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Slate is one of the oldest and most established online magazines  
www.slate.com,  They have an article on the Mindball game that has  
shown up at some ASTC conferences and is apparently being used at  
several science centers.
Happy New Year!
Eric Siegel

Bowling With Brain Waves
A new game has you moving a ball with your mind.
Posted Tuesday, Dec. 26, 2006, at 3:52 PM ET
To win a game of Mindball, you have to use your head. Two players sit  
across from one another at a long table; between them is a little  
gray ball. Each tries to push the ball toward his opponent, but  
they're not allowed to use their hands. Instead, they have to coax it  
along using only the electrical activity of their brains.

Sound like fun? It's amazing to watch. I wasn't the only one  
impressed by Regis and Kelly's on-air game of Mindball in early  
November. Despite its $20,000 price tag, the quirky console has made  
its way into this year's holiday gift-gadget media blitz. Wired has  
been pushing Mindball ever since it appeared in the magazine's  
NextFest two years ago, and they have a system on display (through  
New Year's Eve) at the Wired store in New York City. Last week I  
headed over to the store for a closer look.

The game is supposed to measure each player's brain activity with a  
band of electrodes worn above the eyes. These pick up the faint  
electrical signals that emanate from inside our heads. Mindball's  
designers at the Interactive Institute in Sweden configured their  
system to register only a few of these signals—the low-frequency  
components known as alpha and theta waves. Alpha and theta, they tell  
us, are generated when the brain is "calm and relaxed." To win a game  
of Mindball, then, you have to out-calm your opponent. (For a bit  
more background on this, click here.)

Once the two players hunker down to get their alpha and theta waves  
going, graphs on a video screen start tracking their mental activity.  
Then, all of a sudden, the ball starts to inch back and forth across  
the table. Of course this isn't real telekinesis—there's a concealed,  
sliding magnet that pulls it along. But the magnet gets its cues from  
the headband electrodes, giving the illusion of a ball that's pushed  
by invisible lines of mental force.

Before heading down to the Wired store, I read up on how to maximize  
my alpha and theta waves. It turns out the best approach is to avoid  
thinking too hard about anything in particular—the surest way to  
bottom out your alpha waves is to start doing math problems in your  
head. On the other hand, you can get an alpha boost just by closing  
your eyes. Sleep deprivation is another way to pump up alpha and theta 
—the longer you stay awake, the better. I also had an ace in the  
hole: Studies have shown that cocaine can give you a burst of both  
alpha and theta activity. I loved the idea of juicing for a Mindball  
tournament. While everyone else struggled to stay relaxed with yoga  
breathing, I'd be high as a kite and beating their asses.

I never had to resort to doping. At the store, I sat down at the  
machine, strapped on the headband, and closed my eyes. A few seconds  
later someone tapped me on the shoulder. "It's over," he said, "you  
won." The next few matches were just as easy. I didn't want to hog  
the table, so I decided to try mental arithmetic in an effort to  
diminish my alpha waves and lose as quickly as possible. But I won  
again; one spectator even told me he'd never seen alpha and theta  
like mine.

This was getting suspicious. I took off my headband in the middle of  
one match and still managed to eke out a victory. I convinced my  
opponent to take off her headband, too. We sat across from each other  
with our brain-sensing electrodes laid out on the table and watched  
the ball dance to and fro. It was our closest match yet; after a  
minute or so, the ball finally edged across her goal line.

Mindball was clearly broken. When I pulled a Wired store employee  
aside to complain, he shrugged. "It's not a very good product," he  
said, over the noise of the in-store DJ. He explained that the game  
works better when there's less going on in the store and when  
someone's around to make sure everything's plugged in properly. "I  
wouldn't buy one," he concluded.

Faulty connections and loud music might not have been the only things  
interfering with the Mindball signal. To pick up human brain-wave  
activity, you need a very sensitive (and very expensive) machine.  
Slight changes in the positioning of the electrodes can make a big  
difference—if an electrode slips even a fraction of an inch during  
recording, the machine could register a false spike. Something as  
minimal as a fluttering eyelid can produce a signal.

Electrodes are placed with extreme care in clinical settings, where  
brain waves are recorded to diagnose epilepsy and sleep disorders. In  
most cases, a trained technician will apply them securely to the head  
using a conductive gel to ensure a clean connection. Even normal skin  
or hair oil can throw off the signal.

The Mindball headband comes with no such controls. The location of  
the electrodes and the quality of the connection depends on how you  
happen to put it on. (Women who slide it over bangs, for example,  
will have a layer of hair between the metal and their skin.) The  
machine doesn't even have a way of testing the contacts, though it  
would be easy enough to build in such a monitor.

Even if the connections were stable, there might be other problems.  
Not everyone has the same baseline alpha and theta activity. Some  
people could have naturally stronger signals, whether they're Zen  
monks or nervous Nellies. And there's no way to know what the machine  
is actually recording, since the "data" on the video display are more  
impressionistic than informative. The graphs are flipped, for one  
thing—with higher alpha and theta activity represented as lower  
values. There's also a conspicuous absence of numbers or units of  
measurement.

When I asked a Mindball marketing rep about these issues, I was told  
that it's "just a game." The manufacturers won't give out any  
information about the quality of the signals or the raw data that are  
produced. It's an entertainment product, after all, so why can't I  
just relax and enjoy it?

The Swedes who created the prototype for Mindball—called Brainball— 
aren't any more helpful. "The emptiness of Brainball makes it open to  
interpretation and reflection on what it is and how to use it,"  
writes one of its inventors in an impenetrable essay that cites both  
Jacques Derrida and Claude Lévi-Strauss.

But institutions aren't laying out $20,000 for conceptual art. Seven  
North American science museums have already purchased Mindball  
systems, and the U.S. Military Academy at West Point bought one to  
train cadets on "optimal attentional focus for peak performance." Not  
even the Army could wrest any specific technical information from the  
manufacturers. If we want to train our troops with Mindball, we're  
just going to have to trust that it works.

The crowd in the Wired store didn't seem too concerned with these  
technical issues. The system's flaws weren't subtle—it was plain to  
see, for example, that the player who happened to be sitting on the  
left won nine out of every 10 games. But players on the right still  
closed their eyes and gripped the sides of the table, trying in vain  
to squeeze out enough brain waves for a victory. Even a trained  
meditator with fingers flexed in Mudra poses couldn't catch a break;  
he got his butt kicked over and over by a distractible 6-year-old.

It's easy to believe in Mindball because it's a two-person game.  
Since there's always someone else hooked into the system, it's  
impossible to connect what's going on inside your head with what  
happens to the ball. Sure, I won a match while doing mental arithmetic 
—but my opponent might have been doing calculus. In that sense, the  
game is like a high-tech version of Ouija: When everyone puts their  
hands on the board, it starts to feel like magic.

Mindball isn't magic, though, and it should work. You really can use  
surface electrodes to measure alpha and theta waves, and they really  
do reflect a certain state of mind. There's no reason why we can't go  
head-to-head in relaxation, so long as the game is set up in the  
right environment, with a technician to monitor the electrodes and  
calibrate the machine.

Will you ever find a working Mindball? The machine has been marketed  
for trade shows, product expos, and mall lobbies—exactly the sorts of  
chaotic places where it's least likely to function. It's a real  
shame, too. If Mindball were running smoothly, I'm sure it would be a  
blast.



Eric Siegel
New York Hall of Science
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(718) 699-0005 x 317




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