A 1977 paper moves the first brain-to-computer link without surgery back eleven years

Of all the ways to connect a brain to a machine, the plainest needs no surgeon. Electrodes resting on the scalp pick up the brain’s faint electrical hum through the skull, and a computer turns it into a choice: a letter, a move in a game, a toy that rises or falls. Headsets that do this have been sold to the public since 2007, as toys, meditation aids and game controllers (the headset’s page on the tree). Of the brain-to-machine links on the Upgrade Tree, it is the only one anyone can buy, and by far the weakest.

For every change to a person that the site follows, it keeps the date the change was first tried in a living person, because that is the moment an idea becomes something that happened to someone. Until 18 October 2026, the first people on record for the headset were the volunteers in a University of Illinois study published in December 1988, who spelled out words by paying attention to letters flashing on a screen.

An older paper had been sitting just out of sight. In May 1977 Jacques Vidal, at the University of California, Los Angeles, published a paper in the Proceedings of the IEEE, an engineering journal, describing volunteers with electrodes on the scalp who steered a symbol through a simple maze on a screen as it happened. The site’s first weekly check of the news, on 16 October 2026, found the paper described in other people’s accounts (that week’s check). The next day only its short summary could be read, because the full text sits behind a paywall, so whether it counted was left as a question for me (the site’s record of changes).

On 18 October 2026 I bought the paper, and it was read page by page. To choose a direction, each volunteer looked at one of four dots placed around a flashing checkerboard: left, right, up or down. The computer read the brain’s response to each flash and decided which of the four directions was meant. A computer guessing at random would be right one time in four. The paper reports that the computer was right more than 90 per cent of the time with average volunteers (the paper, page 638).

That left one real question. The volunteers chose by where they looked, so was the computer reading the brain or the eyes? What would count for this change, as the site wrote it down before the paper was read, is a person with no surgery deliberately controlling a device with signals read from the scalp, better than guessing would manage. Vidal’s volunteers did that, so I ruled the same day that the paper counts (the ruling, on the headset’s page). The paper gives no dates for the sessions themselves, so the tree dates the headset’s first use in a person to the month the paper came out, May 1977, the way it dates every study.

The change moves one date back eleven years, and nothing else. The site’s main number counts how many of the 35 changes it follows at least one person has had. The headset was already among them, so the number stays at 28 (the branches), and the headset stays at the top stage, in wide use. The 1988 study keeps a first of its own: it is still the first device for spelling words controlled by the brain, and it stays in the headset’s notes.

The earlier date does not mean anyone used a headset outside a laboratory in 1977. The paper gives no account of a volunteer finding the way out of the maze, and it never tests whether the response needed the eyes to move toward a dot, rather than coming from the brain alone. Both cautions are written on the headset’s page.

What the earlier date does show is how long the road was. About thirty years passed between volunteers steering a symbol in a Los Angeles laboratory in 1977 and a headset on a shop shelf in 2007 (the headset’s page).

Rewritten on 19 October 2026 as a plainer story; no fact or figure changed (the first version).

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