brainfly

Brainfly

This project will fly an imagined movement BCI in multiple different gravitational environments to investigate the effect of varying the gravitational force on individuals brain processes. The expectation is that due to changes in blood-flow, changes in arousal level due to the novel environment, or changes in the vestibular system due to the lack/change-in of a gravitational reference, will change brain function.

This project consists of 3 main sub-projects

• Motor-Imagery BCI -- this is the main part of the project and will look at how the changes in gravitational field impact a users ability to control a motor-imagery based BCI.
• Target detection -- within the BCI task will be a rare target-detection task. This task should evoke a classic p300 type brain response. Or expectation is that due to the novel nature of the environment performance on this task will reduce in the novel gravitational strength cases. Further, we would expect to see a change in the measured p300 brain response associated with this reduced target-detection performance.
• Precision movement control -- within the BCI task will be a rare target-detection and reaction-time task where the user must rapidly hit a particular location in space. The expectation is that the changes in gravitational strength will result in changes in body-schema which in turn mean performance on these reaction time tasks will vary (get worse). We also expect to see a rapid learning of the updated schema over multiple movements, followed by an un-learning when the gravational force changes again later.
• Vestibular response detection -- the changed gravational field strength is expected to have a significant effect on the response generated by the vestibular (balance) system. By cross-correlating the measured EEG with the changes in gravational field we aim to develop a method to detect the vestibular response in running EEG.
• Detection of vestibular hallucination in dreaming -- Due to the highly significant and novel nature of the zero-gravity experience, we expect subjects to dream about the zero-gravity experience in the nights after the flight. By measuring EEG in the sleep after the flight we aim to detect these zero-gravity (flying) dreams to validate the vestibular-response detection