Assistive technologies are tools that help enable people with disabilities to more effectively interact with other kinds of technology, such as computers, mobile phones, and the Internet. But what if we could broaden the definition of assistive technologies to include tools that help all people function more efficiently in their work and personal lives? What if researchers and scientists could harness the power of the human brain to develop a “killer app” to help everyone think more effectively? That’s exactly what Dr. Erik Viirre, Associate Professor of Surgery and Cognitive Science at UC San Diego, is trying to do.
A specialist in the field of higher cognitive function, one of Dr. Viirre’s many focus areas is learning more about how the brain works and translating those complex functions into “tools for thinking.” He recently spoke to IBM researchers as part of the Watson Diversity Council Disability event. After his presentation, Dr. Sara Basson, a researcher from the IBM Human Ability and Accessibility Center, had an opportunity to speak with him about his work.
Q. Do you see yourself as someone creating technologies that assist people with disabilities?
A. I do develop technologies for people with disabilities, and people with medical problems, but I am equally interested in applying these technologies for people that aren’t labeled as “disabled” in the traditional sense.
Q. You’ve said that people with loss of hearing or vision have perfectly normal thinking abilities and are thus “disabled like the rest of us.” What do you mean?
A. Well, for example, our ability to perform even simple mental arithmetic is a task that overwhelms conscious attention and is very often wrong. Our ability to convey mental concepts through language constructs is also fraught with error and requires high levels of mental attention. In contrast, there are some abilities of our nervous systems that can, in milliseconds, perform feats that are potentially beyond the ability of automation. Catching a baseball, recognizing a face with certainty, or manipulating concepts of quantum physics are done with impunity.
Q. In what way can technology bring us even beyond what we consider "good" cognitive abilities?
A. Technology can store and make information readily accessible for us, like on the Internet. With tools like word processors and spreadsheets, we can better express ourselves in text and images. But even these electronic technologies have substantial limitations, manifested mainly through input/output functions that they force users to perform. So a big question for the future is—can we improve the rate of interaction with machine cognitive aids (i.e., information technology) and improve the delivery of intended interactions with cognitive aids?
Q. How can we harness the strong computational abilities of the brain and combine them with technology to improve thinking and communication?
A. It now appears feasible to directly access mental intentions through neuroscience technology, so that, for example, we could disambiguate homonyms for a speech recognition system with neural information. By harnessing the brain’s extensive unconscious computational abilities, we may be able to use neuroscience technologies to provide feedback to the conscious brain. This is still a speculative idea, and something that will have to be tested in the laboratory.
Q. What have been the obstacles in coming up with the compelling "killer application" that achieves this vision?
A. Technology to measure brain activity has been so complex and expensive until now, that it has been available to only a few laboratories. Also, a lot of effort in this area was expended on “primary functions” of the brain, such as responses to sensory stimuli, visual evoked potentials, or brain activities related to simple motor actions like wiggling a finger. Only recently has science begun seriously pursuing the correlates of higher cortical activity. With more availability and reduced expense, there is a growing body of research on higher cortical functioning at many sites, which will more likely lead us to the “killer applications.”
Q. What kind of cognitive systems, or “tools for thinking,” currently exist, and what do you think is possible in the coming decade?
A. We have all kinds of tools now—search engines, word processors, spreadsheets, and software interaction tools are a few examples. In the coming decade, I think it will be possible to determine whether a person is paying attention to a specific task, like driving, air traffic control, or writing an e-mail. And, through the monitoring of attention, we’ll be able to give both the user and people training the user valuable information about how well they are interacting with the task. The result will be that it will be easier to identify and better train people who may have problems paying attention or who have cognitive deficits understanding tasks.
I think it is feasible to have activity in the brain measured in near real time, which will be useful for interacting more precisely with IT. In situations where there is ambiguous information—like homonyms in a word processor, mouse commands on a graphic user interface, or situations where there can be multiple meanings—neural activity can be used to signal the intended action. We are hearing about more experiments related to control of cursors from movement control signals in brain. We anticipate moving up to decision making parts of brain, and using signals from these higher functioning areas.
About Dr. Viirre:
Dr. Erik Viirre is Associate Adjunct Professor in the University of California, San Diego Department of Surgery and Research Associate Professor in the UCSD Department of Cognitive Science. He is also Director of the Applied Cognitive Science Laboratory at the Naval Health Research Center in San Diego. His research interests include vision, hearing, the vestibular system and higher cognitive function. He has been principal investigator on projects for the National Institutes of Health, The National Science Foundation, The Office of Naval Research, DARPA and NASA. He is a consultant for institutions such as the National Academy of Science and high technology companies including Posit Science, Zero G Corporation and Virgin Galactic.
Dr. Viirre received his Ph.D. in Neurophysiology in 1987 at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada and his M.D. at the same institution in 1988. He is a graduate of the 1988 International Space University summer session held at MIT. From 1995 to 1998, he was a Senior Scientist at the Human Interface Technology Lab at the University of Washington.