A new mode of communication between man and his surroundings.

The material presented in this paper is the result of a research project that was designed to study the feasibility of establishing an alternative mode of communication between man and his surroundings. The new form of communication proposed uses only the subject's brain waves with no overt physical action required. Subjects' electroencephalograms (EEG) were recorded while they performed various mental tasks designed to elicit hemispheric responses.

Man-machine communications through brain-wave processing.

The possibility of monitoring voluntarily produced changes in the electroencephalogram (EEG) of a subject and translating these changes into a set of commands to be issued to an external device was investigated. Subjects performed five distinct tasks under both eyes-open and eyes-closed conditions. A feature set consisting of the asymmetry ratios and the power values for each lead at four frequency bands-delta (0-3 Hz) theta (4-7 Hz), alpha (8-13 Hz), and beta (14-20 Hz)-was used to characterize the EEG.

On intersensory evoked potentials.

It has been found in a variety of studies that, for human observers, reaction time is faster to a sound than to a light. The study being reported here was designed to test the hypothesis of audio-visual facilitation when a flash precedes a sound by about 30 to 50 milliseconds. It is hypothesized that the electrophysiological result of this facilitation will be an increased energy of the event related potential (ERP) resulting from the interaction between the visual and auditory processes.