Believe it or not... (Score 3, Interesting)

I had the same kind of idea a couple of years ago for a design project for school. I got the idea from a program I saw on Discovery, they were using the EEG as a lie detector kind of deal. I thought that was dumb and figured reading brain waves would be more useful for controlling things like a game :]. The equipment was a little to expensive for me and I was unable to secure a grant so I gave up on the idea, but not after doing a little research. I was pleased and jealous to read the article that someone was actually working on this. At least it clarifies some of my theories. The main problems I thought would be difficult to solve would be reading the small amplitudes of the beta brain waves, 5-50 mV (if I recall correctly), without that icky gel crap, filtering out any outside noise, deciphering the right brain signal (i.e. "move left"), adjusting the device to be able to read different persons brain signals (since everyone's brain is wired differently), and moving all this stuff off the "baseball cap" so it doesn't weigh 50 lbs. I had thought the hardest would be creating software to read the brain signals and to adjust to different people, but I guess they solved that. I had also thought of another side effect that I'm sure they must have thought of. If one was able to correctly read a persons brain signals, would it not be possible to reverse the process and send signals to the person?