i lost the use of my right (dominant) hand for 6 weeks and tried the twiddler. I didnt find the chorded text entry easy and struggled to get to much over 30-40 characters per min (!), but the mouse pad button works well for navigating a gui desktop (think ibm thinkpad 'trackpoint' center button). Oh and it works perfectly with linux.

The CO2 footprint is, surprisingly, similar (to within one order of magnitude)

Unfortunately, you are completely wrong. The paradigm is in fact good. In particular, I think that you will find that you are equipped with a cerebellum which runs your motor control through feedback provided through your eyes in the same way that this experiment works

thanks for posting this. what a beautiful relation. it is occasionally coming across nuggets of gold like this that keeps me reading slashdot (although, to continue the analogy, it must be said that there is a whole lot of prospecting through cr*p required!).

Changes in synaptic connectivity are one way that learning occurs. It is interesting to see that even minor stimulation (in playing a game like tetris) can lead to observable changes, i.e., the hardware of the mind (aka the brain) can be re-modelled by the software being run (the 'program' or specific task being undertaken). One of the next questions is to begin to understand the rules governing how learning is represented. This will allow us to begin debugging the OS kernel that links brain and mind.

the 'amount of information' you refer to is the Kolmogorv Complexity

- all you are saying is that the system to be modeled has a large number of degrees of freedom.

- I suspect the FACETs team know this.

- the more interesting question is, even approximately, how many degrees of freedom, f, are there?
for n synapses; what is O(n^f)

trust ? trust nothing and nobody !, and encase your head in lead to prevent Van Eck Phreaking