Guest post by Stephen.
With its 140 character limit, you’d be pretty hard-pressed to post something significant or influential on Twitter. In fact, many of the Twitter naysayers out there would be forgiven for thinking that the social networking tool is just another modern avenue for excessive information and runaway self-expression — until recently. On April 15 a tweet went up, “Go Badgers,” that seemed as run-of-the-mill as any other. But it turned out to be, well, the most important tweet ever, for what that’s worth. It remains to be seen how it stacks up against historic expressions of school spirit.
The author of the post was Adam Wilson, a biomedical engineering student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and he composed it with the electrical signals of his brain. In doing so, he turned his fingers and keyboard into unnecessary middlemen and uncovered a new mode of communication for “locked-in patients” who have normally functioning brains but severe limitations on their movements. Wilson’s setup uses a head cap of electrodes to capture the electrical impulses of brain activity and software he created to translate those signals to Twitter. While viewing a screen of flashing characters, Wilson decides which character he’d like to transmit and concentrates on that character, say a “G.” When the “G” flashes, his brain sends a unique signal that is captured by the electrode cap and passed through his algorithm. To post his message on Twitter, Wilson focuses his attention on the word “twit” that appears at the bottom of the computer screen. (more…)
