Pure Imagination

UX design when the interface is your brain

If you’re coming from Hacker News, you might like Mindfull.io, a list of crazy articles just like this.

Watching Minority Report in 2002 was probably the first time I had considered an interface for a computer other than a mouse and a keyboard. In fact, aside from the whole pre-cognition thing, I think it has been the most prophetic movie in terms of near term uses of technology. Seriously. Just like the scene where Tom Cruise’s character can’t stop advertisements from recognizing him from his retinas, facial recognition technology is already in use. Not to mention sound that can be beamed only to you.

But what about the computer that does things when I wave my hands!? Even now, at age 27, after typing for nearly 20 years, I feel a keyboard is a speed bump in creativity. Perhaps I’m the kind of person that’s easily frustrated, but sometimes I look down at the keyboard and mouse and think to myself, “I have what I want in my head, but I have to compress my thoughts into characters and then mash my hands on buttons to get my thoughts into a computer.” As stubborn and simple as that sounds, I think it’s actually a valid frustration. We’ll look back and wonder what the hell we were doing.

The keyboard was invented in the 1860s, and the mouse in 1967. Today, what do we have? Well, we have Leap Motion, Microsoft Kinect, and Google Glass. While Leap and Kinect give you that Minority Report-esque hand gesture interface you’ve always wanted, Google Glass puts the interface quite literally on your face. But, I think they both miss the mark.

There is no life I know to compare with pure imagination. Living there, you’ll be free if you truly wish to be. If you want to view paradise, simply look around and view it. Anything you want to, do it. Want to change the world? There’s nothing to it.

It came in the night

Ever since I can remember, I’ve had extremely vivid, sometimes horrifying, sometimes shed-a-tear-beautiful dreams. I mean, wake-up-and-have-to-rationalize-what-you-just-saw dreams. And it’s been wonderful. My biggest frustration has been having a genuinely good idea, being able to articulate it clearly in a dream state, and then utterly lose it when I awake.

Your experience while dreaming is not analogous to the the sum of your 5 senses. Meaning, what you recall seeing in a dream is not like you have seen it. Your experience is of pure information. Your eyes were closed while you slept. The neurons that relay information from yours are silent. Instead, you only have information that you rationalized as something your eyes must have produced. You only associate the information you recall with your senses after you’ve awoken, simply because it’s the only way you can. You have no other choice.

So think back to that keyboard analogy. When you awake, massive amounts of experiential information are compressed into your spectacularly limited memory, and then mostly discarded as nonsense moments later. It’s like this article that’s trying to get out of my head, but has to squeeze itself through my fingers first. Surely, there must be another way?

There will be. And the answer isn’t controlling a keyboard with your mind, it’s going straight down the rabbit hole.

What makes you think your brain is yours?

The frontal lobe is the same part of the brain that is responsible for executive functions such as planning for the future, judgment, decision-making skills, attention span, and inhibition. Wikipedia

By Polygon data were generated by Life Science Databases(LSDB). (Polygon data are from BodyParts3D.[11]) [CC BY-SA 2.1 jp (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.1/jp/deed.en)], via Wikimedia Commons

If we simplify years of neuroscience, we might say that the frontal lobe is responsible for what you feel to be you. But your thoughts don’t all come from the frontal lobe. They come from elsewhere. From other places in your brain where you have far less control. Your impulses, your desires. The things you can’t always rationalize, like love, and passion, and hate.

If the interfaces of the future can tap into that computing power that you can’t tap yourself, could it reveal things about you that you never knew or never wanted people to know? The interface would bypass your frontal lobe and speak directly to the other parts of your brain that you have much less control over.

Are you willing to give up control to have some fun?