By Lisa Bradshaw

VRT journalist Tim Verheyden said his “hair stood on end” when he was able to move a little ball with his brain. Verheyden was wearing a “brain computer interface” being developed at the famed Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston.

Flemish scientist Pattie Maes is the director of MIT’s Fluid Interfaces research group. The interface looks like a normal  pair of glasses. “They have sensors built in that can read your brain wave activity using EEG as well as determine your eye movements,” explains professor Maes. “From there, we can detect a lot of information about the brain, like how tired you are or how focused you are.”

Using them to determine how attentive a person is could help with the treatment of ADHD and other attention-deficit disorders, she says. “Through the brain waves, the device can tell if someone is actually listening to someone else at a given moment. The system can provide feedback if you appear to be drifting off thinking of other things.”