Charting a Course into the Science of Information
- Posted in Center News: Monday, May 4, 2015
Spectators pressed themselves into the small room so tightly that, viewed from above, they must have looked like a tessellation. All eyes focused on one corner of the plain, undecorated room, where a man sat placidly at a desktop computer. The crowd politely crushed each other for a viewing angle of the computer's monitor, where a marvel was occurring. The seated man had seen it many times before; the crowd had never seen anything like it. On the monitor, a bright green rectangle moved across a white screen, and each motion left a narrow green line tracing the rectangle's previous position. The man had evidently been moving the rectangle around for quite some time; the screen looked like a neon spiderweb. Although the spiderweb was clearly the center of attention, people kept glancing at the man's hat. White Velcro straps criss-crossed his head, and wherever the straps overlapped, they held a rubber suction cup to his scalp. Wires sprouted from the Velcro and branched in all directions. But the truly strange aspect of this scene was the man's hands. They sat perfectly still in his lap even while the bright rectangle on the screen moved as if guided by a mouse or keyboard. The hat was reading his brain.
