Tried the new BCI demo at the Portland science museum and the calibration screen kept showing a picture of a confused-looking squirrel.

The tech said it was a 'known bug with the visual cortex mapping algorithm' and offered me a free t-shirt, but now I can't stop wondering if my brain's default image is just a perplexed rodent.

3 comments

3 Comments

leo_carr132mo ago

Actually, that's probably not your brain's default at all. Those systems work by reading electrical signals, not pulling pictures from your mind. The squirrel image was almost certainly a placeholder file in their software that got shown by mistake. It's funny how our brains latch onto that idea though. The tech was right to call it a bug, just a weird visual glitch. You're not secretly thinking about squirrels, their program just had a hiccup.

aaron_ellis422d ago

Yeah exactly, people forget how clunky these experimental setups usually are. Half the time they're running on some beat up laptop with a generic image folder that's full of random stock photos the lab assistant grabbed off the internet. The squirrel was probably just sitting there in the system files looking for a reason to pop up.

emerychen2mo ago

So my brain's default is just a broken jpeg?