A semi bearing and MRI- A bridge too far - Working

Ed Sanders lab notes on the Brain Lyre. Source: Edward Sanders

The MRI- A bridge too far - working project

By Jack Vaughan

It is fair conjecture to say not too many among the East Side Poets subscribed in later years to The New Scientist, the highly readable British pub that flies into the headwinds of science and technology, but Sanders did.

For my money, this is strong indication he was firmly in a realm known by the ancient Athenian citizen, or the Renaissance Man versed in science and art. He stood ready to inspect the world at first principle. And, if electronics were in reign, he would learn it first hand. He'd been doing such a much, mucking with diodes, soldering circuits,  in the Woodstock winter lab.

However,  as time went by, it was became clear the total EBS might be a bridge too far. Would he back up MRI equipment borne in a semi to his Woodstock cottage, to extend the laboratory portfolio for exploring the next phase? Maybe not.

The workbooks show Sanders full-out imagination - and, as in the lab notes of a DaVinci, Hookes or Galvanil we see the discussion of future projects visualized, but beyond realization, or completion. In the face of the task required to augment the muse*, Sanders, the citizen scientist, paused.

In 2008 he told me:

 My final project [The Brain Lyre], I could never realize. Which was a musical instrument using brain waves. They are going to do that very soon. It's just a matter of time. I figured since brainwaves are multiplexed, if you could figure out a way, you could multiplex them down [into a single signal]. But it would be very expensive.

Even after he shifted attention away from active EBS work, he kept an eye on the developments in the brain-machine interaction, which, together with nano engineering and augmented reality, were to become a truly burgeoning areas of research in the 21st Century.

Examples of progress there to: Brain machine interfaces often use the same mechanisms Sanders envisioned - light-driven I/O, haptic signal processing - but, under the auspices of teams with academic or corporate funding, taken further. At this writing, electromagnetic brain signals are garnered by electrodes implanted in the brain, or by less invasive procedures, applied most notably in paralyzed individuals, with increasing degrees of utility.

Sanders saw this and more as he continued to grok on the pages of The New Scientist, but he let lapse his subscriptions to electronics circuits and sensors catalogs.  Over time, Sanders began to focus more intently on his legacy endeavor: a history of the United States done in the mode of Investigative Poetry, his papers on building the Electronic Bard System, neatly filed in lawyers boxes.

“MRIs are big. I realized I was in over my head. And I put my effort into a five-volume history of the United States. I sort of got out of musical instrument construction.”

But he kept an eye on the sings of wider progress in interactive techniques:

Well I see that Sharp has copied my idea for a Light Lyre. They have an instrument now where you break a beam and create a note.” 

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*think of the Jimi Hendrix feedback guitar and wah wah  (augmenting) the guitarist's emotional id.