A cheap, portable device that reads your mind to gauge your concentration could some day ease information overload in stressful jobs like air-traffic control.

EMAILS, tweets, Facebook posts, texts, RSS feeds... we are awash with streams of information, endless sources of distraction. How can we keep up, cut through the noise and stay focused on the task at hand? Things would be easier if your computer just knew what you wanted.

Evan Peck is building a system that he believes will do just that. He and his colleagues at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, want to give computers the ability to directly monitor your brain as you work, responding to your needs in real time. In other words, it will act as a filter, letting through information when you want it while keeping the rest at bay. "We can really supercharge the way you consume information," he claims.

The system utilises a headset that beams infrared light from emitters on a user's forehead into their prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain associated with planning and decision-making. Some of the light is absorbed by oxygenated haemoglobin, some by the deoxygenated version of the molecule, and some is reflected back out. By measuring the amount of light reaching receivers on the forehead, the system can tell when a user is concentrating intently or not mentally engaged. Matching the readings to what a user is looking at on a screen allows the system to determine what is useful info and what is getting in the way.

The technique, known as functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), is a crude brain imager compared with its better-known cousin, fMRI. But infrared sensors are cheap and portable and MRI machines are not. Peck and his team reckon they can glean enough information from their fNIRS rig to turn computers into mind-readers.

As a proof of principle, the system monitored haemoglobin changes while 14 test subjects rated movies listed on the Internet Movie Database. It recorded how each user's brain behaved when rating movies positively and negatively, with greater levels of activity associated with more positive ratings. After this training, the system recommended a list of other movies in turn, with each movie suggestion modified by the brain's reaction to the previous movie suggestion. Not only were its suggestions more acceptable than a random list, but it also improved its results the more it was used. The work will be presented next month at the Augmented Human conference in Stuttgart, Germany.

The US Federal Aviation Administration is also exploring the technique to help manage the cognitive workloads of air-traffic controllers. Ben Willems, who works at the Human Factors Lab in the FAA's technical research centre in Atlantic City, New Jersey, says fNIRS offers an objective way to monitor – and perhaps some day help manage – the mental workload of air-traffic controllers. Two decades from now, air traffic levels will be much higher than today, he predicts, and current performance-monitoring systems will not be able to keep up.

Right now, for example, aircraft can be diverted from busy airspace to ease the load on air-traffic controllers, but that decision is based solely on the number of planes already in an area. But managing six planes with complex flight paths can be harder than managing 12 with simpler ones, so fNIRS could route flights based on the brain power available for a given airspace, Willems says.

"Adaptive automation is the holy grail for us," he says. "Although it looks like a video game on the radar scope, those 12 aircraft could each be carrying 200 people. Air-traffic controllers have a stressful job. Being able to help them out with fNIRS would be great, though there are caveats."

Personal privacy and technological acceptance are big obstacles to using brain imaging for everyday air-traffic control. Systems would need to be in place to ensure that managers did not abuse their ability to peer into their controllers' brains, Willems says, and that they keep brain-activity records private.

Meanwhile, Erin Solovey at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is working to apply similar principles to enhance how we drive cars. She says fNIRS could be useful for researching the cognitive demands of new car features like heads-up displays.

For Peck, the next step is to build a brain interface that can handle more complex interactions, like filtering emails and the other rivers of information that threaten to overwhelm the modern worker on a daily basis. For now, his team's set-up can only determine when people are engaged with what they are doing, and when they are not. But by recording brain activity levels as people field incoming emails, say, Peck believes computers can learn to predict which emails are important and which are not. Then, under normal working conditions, the system could determine when someone is busy and only interrupt them if an incoming piece of information is deemed important.

"It's very exciting, and shows promise to be used in everyday life, opening up new ways of managing individuals' cognitive workloads," says Hasan Ayaz, a biomedical engineer at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, who has worked with the FAA on fNIRS applications. "This is just the beginning of a new area."

This article appeared in print under the headline "Keep distraction at bay"

Hunting mental buy signals

The portability of fNIRS makes it a tempting tech for marketers, who love the chance to see what's going on inside consumers' brains. Angelika Dimoka at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is using fNIRS to measure people's responses to product packaging and advertising.

"We are studying consumers in experimental settings that simulate a supermarket," she says. "They'll be walking around making purchasing decisions wearing these devices."

Will everyday shoppers want to share their thoughts with retailers? "Right now I don't see them being willing to participate," Dimoka says, "but I believe that everyday consumers will be interacting with these types of technology in future."

Source: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21729056.500-brainscanning-headset-monitors-your-mental-workload.html