News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Consumer brain wave headsets threaten privacy by 44mkultra69 on Sunday November 08, 2026 @05:27AM (#50411979)
how, what? without any input from you, ever? did you feed some personal parameters, first? like "fuck the Yankees, love red, may the Wall Street Soviet live on forever" so it can "map assumptions" bouncing around in your head to all that which you catch on your audiovisual peripheral and/or center of focus while you catch it all at different distances and pitches? Are you a person who feels bloodflow/tension in brain parts more or less specifically temporo-spatially ( pre-, during, release, post-release phases, ... ) or not and you just feel the neuro-chemistry vibe with the brain waves ( tired, awake, confused, intensifying, uuuh me so horny )... ?
Re:Consumer brain wave headsets threaten privacy by schiffern on Sunday November 08, 2026 @05:41AM (#50412063)

  >Are you a person who feels bloodflow/tension in brain parts
You're not 'feeling' your brain. That's biologically impossible, since the brain has no nerve endings.

What you're actually feeling is muscle tension tighten and release in your head/face/neck.

Re:Consumer brain wave headsets threaten privacy by 44mkultra69 on Sunday November 08, 2026 @06:30AM (#50412345)
> is biologically impossible

But there are nerve endings all around the scalp, everywhere in the face and neck, ears, that organ that picks up sound, eye nerves? So some hypersensitivity might create some cerebral geolocationish triangulation of where vessels dilate and constrict? Or are blocked by clots, which gives the flow and dilation a different shape and timing, which also changes clock sync of what usually fires together at much more specific rates than during the blockade.

I'm asking. I'm curious and have not done a preliminary consultation with AI, yet ( why do I feel the need to say this? Probably the sustained increased oxygen supply. Lot's of additional neurogenesis going on in my head atm--19 months on nose plasters )

I used to have annoying TLE attacks which changed thinking patterns and nudged inner dialogues in and out of conversations with people. Even when I was super smooth after weeks of continuous stretching and mobility exercises ( hold two minutes, don't be a noob ) ... but that's about the only somewhat relatable example which I mentioned elsewhere some time in the past.

Some people report tensions on the inside of their forehead even though the particular and surrounding facial nerves are quantifyably ( there's probably a correct term for that ) chill, when taking certain medications.

Re:Consumer brain wave headsets threaten privacy by schiffern on Sunday November 08, 2026 @12:58PM (#50415487)
All kidding aside, a good face and head massage is genuinely life-changing. :)

The brain's mental mapping of nerves in 3D space is highly fluid and adaptive, which is awesome, but it's also why we get things like referred pain and phantom limb syndrome.

Re:Consumer brain wave headsets threaten privacy by gabriel666smith on Sunday November 08, 2026 @06:38AM (#50412388)
This paper explains it better than I could:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-65499-0

If you know that at [timestamp] a certain word was audible in my vicinity, it might be reasonably safe to guess that I also thought this word around that point, because I heard that word.

The EEG signal my brain creates might behave in a unique way when I heard (and thus, thought) that word. Over time, it might be possible an EEG sensor to notice that unique pattern repeatedly.

So my hope is that decoding EEG might be perhaps simpler than people currently assume. Most studies create their datasets using "lots of participants, participating for relatively short periods" rather than "one participant, over an extremely long period".

If it's possible to have my EEG reasonably-well mapped and decoded (this signal previously repeatedly meant I was hearing the words "uuuh me so horny", to use your example) it might then become possible to read mapped words in the EEG signals even when the mapped words were not audible.

This, in turn, might mean it was possible to read (some of) the words I am thinking.

As a sibling commenter pointed out, it's insanely noisy data, so I have no idea whether any of the above will ever prove possible.

But mapping assumptions in the manner you laid out isn't something I would have any idea how to do, not least because I often hate the sports teams I love when they are underperforming.