Mind's Eye Read Online Free Page A

any of the other search engines he recognized, so perhaps it was a proprietary one just for this purpose.
    He scanned down the page and chose the earliest article, calendar-year-wise. It was from ComputerworldUS , published on November 20, 2009. It began by quoting Intel researchers who predicted that someday, “you won’t need a keyboard and mouse to control your computer. Instead,” he continued reading from the page that was always centered, regardless of how he turned his head, “users will open documents and surf the web using nothing more than their brain waves.”
    Hall paused and let this sink in. He was sure he hadn’t heard about this technology before, even though it had clearly been discussed as far back as 2009. He continued reading:
     
    Scientists at Intel's research lab in Pittsburgh are working to find ways to read and harness human brain waves so they can be used to operate computers, television sets, and cell phones. The brain waves would be harnessed with Intel-developed sensors implanted in people's brains.
    The scientists say the plan is not a scene from a sci-fi movie. . . . Researchers expect that consumers will want the freedom they will gain by using the implant.
    "I think human beings are remarkably adaptive," said Andrew Chien, vice president of research and director of future technologies research at Intel Labs. "If you told people twenty years ago that they would be carrying computers all the time, they would have said, 'I don't want that. I don't need that.' Now you can't get them to stop. There are a lot of things that have to be done first, but I think [implanting chips into human brains] is well within the scope of possibility."
    Intel research scientist Dean Pomerleau said that users will soon tire of depending on a computer interface, and having to fish a device out of their pocket or bag to access it. He also predicted that users will tire of having to manipulate an interface with their fingers.
    Instead, they'll simply manipulate their various devices with their brains.
    "We're trying to prove you can do interesting things with brain waves," said Pomerleau. "Eventually people may be willing to be more committed . . . to brain implants. Imagine being able to surf the web with the power of your thoughts."
     
    Hall read several more articles, but it was clear that only five or six years later, all efforts toward this goal, by Intel and others, had been largely abandoned, leaving only a few scattered pockets of activity. The challenges had been greater than first appreciated, and the payoff much farther down the road. And animal models, while surprisingly useful, still couldn’t yield enough data to fully translate into the human experience.
    But, apparently, this technology hadn’t been as abandoned as everyone had been led to believe. He was living proof. He had no doubt he was the beneficiary of the implants spoken of in the article.
    Which meant that it wasn’t projecting the images in front of him. Instead, his further reading made it abundantly clear that his implants were somehow tied into his visual cortex, from the inside , or else were sending information directly to the region of his brain responsible for interpreting the steady stream of visual input from his eyes.
    The implants were converting the Internet images into a complex, multi-pronged binary code that was tied directly to his visual centers. His mind, only having experience receiving these signals through his eyes, from sources external to himself, insisted on interpreting the images as hovering in front of him, rather than coming from within.
    A woman named Sheila Nireberg had been a pioneer in this arena, in her effort to treat blindness. He watched a video of a presentation she had given to an organization called TED in October of 2011, in which she discussed the complex patterns of electrical pulses that were produced by the retina, processing the information delivered by over a hundred million photoreceptors.