this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2025
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I'm curious to what you all think of this:
How the Emotiv EPOC Works
Magic or nah?
Not magic, of course. It's science.
The elctrical activity in your brain is measurable by electrodes placed on your skull. What we then get is called an electro-encephalogram, short: EEG. Although they rather measure a summation of activity rather than individual neurons. Still, this allows to draw some conclusions and has been widely used in neuromedicine.
For instance, it can help to diagnose epilepsy, or investigate sleep quality. In contexts of the Emotiv, to put it simply, it rather measures levels of concentration than actual thoughts.
But, with sufficient training you can enable such a system to perform a bit more complex tasks, like opening or closing a mechanical hand, driving a wheelchair in a simple mamner, etc.. Although, from my experience, the applications are very limited and unstable.
What if, hear me out, there are a few people that can sense that activity when others can't? Kind of like how some people see sounds and hear color. Since all of you all can't really sense that shit, you are relentless against people who can. It's interesting to me. I wonder how that first scientist figured this shit out. Do you know?
You mean sense electrical activity of the brain like EEGs?
I highly doubt it. The electrical brain activity is, in terms of voltage, very weak outside of the skull. So tiny, you need specialized sensors. Even those are affected by noise in their measurements.
As far as I know, humans have no sensing organs to directly* perceive voltages, currents or something in that direction. If there would be such a person, that would be a medical sensation and would require scientific confirmation of course.
*Of course we can passively perceive electric currents and voltages. Everyone who has touched an unisolated electrical conductor or has experienced how body hair is moved by a static electrical field (e.g. a loaded balloon) can confirm that. But those are passive phenomena, i.e., our pain receptors respond to the currents going through our body, while we can see our hair moving and feel that via the "touch-receptors" in our skin. But no one has cells to directly measure magnetic fields, or electric ones or an electrical current.
This should not to be confused with synesthesia, which is the other point you've brought up. I.e., the merging of two or more sensations, like "seeing sound" or "hearing colour". Based on my current understanding, while fascinating, this is also not "a new sense", although it can appear as one to those with synesthesia. It's a combination of existing senses which appears to be caused by how the brain wires our neurological sensing pathways. Simply put, atypical simultaneous activation of regions that are responsible for, e.g., seeing and hearing, while in fact only one of those modalities can currently be perceived (either seeing or hearing something).
Regarding the history of synesthesia: you can read up on that on Wikipedia or alike. It's like most other discoveries were made: people investigate and observe. In this case, scientists were investigating human perception and found synesthetics among people via interviews, experiements etc..
Again, not understanding what I'm putting down.
What do you mean?
You seem like you can gather information well. What do you mean, you never tied my POV to anything you posted.
People can’t do those things. There are no supernatural powers. Magic isn’t real.
People are already doing that by using sensors, that's how the video game works. You guys are so closed minded, I have empathy for you.
Still not magic, very much science.
So science to you is anything that science explains with scientific words, but didn't exist before that. So joe schmo invents a mind reader, but that's bullshit until "science" (whatever the fuck that is) tells you it's real.
Did you know how an MRI works? It's magnets. Do you know how a laser works? It's light. Do you know they're now using light as therapy? I don't know how more woo you can get. You guys have blinders on to an awesome world.
All those things are specifically not magic, scientific discovery doesn’t mean it didn’t exist before. Magnets aren’t magic, MRIs are not magic, photons, which is what lasers are, are not magic.
Not knowing about something doesn’t mean it’s not part of the natural universe. Magic is fake, you’ve been grifted and miseducated.
You clearly haven't read what I'm saying. Dig deeper.
Well, at the moment I don't understand how it works, and any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic, but if I follow the link titled "How the Emotiv EPOC Works" then it will remove the mystery, thus making it distinguishable from magic.
So what you're saying is half the world is magic because we don't know anything about half the world. We have theories, but they can't or haven't been proven yet. Naming it and harnessing it doesn't mean we really get how it works. Reading people's thoughts is supposed to be impossible according to most of this thread. Turns out, they've been doing it for close to 2 decades.
Argue with Arthur C. Clarke.
why?
He's the guy who said the quote, and I'm not gonna do it.