 This is our first year speaking at DEF CON. I'm sure you can tell that by the way I'm shaking like a leaf up here. Unfortunately, I won't be able to stand in order to do this speech. I just had a major operation less than a month ago, so I'm not allowed to stand for long periods of time, so hopefully you'll be able to bear with me. This talk is titled, Better Than Life, The Manipulation in the Human Brain with the Use of Machines. Today we'll be covering, hopefully very simplistically, how the brain and the central nervous system works, the techniques that people have used in the past to try to manipulate their brains, the future of brain manipulation technology with machines, and of course at the end of the speech comes the most fun part. My partner John M. here will teach us how to build a mind machine of your very own. By a show of hands, how many people have seen the BBC show Red Dwarf on television? My kind of room. By a show of hands, how many people have actually read the Red Dwarf series of books? Specifically, The Book Better Than Life by Grant Naylor. Where are my people? Where are you? Yeah, you know. So you guys will know what I'm basically talking about. But for the people who haven't read the book and the book in this series are absolutely amazing, I'll give you a quick summary. The book Better Than Life, the main characters get trapped in this game that you would plug into your brain. And your mind created an artificial world out of your fondest dreams and your deepest nightmares. No one had ever been able to escape from the game because they were too focused on the game and didn't pay attention to the outside world around them. Their bodies would wither away and die. When you read the book, the question you ultimately have to ask yourself is, if you could live in a perfect world of your own making, would you really come back to reality as you know it? But before we can do all this finding crazy stuff with the human brain, we have to have a basic understanding of how the biological bits and pieces work. I know this is not the most fun part of the speech and you want to get right to the point that you get to build your own mind machine, but it is something that we have to cover. You don't have to memorize the rest of the information that I have to tell you, but it will give you a better understanding of how everything works. I promise it will be quick and messy and it will be all over before you know it. I hope for both of us. The brain is the most complex structure in the known universe. It's an amazing organ about the size of a small cauliflower. It's almost as heavy as a carnive orange juice and it uses about 20% of the oxygen you breathe. The brain is truly the showpiece of your existence. Since we're under major time constraints today, I'll only be skimming how the brain and the central nervous system works. The brain is a master control for the body and monitors and regulates body's actions and reactions. It constantly receives information from the senses about the conditions outside and inside of the body. The brain rapidly analyzes this data and then sends messages to control body actions and functions. The three main parts of the brain are dedicated to different processes. The brain stem controls breathing, heart rate, and many other vital processes. The cerebellum is responsible for coordination and movement and balance and posture. The cerebellum is the center of thinking and stores information from past experiences making learning and remembering possible. The cerebellum is separated into four different lobes. That makes me even more nervous, actually. Your brain is connected to your spinal cord at the base of your skull. Must not think of pink elephants. Both your brain and your spinal cord are made up of gray matter and white matter. Generally, white matter can be understood as being responsible for information transmission and the gray matter being responsible for information processing. The brain in the spinal cord is what makes up your central nervous system. The job of the central nervous system is to take information in, turn it into something that the brain can understand, and then have the brain relay the messages back out. Only a few nerves lead directly to the brain. The rest of the nerves in the body pass through the spinal cord first. The brain is the control center of the nervous system and impulses come in from five senses or the organs inside your body. The brain controls different parts of your body. This is how your brain can do a lot of things at once and do them very quickly. The nervous system, which is actually working really well on me today, is made up of two parts, the central nervous system and the peripheral nervous system. The peripheral nervous system is made up of all the branching nerves that reach out to all parts of the body. Most messages move between the peripheral nervous system and the central nervous system through the spinal cord. The peripheral nervous system is made up of two main sets of nerves. One set of nerves used to work the involuntary muscle movements and the other part to move the voluntary muscle movements. Nerves are bundles of thin threads that carry messages throughout the body, a lot like how phone lines carry conversations. There are two different types of nerves, sensory nerves and motor nerves. Sensory nerves carry the signals from the sense organs to the brain, and as you've probably guessed, motor nerves carry the signals from the muscles to the brain. Most all the nerves in the body pass through the spinal cord. Sometimes it can take too long for a signal to go all the way to the brain and then wait for a brain to send another signal out. In order to deal with something when it has to happen incredibly quickly, the signal will bypass the brain. A well-used example is if you touch something hot, it hurts. As the pain signal travels along the sensory nerve fibers to the spinal cord, a signal goes to the brain to tell it what's happened as per usual. But at nearly the same time, another signal goes straight to the spinal cord to the muscles in your arm. The muscle then pulls the arm away from the heat without the brain needing to relay the message to the muscles. This movement I just described to you and other movements like it are called a reflex action. The human body is made up of trillions of cells that vary greatly in size, shape and function. There are two major cells in the nervous system, neurons and another type of cell that supports and protects the neurons. Neurons are also known as nerve cells. And that's my neuron. A nerve is just an enclosed cable-like bundle of neurons. If we look at the brain itself, it's made up of over 100 billion neurons. I find it very hard to get my mind around numbers that large. But if you think of it this way, there's more neurons in the human brain than there are stars in our Milky Way galaxy. Neurons are long spidery cells with arms like tentacles. They fire electrical signals along their wiry arms back and forth. Neurons come in many styles, but no matter what they look like, their purpose is still the same, to send and receive electrochemical messages. Neurons don't touch one another. To talk back and forth, neurons send off chemical messages across tiny fluid-filled gaps called synapse. These messages, small molecules called neurotransmitters, wait at the gaps until a neuron's electrical signal arrives. Then they jump the gap by carrying the message to the neighboring neurons. When you were first born, your brain pretty much weighed less than a pound, and your mind was almost completely a blank slate. As you aged a mere six years, your brain reached its full-grown weight of about three pounds. Your brain came with all the neurons you would ever have when you were born, but many of them were not connected to each other. When you learn things, messages travel to one neuron to another over and over again. Your brain starts to create connections or pathways between the neurons, so things become easier, and the neurons are able to follow these pre-weighed pathways in the brain and get to the destination much quicker. Your brain did not get larger when you were growing up by gaining more cells. Your original cells got larger by learning new tasks and repeating old ones over and over again. If you were to take a closer look at the clumps of neurons running through the brain, you would see that even though they look like a bowl of spaghetti, they're actually making mazes of connections. The reason it's designed like this is to allow the brain to take a lot of different routes to come up with the same response. It's because of this that thousands of neurons can die a day, and you never have problems with the messages getting across because it can always take a different route. A nerve impulse may not be able to travel down a neuron as fast as electricity travels down a wire, but it travels really fast. And as they move, they set up little electrical impulses. Even though we're talking about millions of brain neurons active at one time, they don't use a lot of electrical power. The brain uses only about as much electrical power as a 10-watt light bulb. Even though these patterns are very small, they make electrical patterns. We produce these electrical patterns when we're awake and even when we're asleep. Depending on what you're doing, your brain thinks at different frequencies. Doctors usually measure these electrical patterns using a machine I'm sure you've heard of called an EEG. An EEG is a graphical record of electrical activity the brain produces. When these patterns are stretched out on an EEG tape, they look like waves, which is why they're commonly known as brain waves. Brain waves are classified into four major types. Beta, at 13.25 cycles per second, is when you're awake and alert. Alpha, at 8.12 cycles per second, is when you're daydreaming. Theta, at 4.7 cycles per second, is the early stages of sleep. And delta, at 1.3 cycles per second, is when you're in deep sleep. Long before the discovery of brain waves and the ways to measure them, human beings had figured out less imprecise ways to self-induce alterations of consciousness. The slang term for this is getting high. Think of the brain as having two primary functions. First is responsible for keeping us alive. And then after it figures out that there's no danger to either our ego or our body, the brain wants to feel good. It responds to our surroundings with these two directives in mind, before our cognitive brain, including our logical and reasoning functions, ever kick in. In other words, most of our behavior is the result of the brains of our desire to avoid pain, want a quest to feel pleasure. We'll now discuss three ways the brain uses to do this. We'll also quickly skim through some of the techniques that people have used in the past that fall into these categories. The thing that needs to be remembered is that the technique is not the high. You're changing your brain waves into a state that you prefer more. If you change the level of chemical losses in your brain, you change your brain waves. It's as simple as that. Adrenaline is a hormone which brings about changes in the body known as the fight-or-flight reaction. It's also called the stress response. The important thing to remember about the stress response is even though it can be a lot of fun, it's adapted to short-term responses only. It gets dangerous when you receive multiple stress responses one after another, or you feel chronic stress over a long period of time. I'm sure I don't need to tell you that chronic stress has nasty effects on the body. We often blame our woes on external stresses when in actuality we're creating that stress by overproducing adrenaline. A few of the techniques that people have used to try to control their adrenaline level are putting themselves in mild danger, such as skydiving, carnival rides, and other safe risks. Nicotine, I'm sure a lot of people can relate to that. We're also talking about eating and eating red meat and fatty foods. Endorphins and serotonins are among the brain chemicals known as neurotransmitters, which as you've learned function in the transmission of signals within the nervous system. Endorphins are the brain-natural painkiller, and are three times more important than morphine. Sorry. In addition to decreased feelings of pain, e-dorphins lead to feelings of euphoria. A few techniques that people have used in the past are strenuous athletics, I'm sure you've heard of the runners high, acupuncture, massage therapy, sex, and meditation. We'll not dignify that with a response. Serotonin helps us maintain a happy feeling and seems to keep our moods under control by helping with sleep, calming anxiety, and relieving depression. A few of the techniques that people have used to control their serotonin level are antidepressants, exercise, singing and chanting, playing or listening to music, and taking psychedelic drugs. Most artificial drugs, the legal ones and the not so legal ones, cause fast acting shifts in our moods. Unfortunately, in doing this, they diminish our own natural ability to produce plays. Addiction to a drug happens partly because over time, the drug causes long lasting and possibly permanent changes to the way the drug user brain experiences pleasure and reward. You need to understand that your system has to self-regulate itself. If you go around spreading all these neurochemicals and one lump sum, you use up your ability to feel pleasure for a certain period of time. When you stop using the drug, it leaves you in a state where you're unable to feel pleasure anymore. A lot of big people become addicted to a drug because initially they take it to feel good, but eventually you have to continue to take it just to feel normal. Throughout history, human con is developed a variety of techniques to study the brain so we could better predict, control and explain human behavior. In the early 1800s, people measured bumps on their skull and tried to relate them to various behavioral techniques. Well, this method called phrenology has been discredited as a science since the 19th century. It did get us thinking about our brain and how it works. In the 1930s, it was discovered if the frontal lobes were disconnected from the rest of the brain, violent or extremely emotional mental patients became calm. This procedure called a prefrontal lobotomy. Can you guys relate or something? I don't quite get it. This procedure called a prefrontal lobotomy was commonly done in the United States by pushing an ice pick up the eye socket until it reached the brain and making a quick swishing motion. During its time, it was very popular in treating severe behavioral problems. However, it didn't take long for the negative side effects for this procedure to start showing up. This is my shocked phase. Lobotomy patients showed little emotion, had little drive or initiative, and had trouble solving problems. It's because of this and the ethical implications of cutting out parts of people's brains that this has pretty much been totally abandoned. It's easy to mark these concepts now, but in 1949, a scientist was granted a Nobel Prize for his discovery for the therapeutic value of lobotomy with certain psychosis. By 1955, 40,000 men, women, and children had undergone some form of this operation. Today, the most common method for treating mental disorders and manipulating the human brain is drug therapy. Wow, you guys get so excited! The American public has been conditioned to believe that for every symptom or disease there is a solution and a pill. However, the brain is more than a chemistry lab. The brain and the body are electrical in nature as well. You may be asking yourself, if manipulating brains with machines are so wonderful, why haven't I heard about them? The truth is people think science is about the pursuit of truth, but in actuality, more often than not, it's about the pursuit of funding. The fact is that Western medicine is fundamentally biased towards pharmaceuticals. There's major political and economical power behind drug companies. Do not ever kid yourself. Drug companies are around for the same reason other big businesses are around. To make money. It's because of this political and economical power the drug companies have major influence over public policy, of course what gets written, and then eventually public opinion. Chemical drugs may be currently accepted. Apparently, I am being beckoned. Oh, there's time. Sorry. We want to let you all know that the movie time has changed. You can be up with the information booth area. We actually have a zero-day Sundance award-winning film that's going to show tonight, which is supposed to be actually... the movie Pie. I'm not going to give you the title so we can keep a little suspense. Ice cream, sir. The director actually sent it to us and said we get to see it first because we are their target audience. So we want to let everybody know that the time has changed. I think it's an hour later, but I would check the info booth and I would check the screens and we've got some really awesome films tonight. It's not the same old Matrix-related crap. The first film, Out the Gate, will be a zero-day film that no one outside of Sundance has seen. So we're lucky you guys get to see that. Thanks, guys. I know about you, but I'm totally distracted now. Oh, yes! I was talking of the evils of the pharmaceutical companies. That's where I was. It's because of this political and economical power that drug companies had major influence over public policy, which influences what gets printed and of course influences public opinions. Chemical drugs may be currently accepted as the best method to manipulate the brain we have today, but more and more research is being done on the manipulation of the human brain with the use of machines. I'm not going to get into the fine, fine science of how everything works. Each of the methods I'm about to talk to you about would take up a whole entire speech of their own. I just want you to know what they do and that the technology is out there to be used. The two machines will be discussing biofeedback and cranial electric stimulation's main purpose is to promote relaxation. According to the American Academy of Family Physicians, stress-related problems account to 80-85% of all visits to medical offices. Research also indicates that 80-85% of all diseases are caused by stress. The key role in the aggravation of up to 90% of all diseases and at least some part in the development of every illness from cancer to the common cold. It's also been estimated that 80% of people in the United States react to most major problems they face in their lives with the fight or flight anxiety response I just talked to you about. As well it's been said that a similar percentage of hospitals are filled with people who've repressed their anxiety and emotions into their bodies and have caused mental illnesses. I thought we would start with something easy. You've probably heard of biofeedback. The principles of biofeedback date back more than half a century but the application's specific biofeedback techniques and procedures began only 25 or so years ago. Biofeedback is a technique that teaches people how to control processes in their body that are once believed to be involuntary by using electronic instruments that measure and indicate those things that are happening in the body. Neurofeedback is a form of biofeedback which uses electrical signals from the brain detected by electrodes that are placed on the scalp. Biofeedback is often aimed at changing habitual reactions to stress that causes pain or disease. The thinking is this some people have forgotten or have never learned how to relax. Feedback of physical responses such as skin temperature muscle tension provide information to help recognize a relaxed state. The feedback information may also act as a kind of reward for reducing tension. Chances are you've used biofeedback if you've ever stepped on a scale taking your temperature or if you used a heart monitor you know these devices feedback information about your body's condition. Once you are armed with this information you can take steps in improving the condition. This equipment for biofeedback that can help you get precise measurements to use with your home PC. These products are relatively inexpensive for a brain manipulation device coming in at about $100. The problem is biofeedback doesn't do anything to you. The equipment acts as a mirror to show you what you're doing. You have to practice until you master the ability to change your mind state. In summary, biofeedback's benefits are you gain control of your responses to stress, anxiety, physical strain, and emotional stimuli. The equipment is relatively inexpensive and once you've learned the technique the benefits continue indefinitely for as long as you keep practicing. The cons are the fact that it's a learning process it also requires time, consistent practice and personal motivation. The technology isn't user friendly and biofeedback doesn't work on everyone but for some problems that you can't understand. Craneoelectric stimulation or CES for short is an over-the-counter device available without a prescription with few restrictions most places in the world except for the United States. In the United States though it is an FDA approved treatment for anxiety, depression, and insomnia. So if you want to get your hands on one you're supposed to get in touch more and get the recommendation but of course these machines are easily available to order off the internet. I say that every day. CES helps those suffering from illnesses where stress is thought to be a major symptom like biofeedback. As with the case of numerous medications like aspirin we're not exactly sure why CES works, this part is still being researched. CES has a past history of helping with withdrawal that people experience from abusing alcohol, street drugs, prescription drugs and even nicotine. What you need to understand is just like biofeedback it's not a cure for these illnesses and never pretends to be. The ideas that successfully dealing with the anxiety that lays beneath these disorders it can help in the healing process. How it works is it introduces very weak, very weak electrical current into your brain. There isn't any discomfort from this current the most you might ever feel is a mild tingling sensation. In extreme cases you might even get a headache but to deal with this is as easy as turning the current down. Most people will experience a relaxation response almost immediately after treatment begins with CES. People usually report feeling relaxed and somewhat inebriated for the first few minutes. This is a pleasant and very comfortable sensation. After a while lightheaded feelings disappear and a relaxed state remains as well as profound sense of alertness. With regular use it's possible to recognize this preferred state of consciousness. CES units usually allow you full freedom of movement which means that you can use it almost anywhere and under a variety of circumstances. It's not like biofeedback or neurofeedback where it needs your complete focus. CES machines usually cost a couple hundred dollars more than PC controlled biofeedback devices. The benefits of cranial electric stimulation is it is an FDA approved treatment for anxiety, depression and insomnia. CES has been used in many parts of the world for more than 50 years with no negative side effects or major problems. CES units are user friendly. They can be used almost anywhere and do not require your mental attention and in almost every case it causes no discomfort. I have a little secret to confess. My talk isn't entirely as it seems. I've been warming you up to the idea of using machines to manipulate the human brain as a strategy for us to be able to discuss these next two methods. In my defense I've done it for a reason. We're about to talk about sounds more like science fiction than science fact and I sometimes find it hard to get my mind around an idea but if you look at the history of what led up to the idea then everything starts to make perfect sense. So here we go. Get your tinfoil hats on. Oh I forgot to go with the cons. Okay just backtracking so just to keep the suspense going. No, the doctor cranial stimulation doesn't have any cons. The equipment is affordable but pricey. The benefits have never been fully proven and CS does not work on everyone but it's effective in about 95% of people who use it. So who wants to know the spooky creepy stuff now? Everybody, should I go on to the spooky creepy stuff? Okay. Spooky creepy stuff coming up. Transcranial magnetic stimulation. I don't see your tinfoil hat. No screaming without tinfoil hats. Transcranial magnetic stimulation or TMS for short was first introduced in 1985 as a new method of non-invasive stimulation for the brain. The problem with using electricity to manipulate the human brain is that the skull is a very good insulator. Magnetic pulses go directly through the skull which of course helps when you're using in the manipulation of the human brain. Currently, Dr. Michael Prussinger is trying to explain away mystical experiences and other words, he's trying to explain away religion and the concept of God. Using TMS she's been able to give a feeling of sense presence and he can also make you experience euphoria anxiety, fear and even sexual stirring. Wired magazine Wired magazine has reported on his successful experiments. I want you to think about this for a second. Think about virtual reality. Isn't it possible that we're going the wrong way with it? Instead of trying to make the graphics look more and more real wouldn't it make more sense to have an emotional response to what you see? We all go to the movies we look at that big screen and we know what we see isn't real but it can cause an emotional response in us. Can you imagine playing any first one player shooter video game, like quake I'm trying to use a general term but it's not working but imagine playing quake and when you're going around the corner you feel an evil sensed presence especially at 3am in the morning when you're playing when no one's around wouldn't that change the nature of gaming? How about treating phobias that have debilitating phobias wouldn't it make sense if people are trying to face their fears to feel a good presence? Excitingly, Dr. Peersinger has been talking to people in Hollywood about marrying the concept of his device to their special effects but to the best of my knowledge nothing has happened yet. I'm hoping that he'll get wind of this and so will Hollywood and I can see something come soon. If Michael Peersinger's theories descend into the mainstream it'll change our views on the supernatural as well as experience future media. Another scientist named Alan Schneider has been using TMS in an attempt to approve the brain by shutting off certain parts of it that analyzes information and turning on certain parts of it that are involved in non-conscious problem solving. His work is based on a study of something called the savant syndrome. I assume we have all seen Rainman. It's found in people with severe mental disorders that I can exhibit extraordinary talents in the field of arts, music and mathematics. He believes that everyone possesses these skills but the problem is that the average person's brain goes one step farther than the savant's and unconsciously processes and edits the information to give it meaning. The New York Times magazine and BBC News have reported on his successful experiments. If Alan Schneider's theories descend into the mainstream it'll change our views on artistic genius. In summary, transcranial magnetic stimulation's benefits are its accuracy, it's a non-invasive procedure with generally no discomfort, there are no harmful side effects and it may bring about lasting changes in the brain activity. The cons are it's only emerged in the last decade so most study is needed currently in the experimental stage and not yet available to the general public and of course the long term biological effects of electromagnetic fields on human beings are not yet known. The discovery of implants have long been thought to be the next stage of evolution in the blending of humans and machines. In 1954 two scientists investigated the pleasure reward system of a rat's brain by attaching an electrode from the rat's head to a lever in its cage. They found that the rat would continue to stimulate its pleasure center and to collapse an eventual starvation. In later experiments the two scientists moved the electrode to the rat's pain center. It would only touch the lever once and then forever refuse to touch that lever again. In the early 1960s a Yale physiologist caused a stir when he entered a bull ring and was able to halt a charging bull to the amazement of those watching by sending radio signals through implanted electrodes to stop that bull in mid charge. And by 1975 that same Yale physiologist had linked electrodes with computers. In 1999 there was a strong theory that brain cell activity could be used to control a robotic device. In 2002 scientists had developed a device that allowed monkeys to control a video game through thought alone. In the year 2003 scientists had now taught that monkey to operate a robot limb as if it was its own limb. In this year 2004 testing began on humans after the FDA approved the first clinical trial of brain implants to minimize people. Don't thank me. Even though this year we've hit an important milestone it'll take quite a few years before we master this technology. In time people will be able to control artificial limbs as if it was their own. I'm kind of hoping for an artificial tail. We'll be able to interface with all the electronics we own in our home without ever having to touch a button and the ability to read somebody else's mind will be well within our grasp and I'm sure men cannot wait for this to happen. What we used to believe only existed in the realm of science fiction has now started to take baby steps towards becoming part of our future. Like it or not for good or for bad this technology is coming and it will change our lives just like the light bulb the telephone, the computer and the internet have. The question is if you could live in a perfect world of your own making would you really come back to reality as you know it? Think about it. I can't claim that all this future technology will end up making us better people but I do believe that we can use existing technology to be the best we possibly can be now. It's all been leading up to this. It's time for us to give you something more tangible and send you on your way. Think of it as your first step towards the future. Now that I've given you something to think about I'm going to get out of your way and turn you over to the mechanical magic of my good friend and partner John M. So the machine I'm the machine I'm going to talk about is kind of halfway between the biofeedback that we talked about earlier and the cranial electric stimulation so it's actually actively manipulating your mind but it's at a level that's much below what you're doing when you're sending electrical current directly into the brain. So what it basically is doing is trying to change your mental state by stimulating your mind with light and if you recall back to what Des was talking about earlier there are different brain wave frequencies that are associated with different mental activities so we've got the beta that's at a higher frequency associated with being awake and alert and as you get towards the lower frequency ranges that are slower and slower you get towards more subdued mental activities until you get down to the lower range of delta which is associated with deep sleep. So the first machine is probably the simplest kind of electronic device you could ever build it's basically just a bunch of LEDs hooked up to your computer's parallel port. All you need to build it are eight LEDs any color you want to avoid blue because that tends to trigger people who are susceptible to epileptic seizures you may recall back a couple years ago there was this problem with this anime show in Japan they had this one segment where there's this flashing blue square on the screen and all of a sudden there are a wave of kids in seizures on the floor it was great stuff so yeah any color LED but blue a parallel what? a parallel cable either you want a parallel cable try and find one where you can take the head apart unlike this one that'll make figuring the pin out a lot easier because when you open this up there's 25 different colored wires in there and they're all different for each cable in each manufacturer so trying to figure it out is a lot easier and probe it on the thing directly you'll need something to hold the LEDs to your head like a dollar pair of safety goggles some wire and a soldering iron and maybe some tape to make it look cool so what you do is you wire them up so what you do is you wire them up you make it look cool and then you plug it into your PC and I'm going to show you the software I wrote for Linux that makes these go the most basic thing you can do is move the mouse to get focus and just blink them at a set pattern right now I'm blinking at 10 hertz which is mid alpha so that's a little in the right under the threshold of alertness if you go faster you get more alert and like I said as you drop down lower it's lower frequencies lower less mental activity more relaxation you can even do goofy things like strobe them in different patterns neat so you can strobe them in different patterns it looks cool but it doesn't really add much to the actual experience the important thing is flashing it at the target frequency that you're looking for so this is the easiest thing you can possibly build a train monkey can do it I've had her help me with them but hey she can talk into a mic so you know so the pros of this method is that you get precise finding control of the stimulation frequency you can program patterns and sequences of frequencies so say you can work through a sequence of starting off at low levels of activity working your way up to higher levels of activity you know kind of bring yourself up out of sleep and into normal activity they're cheap and easy to build the cons are you've got this bulky 25 pin cable connected to your head and you need one of these to carry around with you to make it work so that brings us to the next one I built which is a self-contained unit built off of a very simple IC called a 555 Timer IC it makes things blink you can also use them to make other things oscillate at various frequencies you can find information about the 555 timers and the devices themselves at pretty much any electronic store including Radio Shack Radio Shack has even little booklets that give you several dozen circuits you can build with these you can also find a lot of information on the internet they're very cheap they are very cheap don't buy them at Radio Shack they're not cheap there you shouldn't pay more than 50 cents for one of them and then you need other components like a couple capacitors a resistor and a variable resistor so you can change the speed from slow to fast the downside and you know the frequency is determined by the the capacitor components you select the capacitors and the resistors the values I've selected here will give you from about 3 hertz which is the high delta range up to 35 hertz which is beyond beta so it gets you a lot of the high range but it doesn't go very down it doesn't go too far down into the low range and that's basically because the components I had on hand wouldn't get me that way you can build one that'll go across the full spectrum the thing is that you lose fine grain control on either end of the spectrum so as I turn this dial here it goes pretty quickly from 35 down to 20 or so but it goes much slower down to 5 to 3 so you can make it more fine grain by adding more potentiometers in sequence but that makes the calibrating harder and it adds more controls and that's all work where you can go from here is actually start introducing more complex electronics and use a microcontroller and then with a microcontroller you can do pretty much everything you can do with one of these connected to a PC you can have accurate frequency you can have different patterns and you can have programmed sequences of patterns and things like that so the pros are it's portable lightweight and self-contained the cons are you've got a little tiny dial to manipulate the frequency you don't have very precise frequency control you're only blinking all the LEDs on and off you know this looks much cooler than this when you're showing it to your friends and it's hard to get a broad range of frequencies with these you can also buy these things from a number of companies they start off at the low end from about $100 and they go up to above $300 I got the $555 in a grab bag with like half a pound of other components all told this is probably about $10 worth of things oh there's a battery so maybe $12 worth of stuff you know maybe I spend a little more for the tape but you know that's colors so you can buy these things you can pay $300 for something with flashlights in your face what you get is portability you get accuracy you get programmability so they they all have microcontrollers in them and they will do various patterns of events and they tend to look a lot better than safety goggles with electrical tape on them typically the way they look is they're like sunglasses or something like that with diodes in them and they have a like a hip pack kind of like a wireless mic or something like that and you can plug stereos into them and they'll kind of try and follow along with those on the higher end but that's a lot of money and it's for something you're gooping off with and trying out and manipulating your mind so to use these things it's you know pretty straightforward you pick the frequency that's associated with the desired mental state you turn it on dial in the right frequency you're looking for okay I want to be pretty active you put it on and you close your eyes you don't want to have your eyes open because that's adding complexity to the visual signal you're getting and so the idea is that you're getting a very even set of inputs to your mind and trying to get it to resonate at this desired frequency kind of like when you were a kid playing in the bathtub you know you'd slosh back and forth and similarly you get this monster wave going back and forth it's the same thing you're trying to do with your brain but you know there's less water and less stuff in your head the only thing that matters on the colors is avoid blue red actually doesn't matter that much really if you're generally predisposed to seizures or epileptic events you probably want to avoid these in general you're welcome to try but make sure you have soft things around so that white white is pretty much the best you'll pay more for the white LEDs you can get yellows 25 for you know 5 bucks you'll pay a lot of fries you'll pay a buck a piece for the white ones maybe more so yeah the key thing when you're using these is you want to relax and not try to force this thinking okay I'm going to be more active it's about as easy as thinking okay I'm not going to think of the number 3 so you know just let it happen and kind of disengage your mind so that about wraps it up these mind machines questions answered can be answered I'll have the slides the schematics and the software I'm using for this up at this website after con and we don't have that much time we only have a couple minutes no questions no questions alright oh we're not building them yet but we will possibly if I'm chosen next year oh what machines we will have I see us units are about this big they're no bigger than they're usually yeah not bigger than that they usually either they have a headband on them that you would wear around your neck or they have a electro eclipse that they have on your ears so they're very very tiny yeah exactly they're very tiny yeah I'll let him go do you have the same question this is my personal assistant he was here to catch me if I fell from anxiety yes back there I see yes definitely the question is if the colors have any influence on what you're using to the best of my knowledge because your eyes are closed but I could be wrong you don't really see the colors so it should make a difference and yes all like biofeedback and crane electric stimulation the whole point of using them is to help you be able to recognize how to relax there's definitely it's like meditation if you you meditate eventually you are able to reach it quicker and faster yes if you're able to recognize your relaxation response then you won't need the machine anymore transcranial magnetic stimulation is totally different it's in a different category because of magnetic pulses and of course brain implants you're stuck with them there's not much you can do about that after the point so but yes if you're just talking about crane electric stimulation or biofeedback after you stop using them after a certain amount of time you can recognize the state who do we want to choose next oh can you? yeah I'm not sure so apparently I'm totally entirely wrong epileptics can tell the difference between colors in the eyes so I was proven wrong so listen to this lady she knows what she's talking about who's next? I'm going to have all my research links as well on the page and that is the information I was received that's the research I got so I mean it's this and that from there the point is if you keep your eyes open it's like if you're meditating if your eyes open you're going to have a harder time than if your eyes are closed all the external visuals will stop you from being able to concentrate and be able to switch into a different state quicker and easier so that's why you have to keep your eyes closed because it's like being in an isolation tank the whole point is to get all the visuals to be gone so you can change brain waves yes so the question is the gentleman was questioning these things are supposed to be changing our brain waves with the light how does it make a difference if your eyes are open or shut? how does it make a difference at all? your visual cortex is one of the largest parts of your brain it represents a very large portion of your mental capacity so if you can stimulate activity in your visual cortex there's a good chance that it'll percolate that activity to the rest of your brain especially if it's on this recurring frequency that your brain is sort of tuned towards does TV do it? perhaps although TVs operate at 50 hertz so you have 25 interlaced 25 of frame 50 interlaced so 60 so it's a lot higher frequency generally a lot more benign in the blue shirt oh sure haven't you ever been in an office that just sucked ass I mean dental offices you don't think that's accidental do you? okay last question in the black shirt it's I'm actually trying to figure out the exact waveform but it's generally some kind of square wave pulse modulated at high frequency it looks like it's about in the 10 to 20 kilohertz range pulse modulated with so it's a square wave at that range pulse modulated with a lower range frequency is what it sounds like but I haven't actually been able to get my hands on one one more question in the DVD well so the question is how small light and portable could you make an EEG if you have the helmet so for an EEG a lot of the bulk is just connecting the connectors you also need a lot of analog electronics to do amplification and filtering and things like that I'd imagine that they've gotten a lot smaller in the recent years so they've gotten from cart size devices down to you know I think they're down to bag size devices that you can hook up I think that although those things include printers and things like that so it's probably it could probably be made smaller if all you care about is figuring out what the fundamental frequency your brain's acting on it could be a lot smaller I don't know of any device like that I think we're out of time thank you