You Know You Really Want To Use Your Eyebrows To Stop Your Car

I’ve been sent this at least three times in the past couple days, and I absolutely understand why. It’s a tiny, wonderful footnote of automotive madness that defies all reason and yet somehow exists under a veneer of rationality and scientific research. As far as I can tell, this blurb in the August 1965 issue of Popular Mechanics is the only (English language, at least) reference to this particular device available online. Which is tragic, because I’m dying to know more about this remarkable thing.

I’m supposed to get up early tomorrow to get on a plane to go to the Slate event in Los Angeles, and here it is almost 1:30 am and I still need to finish packing, but Cold Starts have to be started, coldly, so here I am. Why do I do this to myself?

Oh, back to the thing! Here’s what I’m talking about: a device, developed in Yugoslavia, that lets you, finally, control your car’s brakes with your eyebrows. Yes, eyebrows. Look:

So, what we’re looking at here is a special pair of glasses with a pair of electrodes that make contact with the muscles right above your eyebrows, the ones responsible for moving those two furry caterpillars above your eyes. When you move those muscles, the electrical current from your muscles are picked up by the electrodes, amplified considerably, and then that current is used to actuate and electromagnet that pushes the brake pedal.

The blurb claims there’s a 75% improvement in reaction time when comparing eyebrows to legs and feet, and while this seems to be generally supported by experimental evidence, I still have many, many questions. Other than the fact that people probably won’t want to wear a pair of freaky glasses with little arms that caress your forehead, there’s the question of inadvertent braking caused by emotional responses like surprise, anger, befuddlement, swankiness, disgust and more, all of which are expressed, unconsciously, via our eyebrows.

Would this system mean cars would be screeching to a halt every time a saucy double-entendre is uttered? Would making the Spock-type one-arched eyebrow send you into a spin? And what about brake pressure – is this an on/off system, or does the intensity of the eyebrow motion correspond to pedal pressure?

Who was asking for this, exactly? Did it all come from the realization that eyebrows react quicker? Is that it? I can’t think of any other plausible reason, really.

I can only think of one other sort of interface like this that utilized the muscles in one’s forehead to control things, and it never actually made it to market: Atari’s Mindlink System.

Yes, around 1984 Atari, the videogame company, was experimenting with a headband a player would wear, and that headband would read brainwaves to control a game! Well, that’s what they wanted you to think, at least. In reality, the Atari Mindlink headband did exactly the same thing that Yugoslavian eyebrow-brake doohickey did: read electrical signals from contracting forehead muscles.

It never worked all that well, and as a result, never made it to market, only existing as a few prototypes. I suspect this is essentially the same fate as the eyebrow-car-brake-controller, only if the Atari thing doesn’t work, nobody gets rear-ended so hard their face hits the dashboard, sending their teeth flying around like shards of a porcelain vase packed full of firecrackers.

So, I guess the takeaway here is if you’re planning to design something that’s controlled with forehead muscle impulses, maybe take a pause and reconsider things.