Pinkie Pie and Electroencephalography · 4:21pm Jul 24th, 2019
The other day Google’s image search failed me. I was after the well-known image of Pinkie Pie hunched over a control panel in Twilight’s laboratory while her friend examines her brain activity. I searched for “Pinkie Pie EEG”, “Pinkie Pie electroencephalography” and got nothing relevant. Of course I was easily able to locate the required file by other methods, but I’m very disappointed by the fandom’s failure to properly tag images.
Electroencephalography or EEG is a relatively simple way to detect brain activity. With a bit of skill you can build your own in your basement. Basically you attach electrodes to your victim patient’s head and feed the micro-volt signals through an amplifier into a digitizer (or a chart recorder if, like Twilight, you want the retro look). You can then look at the electric field produced by currents in their brain.
Setting up the harware is the easy bit. The next challenge is how to interpret the data. If you’re hoping to get a glorious image into someone else’s thoughts you’ll be disappointed. The information it provides is nothing like Sunset Shimmer’s magic. Each electrode is picking up the electrical signal averaged over millions of neurons. However it gives us a crude look into their head, some insight into how our brains work, and provides a diagnostic tool for conditions such as epilepsy and sleep disorders.
The first thing we learn from looking at EEG signals is that they oscillate. Brain waves come in different frequency bands: delta waves (below 4Hz), theta waves (4-7Hz), alpha (8-15Hz), beta (16-31Hz), and gamma (above 32). The bands are associated with different activity: delta waves with sleep, theta and alpha with being relaxed and calm, beta waves with active thinking, and gamma with concentrated activity.
As a simple example of the type of research questions we can study with this technique, take a look at this short video by David Eagleman, a neuroscientist from Stanford University, where he investigates the brain activity of a champion 'cup stacker'.
Cup stacking is an American sport which hasn’t yet caught on this side of the Atlantic. The game is to build towers of plastic cups in the shortest time. Simple, but to reach record-setting times requires years of practice. What does the brain of a champion look like while they are stacking cups? Professor Eagleman uses electroencephalography to see. I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to then decide what sort of activity Twilight would have seen in Pinkie’s brain had she continued her experiment.
While Google failed to locate the picture I had in my mind, it did direct me to something interesting – this preprint by Xiang Zhang et al. at the University of New South Wales, Brain2Object: Printing Your Mind from BrainSignals with Spatial Correlation Embedding, describing a project to use EEG signals to identify a 3D object an individual is observing, then direct a 3D printer to produce a copy of—you’ve guessed it—Pinkie Pie!
The authors describe the goal of the project:
Imagine that a child observes a toy, for example Pinkie Pie (from My Little Pony) belonging to her friend and likes it very much and wishes that she can have one too. Brain2Object can make her wish a reality by translating her brain signals to command the 3D printer to fabricate a copy...
...During online operation, the user wears an EEG signal acquisition equipment, while she is concentrating on a physical object, which collects her brain signals in real time. The gathered signals are forwarded to the pre-trained model which aims to recognize the object. For example, as shown in Figure 1, the user is focusing on ‘Pinkie Pie’ instead of other ponies, the pre-trained model is empowered to automatically recognize the object and send an appropriate command to the 3D printer, which loads the 3D physical model and fabricates a copy.
Still work to do, but it looks like a fascinating proposal, and illustrates what electroencephalography is capable of once you have the software techniques to extract information from the raw data.
Huh. That Pinkie printer has some truly fascinating potential, pony and otherwise.
5093537
Would you like a 2D version for playing cards?
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I suspect it will need a bit more refinement before it's suitable for my purposes.
Science!!
I'm not sure that this would actually be "the retro look" in Equestria. Technology isn't exactly the most consistent, but generally speaking the chemical industry is roughly contemporary, weapons are downright medieval (weapons tech is more of a philosophical bent than a discipline in itself, and ponies are less inclined to said bent than humans), and everything else is the better part of a century behind. Source: Oliver.
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Consider the legal implications! Pinkie Pie is someone's property, as is the template for her toys. To make this work, she would either have to become public domain or we'd need a system to pay Hasbro royalties for every use.
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I'm suprised Hasbro hasn't set up some kind of system, given how much longevity the entire company has gotten from fandoms.
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You got the general idea.
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True, what looks retro may be avant-garde in the random world of Equestrian tech. Although the Equestria Girls Twilight does seem to have a thing for old school instruments - chart recorders and CRT oscilloscopes.
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Like we do with fan fiction?
I would be surprised if Hasbro doesn't have a team monitoring developments in 3D printing and the likely impact on their business model. What will happen is hard to predict.
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Fanfiction does infringe on copyright most of the time, it's just that even very large companies don't have the resources to go after authors (who aren't deep pockets anyway), and DMCA and similar laws protect platforms that host infringing material (who are deep pockets).
DMCA could have been set up differently, for example, to require authors or platforms pay royalties to the rights holders for the privilege of producing or hosting infringing content. Also, it's up for renewal soon, and will likely change form under the influence of rights-holder lobbying. So keep an eye out for that.
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Or we could destroy copyright
5093602
You and what political movement?
I mean, it's among the more pious of wishes, but that's all it is, a pious wish. There is no serious force today that would back destroying copyright, and copyright's defenders are numerous, organized, and powerful. It is a utopia.
One might as well storm Area 51.
(Oh, and there is trademark to consider too.)
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We could, but the way lobbying works ensures that we won't.
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I mean, realistically that's probably true, yeah, but this is one of those things where if everyone says it'll never happen, then it'll definitely never happen. Somebody has to dream.
I had a choice back in my Electronics Engineering Night Colledge course back in the 90s, try building a real time 4:2:2 video digitiser, or an EEG. Once I worked out that the three discrete chips for each electrode would cost me £50 a set, before support componants etc, I decided to work on the video stuff. 600 Mips pipeline because almost All the processing was in deterministic digital space.
I like the guys who came up with what they call the Glass Sheet ANN. Because its a hologram. Which means GPUs can use their hardware FFT to process it. Even Pixelwise convolution lets a 10 Terraflop GPU convolve a million pixel image with a milion pixel database in under a second,a nd training is just as fast.
The great thing about this type of research, is while theyre flailing around, building ever more powerful computers to do the analysis, once they finally discover how to do it algorithmically, they now have orders of magnitude excess power for a given price, or better, to do the job, now costs a fraction the price.
This is remarkably similar to research I've been involved in.