A few days ago, we posted a video showing someone controlling Siri with their mind (or so we thought).

Greg Courville, an undergraduate physics student at the University of California, explains why it is a fake:

“If you haven’t spotted it already: not only does there appear to be virtually nothing connected to the SpeakJet chip, it’s also placed sideways in the breadboard, which shorts a number of critical pins together, and therefore would make it impossible to use.

The project’s blog claims that ”ECG pads provide raw skin conductivity / electrical activity as analogue data (0-5v)”. Let’s go ahead and ignore the fact that they seem to have confused EEG with ECG (which is a completely different type of measurement), and the spurious reference to “skin conductivity” (ditto). The most glaring problem with that statement is the claim that EEG signals fall in an Arduino-friendly 0-5V positive voltage range. Suffice it to say they don’t.

What did Project Black Mirror do? Based on their written statements, their YouTube videos and the photo shown below, they connected the electrode leads directly to the analog input terminals on the Arduino.

In short, there’s not even the slightest chance that they are actually recording EEG signals this way.”