All things considered, the XBox Kinect is pretty damn impressive-who would have thought that one day we’d just be able to play videogames by moving our bodies? Well, scientists at MIT might have one-upped Kinect. By a lot.

Researchers are working with the brain’s alpha waves — neural oscillations in the frequency range of 8 and 12 Hz — to create rich syntactic representations that can be used to communicate directly with computers, Schalk said.

Schalk presented attendees a video showing how test subjects can control computer games through the use of electrodes attached to the surface of their brains. The test subjects were already wired for treatment of illnesses such as epilepsy.

In one demonstration in the video, a patient used thoughts to shoot monsters in the video game Doom. The patient used a joystick to move the gun back and forth but used his thoughts to cause the gun the shoot — accurately.

Alpha waves! Doom! Pretty sure that shooting things with your mind is more or less the premise of the entire show Supernatural. Can anybody confirm this for us?

-Drew Millard

[via]