Hello there, and welcome to my blog. This is the beginning of what I hope will be a series of texts on ideas revolving around my line of work, making brain computer interface devices, oh and maybe of a beautiful friendship also. These texts are meant to be addressed to people with no, little or totally different scientific background. You see I strongly feel that technologies that read or manipulate the human mind (which is another description of brain computer interfaces) are both going to become part of life sooner or later and because the ethical issues with them need to be tackled towards the sooner side and by as many people as possible. So if you are wondering what a brain computer interface is, why it can eventually be both a wonderful and a terrible technology and why the forms it is going to take in the future shouldn’t be left to the whims of managers of large co-operations, then keep reading and more importantly, enjoy.
The problem of interfacing the human brain with a computer (Brain Computer Interface or Brain Machine Interface) is a scientific idea that you’ll be happy or dismayed to know is currently trying to transform itself into a technology. Most people – those at least not steeped into sci-fi literature– have probably never heard the term. If you are one of them I would love to know the search terms you used to unearth this text. The ideas though behind the name have been trickling into the public cultural sphere some decades now mainly through – you guessed it – the sparkling world of Hollywood.
If my limited capacity for movie trivia bits isn’t letting me down (imdb isn’t a bookmark of mine) there have been films touching the subject since the mid 70s (‘The Brain Machine’ – 1977 comes to mind). A couple slightly higher calibre efforts took place just before the turn of the century with ‘The Lawnmower Man’ (‘92) and ‘Johnny Mnemonic’ (‘97). In the later, a brain augmented Keanu Reaves manages to save the world from BCI/social manipulation gone horribly bad. All the above efforts had two things in common. They were addressed to hard core sci-fi enthusiasts, so if you’ve never heard of them it’s probably ok, and they were depicting BCI as the area of expertise of the mad scientist bound to fail. A failure as expected accompanied by spectacular (for the era) visual effects. If you don’t get annoyed by previous century special effects these films are worth seeing (unless you are a romantic comedy fun so maybe not).
The BCI’s cultural breakthrough though came with the Matrix trilogy (yes there were three of them, but if you missed that you really needn’t worry). This series brought along a couple of changes as far as BCI is concerned, even if the term was never mentioned in them. I will agree that the blue pill red pill nomenclature can be easier on the tongue. The first thing they did was to set Mr. Reaves up for nomination for having the first truly two way BCI machine named after him (not too long now Keanu). I mean 4 movies in less than 20 years out of a total of, I don’t know, maybe 10 on the subject is surely worth the appreciation of the scientific community. More importantly though, these movies managed to pretty much take the idea that human brains can directly connect to machines and slam dunk it into the western population’s collective cultural consciousness. The effect was almost as impressive as our introduction by sweet old ‘I keep coming back’ – Arny to the concepts of AI and autonomous robotics (these are the scientific terms of that evil Skynet’s game – don’t you just love to hate AI?).
As I am writing this, Mr. Ridley Scott has just released a marvel of cinematic technology which seems to show us how the world of Pocahontas would look when humanity achieves space flight and brain computer interfaces. Now I am the last person to talk about space flight or the inherent disrespect of western civilization(s) to any other. Brain computer interfaces on the other hand is what I have chosen to do for a living so this is the beginning of a series of texts transforming my take on the subject into a mirror that you may choose to use to view your thoughts of this emerging technology in.
For the sake of those readers who have joined us without realising that what they have seen in these movies has a name (and my apologies to the rest of you, but keep reading it may be not as boring) allow me a brief explanation and maybe the introduction of a few examples. Currently brain machine interfaces is a rather active branch of one of the busiest scientific questions of our time, the brain mind connection, or to put it crudely the making of the theory of how humans (and other animals) think. BCI can be thought of as the technological fruit behind the scientific theories of neuroscience, much like the computer and the cell phone are the products of electromagnetism and information theory. But what is it that we are trying to do exactly and how close are we to it at the moment? Before I move on, a small note of caution. The following ideas are mine and mine alone, meaning that scientists in the field will most probably have different opinions on the subjects I am touching and even the subjects they will find important will come in a range of flavours. You have been warned.
BCI is trying to connect the human and animal brain directly to a machine (usually but not necessarily a computer). This connection, like most interesting information exchanges, e.g. a phone conversation, can have two paths. One connects the brain to the machine and the other the machine to the brain. In the first instance we are trying to make machines that read the brain and do something using this information. This is very much like your hand muscles read signals from your brain and move to produce let’s say obscene gesturing during traffic time or your tongue and throat muscles move to produce speech (during the same hot episode for example). Devices that use this connection from the brain to the machine are electric wheel chairs that can be driven directly from the brain, communication devices where words can be formed without any physical movement on behalf of the user (usually a fully paralyzed – locked in patient) and computer games where on top of the joystick the gamer can control parts of the game directly from his or her brain.
The second information pathway, from machine to brain is focusing on making machines sending signals to our brains in such a way that those can be understood and utilized by us. Here the technology has advanced enough to actually have an example that today is a used medical technology, called the cochlear implant. This is a small implantable electronic device that like a microphone turns sound into electric signals. Yet unlike anything else existing today it is transmitting these signals straight to the cochlear nerve. That nerve in humans is responsible for sending the electric signals formed as the ear drum vibrates when forced to by sound waves to the right part of the brain where the sense of sound is formed. In people though that have their ears damaged but their nerves and brain centres intact the cochlear implant takes the place of the damaged ear and connects straight to the nerve as a functional ear would do. Thousands of people all around the world that would otherwise be considered deaf are currently able to have conversations even over the phone. Other examples still under development are artificial sight where the above idea will be applied to the eye and artificial senses of touch and pressure that will allow artificial limps to be controlled like the biological ones. You will find more info on the last technology if you search for research on ‘haptics’.
In my next entry I am planning to have a go at a second and very important distinction in the world of BCI. This is one between invasive and non invasive technologies. Here the distinction appears to also show another very interesting aspect, this time not based on engineering but on sociological ideas. It seems countries currently involved in BCI research seem to be concentrating almost exclusively on either one or the other of the two technologies (invasive or non invasive). When you also start taking under consideration the discrepancies as far as funding is concerned (yes some of these post will deal with the follow the money issue) this is just food for though. More to come.
Thanks for reading
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