Controlling Entrainment Through Attention

In a previous post, I showed that I could induce (entrain) brain waves at different frequencies simply by staring at blinking movies playing on my computer.  Having demonstrated this basic feasibility, my goal now is to exploit this phenomenon to make a brain-computer interface (BCI) to control future hacks.  My idea is to play two blinking movies simultaneously -- one at a slow speed and one at a fast speed.  I'm hoping that my brainwaves will only entrain with the blinking from the one movie that I choose to focus on.  Does my brain work this way?  Will my brain successfully reject the blinking from the movie that I'm ignoring?  Let's find out!

Simultaneous Blinking at Two Speeds:  Previously, I made some blinking movies where the whole screen would blink black or white at a given speed.  To make this idea work for a BCI, I want my screen to blink at two different rates at the same time.  So, as you can see in the video above, I made the left side of my screen blink at one rate while the right side of my screen blinks at a different rate.  I'm hoping that, if I focus my attention on the left side of my screen, by brainwaves will only become entrained at the left-side blink frequency, whereas if I were to focus on the right side of the screen, my brainwaves would follow the right-side blink frequency.

Swapping Sides:  To help with this test, I wanted to remove any effect of turning my head to change my gaze between the two sides of my screen.  So, in creating my dual-rate blinking movie, I had the movie automatically swap sides every 20 seconds.  As a result, it starts with fast blinking on the left and slow blinking on the right.  After 20 seconds, it swaps so that slow is on the left and fast is on the right.  It does this swap a few times.  The Matlab code that I used to make these movies is here.

I created a movie where the left and right sides blink independently -- left is fast and right is slow.
For this test, the two blink rates swapped sides every 20 seconds.

Choosing my Blink Rates:  Based on my previous results, it looks like my brain (coupled with my computer's limited ability to blink steadily) is most easily entrained in the 6-10 Hz frequency range. So, for this dual-rate movie, I chose "slow" to toggle between black and white at 10 Hz (ie, a 5 Hz white-white rate) and "fast" to toggle at 15 Hz (ie, a 7.5 Hz white-white rate).  In truth, I made a bunch of movies at different rates, but the the 10/15Hz movie worked the best, so I'll only show its results.

EEG Setup:  With my movies prepared, I gathered up my EEG stuff.  Like usual, I used my OpenBCI board and a few cup electrodes with Ten20 paste. I put one electrode on the left side of my forehead (Fp1), on one the left side of the back of my head (O1) and one on the right side of the back of my head (O2).  Using the impedance measuring feature, my impedances were 11 kOhm, 67 kOhm, and 28 kOhm (I seem to have an on-going problem getting a low impedance at O1).  My reference electrode was on my left ear lobe and my bias electrode was on my right ear lobe.  My OpenBCI board was connected to the PC via USB and I was logging data using my OpenBCI GUI in Processing.  For this test, I also used my photocell to confirm that my computer's blinking was sufficiently steady.

I used my OpenBCI V1 board to record my EEG into the computer.  I also attached a
photocell to confirm that the screen was blinking at the right rate.

Results:  After setting everything up, I started recording my EEG data and then I started playing the dual-rate blinking movie.  It was night time, so my room was pretty dark.  I focused my attention at the center of the left-hand movie. As described above, the left movie toggled fast-slow-fast-slow every 20 seconds, while the right movie played the opposite -- slow-fast-slow-fast.  Spectrograms of the EEG signals from my head are shown in the figure below.  As you can see, there was no entrainment seen in the signals from my forehead (as expected) but there was entrainment in the back of my head (also as expected).  The best entrainment was seen on the left side of my head.

Spectrograms of my EEG signals recorded while watching my dual-rate blinking movie.  The left-back
of my head exhibited the strongest entrainment to the blinking of my movie.  

Only Seeing the Left Blink Rate:  Because the left-back of my head (O1) gave the best entrainment, let's just focus on its results. The figure below shows just the results for the left-back of my head.  Note how,once the movie starts playing, my EEG signals seem to toggle between a fast blink rate (~7.5 Hz) and a slow link rate (~5 Hz).  This exactly follows the white-white blink rate of the left movie. So, my brainwaves successfully entrained to the movie that I was watching. Most importantly, there seems to be no signature in my EEG data from the blinking of the right movie.  This is success!

Spectrogram of my EEG data from the left-back of my head (O1) while watching my dual-rate
blinking movie.  I was focused just on the left movie.  Because of this focus, my brainwaves
appear to have entrained only with the left movie's blink rate.

Purposely Shifting My Attention:  OK,so I've demonstrated that my mind can successfully ignore one of the movies.  That's really good.  But, maybe I'm just biased to looking left. To really make this work for a BCI, I need to be able to shift my attention to either movie and have my brainwaves follow.  So, for my 2nd test, I started the same movie playing back.  But, this time, when the movies swapped sides every 20 seconds, I switched my attention to follow the movie that blinked faster. This means that I started by watching the left movie, then I watched the right, then left, then right.  My EEG response is shown below. Note that I showed strong entrainment and,most importantly, that my brainwaves only show the fast blink rate (7.5 Hz). So, by shifting my attention to follow the faster movie, I successfully rejected the effect of the slower blinking movie. Success again!

Spectrogram of my EEG data from the left-back of my head (O1) while watching my dual-rate blinking
movie.  While watching the movie, I switched my attention between left and right to follow the movie
 that blinked faster. Because of this focus, my brainwaves remained entrained only at the faster rate.

All the Elements are In Place:  It looks like I now have the elements in place for a 3-state BCI.  If I don't look at the movie at all, I get State 1: "Nothing". If I watch the blinking of the left movie, I get State 2: "Left".  If I watch the blinking of the right movie, I get State 3: "Right".  It may be possible to further divide my screen to get more blinking regions to add more BCI states. Maybe that's a good experiment for the future. Right now, though, I think that I'm going to turn my attention to a little robot that I got (thanks for the pointer Conor!) to see if I can control it with visual entrainment.  This is gonna be fun!

Follow-Up:  Interested in getting the EEG data from this post?  Try downloading it from my github!

Follow-Up:  I successfully used visual entrainment to control a six-legged robot!