” killing the disease’s nucleus puts an end to the disease.

Once It’s Off, Switch to a Garlic Shampoo

Futurama: An important step in any brain parasite removal is preventing another infection. Switching to a garlic shampoo deters reattachment, as does wearing a helmet. Just be sure that your friends don’t mistake your fallen brain slug for an unusual hat, or you could be reinfected before you get a chance to wash your hair.

The research team at the Karolinksa Institute presented their findings today at the annual meeting at the Society for Neuroscience. They provided male and female volunteers with sensory input to convince them that they had switched bodies with another person or a mannequin:

Volunteers experienced the body-swap illusion by receiving simultaneous visual and motor input from another’s body. In one experiment, each participant stood across from a male mannequin, and in another experiment volunteers faced a female experimenter. A headset covering participants’ eyes displayed a three-dimensional view of the other’s visual perspective, transmitted from a small video camera positioned on the mannequin’s or the woman’s head.

In the mannequin situation, an experimenter simultaneously touched the participant’s belly and the mannequin’s belly with separate probes. So the volunteer felt a poking in the abdomen but saw the poking happen as if he or she were the mannequin. In the real-person situation, participant and experimenter shook hands. Thus, while volunteers felt the sensation of hand shaking, it appeared to them that they were shaking their own hand. After 10 to 12 seconds of abdominal touch or hand-shaking, male and female participants spontaneously had the experience of looking out from the body of the male mannequin or the female experimenter. They literally felt that they were in the mannequin’s body getting poked or had embodied the female experimenter and were shaking their own hands.

Neither male nor female participants had any trouble convincing themselves that they had entered the body of the male mannequin. Similarly, when male volunteers were given sensory input from the female experimenter, they readily believed that they had swapped bodies with her. And as surreal as the experience was, presenter Valeria Petkova reported that the subjects were ready for another go:

“Our subjects experienced this illusion as being exciting and strange, and often said that they wanted to come back and try it again.”

[Science News]

According to the Daily Grail, the scientists from Goldsmith College’s Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit got mixed results with their EMF-laced house:

Recent research has suggested that a number of environmental factors may be associated with a tendency for susceptible individuals to report mildly anomalous sensations typically associated with ‘‘haunted’’ locations, including a sense of presence, feeling dizzy, inexplicable smells, and so on. Factors that may be associated with such sensations include fluctuations in the electromagnetic field (EMF) and the presence of infrasound. A review of such work is presented, followed by the results of the "Haunt" project in which an attempt was made to construct an artificial "haunted" room by systematically varying such environmental factors.

Unfortunately, when the team tested this theory, they came up ghostless. They asked 79 participants to walk through their haunted house and record if and where they experienced any unusual sensations. While some participants did feel such sensations, the locations in the house where they felt the sensations did not correlate with the locations the team had “haunted,” suggesting the sensations were caused more by the power of suggestion than electromagnetic fields.

But other researchers have had more luck summoning ghosts with EMF. Michael Persinger, a neuroscientist at Laurentian University, published a study on a brain damaged girl who reported frequent nocturnal visits from an apparition. Reports Scientific American:

When Persinger and his colleagues investigated (at the behest of the girl's mother), they found an electric clock next to the bed that was about 10 inches (25.4 centimeters) from where she placed her head when she slept. Tests showed that the clock generated electromagnetic pulses with waveforms similar to those found to trigger epileptic seizures in rats and humans. When the clock was removed, the visions stopped. Persinger determined that the clock, in combination with the girl's brain injury, were highly likely to have been contributing factors to the perceived nocturnal visits.

Regardless of the cause, the notions of ghosts and haunting do have a measured effect on our psyches. In 2005, a study published in Human Nature had participants take a test on which they were given the opportunity to cheat. Some of the test takers were told the room was haunted, while the others were not. The students in the haunted group were overwhelmingly less likely to cheat than the non-haunted group, suggesting that, even if they didn’t fear ghostly retribution, they still had the uneasy feeling that someone might be watching them.

The 'Haunt' Project [Daily Grail]
Ghost Lusters: If You Want to See a Specter Badly Enough, Will You? [Scientific American]
Spooky Science: Does a Fear of Ghosts Help Keep Us Honest? [Scientific American]

Carr's argument is a subtle one so I suggest reading the whole feature. But let me take a shot at a one-sentence distillation: The internet is giving us a form of ADHD when it comes to reading, and we should be scared of that.*

I don't entirely disagree with the first part of that thought, but the second doesn't make a whole lot of sense. In Carr's own words, humans have been developing technologies that change the way we thnk throughout our history:

As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies. The mechanical clock, which came into common use in the 14th century, provides a compelling example. In Technics and Civilization, the historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford described how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.” The “abstract framework of divided time” became “the point of reference for both action and thought.”

The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and scientific man. But it also took something away. As the late MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum observed in his 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, the conception of the world that emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments “remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality.” In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.

Now I hate alarm clocks as much as the next guy, and it's true, we do live our lives by minutes and hours more than the cycles of the sun, moon, tides, or whatever. But is Carr really trying to say that the advent of the 9-5 job cancels out the advances of all of science, math, and our understanding of the universe? That's pushing it.

And so is this passage on how Google will one day turn into the HAL-9000:

Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.” In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”

...their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.

Google's dominance of the digital world is admittedly a little unnerving, but HAL? C'mon now. Actually Carr's article leads and ends with references to the murderous and fictional computer, making it pretty clear what he thinks about the role artificial intelligence will play in our non-fiction future.

In the end Carr's article isn't entirely ham-handed — but his analysis is. He looks back on Socrates, who once wrote about how the invention of writing would be the death of us all. Later, other writers thought the printing press would ruin the pursuit of knowledge. Looking back, those sentiments seem shortsighted, and with good reason. They're actually evidence against Carr's case: If printing presses are any indication of how these things go, the internet will facilitate an intellectual revolution the likes of which no one could predict in the early going.

But Carr still argues that the internet is going to ruin the human mind. Who knows, maybe he just couldn't resist the opportunity to compare himself to Socrates. Regardless, both Carr and the ancient Greek were wrong on this one: their arguments are little more than over-intellectualized bellyaching that resemble old people's classic "kids these days" speech. But instead of moaning about modern youth, the refrain is more like "technology these days."

*I realize the paradox here — if Carr's right, no one's going to go read the whole feature. You probably won't even read this whole post. You'll scan the headline, maybe a paragraph or two, then go flitting off to the next item. I've got more faith in io9ers, though.

Here are five orgasm weapons you'll want to stick in your holster.

The orgasm gun from Orgazmo delivers orgasm from a distance via a cheesy "raygun" special effect and can be used to stop bad guys (or give unsuspecting girls a zap). Orgazmo, made by South Park guys Trey Parker and Matt Stone, is a scifi comedy about Mormons, pornography, and this strange device. Can a nice Mormon boy who accidentally becomes a porn star save the world with his orgasm gun? You'll have to rent this flick to find out.

In Larry Niven's "known space" books, he introduces the Tasp — a weapon that delivers intense zaps of pleasure right to your brain. It can be used to incapacitate enemies, who are left writhing on the ground in ecstasy. Or it can be used to slowly train somebody you want to enslave, by giving them pleasurable rewards each time they obey you. Eventually, they'll get addicted to your Tasp and do anything to get another jolt. This is a major plot point in Niven's Ringworld, where the Puppeteer alien has a Tasp installed in one of his heads and uses it to control the other creatures who venture to the Dyson Ring with him.

Ming's ring in the 1980 Flash Gordon movie seems to have some kind of orgasm-inducing, mind-controlling power. As you can see in this video we posted of Ming controlling Dale with the ring, falling under its glowing ray results in writhing and solo dirty dancing moves. Could be good at parties. Or in the throne rooms of Emperors who make speeches about "pathetic Earthlings." Either way.

And although sex ninjas aren't exactly scifi, there is simply no cause to leave out the importance of orgasm weapons in the anime miniseries La Blue Girl. It's the simple tale of rival ninja clans who fight with sex instead of swords. The first person to have an orgasm loses, and often becomes enslaved to the ninja who gives the orgasm. Plus monsters can play too, which makes it even harder to resist those orgasms. After all, a monster can have an infinite number of pleasure-inducing tentacles as you can see here.

There's a really messed-up orgasm electrode in Robin Cook's cheesy medical thriller Brain, about some scurrilous doctors who create a brain-based computer by using the brains of hapless co-eds. In one scene, our hero finds out about the brain experiments, and discovers the secret of using women's brains. The bad guys have their unlucky vicitms half-dissected but still alive, suspended in cerebro-spinal fluid, their brains exposed and their bodies (inexplicably) still attached. (Also, unexplained is why they need only ladies, other than that it's way sexier.) They've implanted electrodes in the women's pleasure centers to get them to perform computer work in their heads. "When we stimulate her, she has the sensation of 100 orgasms," the evil doctor tells our hero. "It must be sensational because she wants it constantly." I love that this doctor knows exactly what 100 orgasms would feel like, as if "orgasm" is a unit of pleasure measurement.

And just to remind you that the reality of these devices is closer than you might think, don't forget that surgeon Stuart Meloy invented a spinal implant several years ago that gives women orgasms. He's patented it, and is in the process of doing tests to turn it into a consumer device.

According to Albert Y. Hung, a staff neurologist at Mass General and co-author of the study:

These opposite effects on different types of learning are reminiscent of the mixed features of autistic patients, who may be disabled in some cognitive areas but show enhanced abilities in others. The superior learning ability of these mutant mice in a specific realm is reminiscent of human autistic savants.

Hung said that while it seems counter-intuitive that loss of an important synaptic scaffold protein would result in improved learning among the mice in this study, the absence of this protein may "trap" the mice's synapses in a more plastic state, which means the synapses are ready to respond to input but not maintain it in long-term memory. Aberrant synapse development and faulty structure of dendritic spines—tiny protrusions on the surface of neurons that receive messages from other neurons—are often associated with neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism, in humans.

It turned out that men and women use exactly the same parts of their brains to engage in the imaginative exercise required to imagine, a future scenario. Even more intriguing was that both genders relied heavily on the Hippocampus, a part of the brain that's usually associated with memory. Write the authors in a study published earlier this year in the journal Hippocampus:

Behavioral, lesion and neuroimaging evidence show striking commonalities between remembering past events and imagining future events. In a recent event-related fMRI study, we instructed participants to construct a past or future event in response to a cue. Once an event was in mind, participants made a button press, then generated details (elaboration) and rated them. The elaboration of past and future events recruited a common neural network.

The armies of evil look like Gort from The Day The Earth Stood Still painted red and sporting fins, and we love the pre-packaged versions of them lined up behind the two evils. They look like something you might find in a toy store in the action figures aisle. However, it's the androidical sidekick who steals the entire commercial. From his excitement over War Kittens, to the way he "accidentally" blows up the space station in the background and says "Oops," we need more bad guys like this.

Just hyperventilate, get your heart going fast enough, and the computer will turn on. Apparently they've tested the system on several users and it's working pretty well. Usually I only hyperventilate at my computer when it is turned on and doing something annoying (Firefox on Mac OS ahem), so I'm glad there isn't an EKG power-off command in the works. [New Scientist]

No matter what, I like any trend that leads us closer to a day when people flirt online by exchanging MRIs of their brains.