Why Being a Brain Narcissist is a Good Thing
I love my brain.
Maybe to the point that it’s unhealthy — narcissistic even. But I still think it's reasonable.
See, the thing is, I don't just love my brain, I love your brain too. I love all of our brains. You might be thinking:
“What the hell is this crazy 17-year-old on about?”
So let me explain. . .
Crazy Compelling Cranium🧠
The thing is that the human brain is a complex and magical machine. It allows our body to do countless tasks each day from shaking an investor’s hand on a deal well done or even signaling that it’s lunchtime. Without our brain, we would just be senile bodies of flesh and muscle.
Just like any other complex machine, our brain also has complex functions and assembly. Our brain is built up of tiny nerve cells, called neurons. Neurons are like tiny cranial LEGO building blocks that connect forming connections that are the basis for how our brain communicates.
With over 100 billion neurons we have nearly 100 trillion connections that are created, changed, or destroyed every day. These neural junctions are densely interconnected highways via synapses, which act as gateways of inhibitory or excitatory activity, that carry tiny electrical impulses from one neuron to another.
Any time we think of something or move a specific limb in a particular fashion there is a designated neural pathway in your brain for that exact thing. Most importantly, there’s a neural pathway that’s helping you understand my obsession with the brain. So keep reading to strengthen that pathway even more.
Isn’t that CRAZY! Each one of the hundreds of tiny things you do in a day has a unique electrical pathway in your brain?!
How small?🤔
Unfortunately, scientists can’t just look inside your brain and see what those pathways are since neurons are very tiny. Neurons can range from about 4 microns (thousands of a millimeter) to 100 microns.
For scale, the diameter of a human hair is 150 microns…
Even aside from their tiny size, to look inside a brain and decode each neural pathway and neuron, scientists would practically have to take a brain out of a head and dissect each part of it and understand the complete 1500cm³ of the brain.
Although many prospective and eager people have attempted this feat such as Robert Joseph White (1926–2010), an American neurosurgeon known for his head transplants on living monkeys, it has been proven unsuccessful time and time again.
However, over the years there have innovations that have allowed us a glimpse into our minds. One of the most simple methods is through electroencephalography.
Electro- what?⚡
Electroencephalography is one of the many promising applications of brain-computer interfaces: essentially devices that can communicate information in your brain to a computer.
Broken down word by word, electroencephalography(EEG) essentially means electrical (electro) measuring(graphy) inside(en) the brain(cephalo). Specifically, EEGs measure the ionic current of your cerebral(surface of the brain) neurons firing through tiny measuring devices called electrodes.
To understand this a little bit better, let’s get into some biology. 🤓
As neurons fire across their synapses, ions are constantly leaving the synaptic membrane through a voltage-gated channel. This movement of opposing charges across the membrane (positive sodium and negative potassium) polarizes and depolarizes the synapse very quickly which allows the charge to go through and generates a subtle (and unmeasurable) electrical impulse called postsynaptic potential.
Due to this, neurons are constantly exchanging ions during their postsynaptic potential. Now one thing to note is that ions of the same charges are very mean. They’re little bullies that trigger other ions around them and like pushing them around.
Terrible, I know.
However, when many ions of the same charge are collectively pushed out of neurons, they repel each other, and repel their neighbors, who repel their neighbors, and so on, in a wave. This process is known as volume conduction.
When thousands of neurons fire in sync, they can generate an electrical field that is strong enough to spread through muscle tissues, blood, and the skull. Eventually, this can be measured on the surface of the head through electrodes.
This can be compared to subtle earthquakes.
On their own, they are too small to notice. But if many tectonic movements occur at the same time, location, and rhythm, they collectively become a larger earthquake and can be noticeable from the other side of the world.
Returning to our bully analogy, when these waves of ions reach the electrodes on the scalp, they go back to their bullish ways and start to push or pull electrons on the metal in the electrodes. Since metal conducts, ions push and pull on their electrons very easily.
Similarly, EEG electrodes detect these larger neural earthquakes hundreds of times a second and amplify them to appear on a graph on a computer screen or a recording device. By using the difference in the push or pull voltages between any two electrodes, these voltages can be measured by a voltmeter which is what gives us EEG recordings in Hz and resemble waves.
Electrode Orientation 🧭
Electrodes can be used individually, like the picture above, OR can be used with elastic caps, such as this the one below, for faster applications and more spatial clarity.
The electrodes here are placed in various arrangements to target specific cortical surfaces and cranial lobes such as the somatosensory cortex (T9 horizontally across to T10) or the prefrontal cortex (FpZ). Here is an example of an electrode placement reference guide:
As electrodes quantity and quality grow, we get far superior readings. Mainly these readings have been used in medical applications for detecting seizures or other similar sharp neurological conditions. However, with recent research done within the field of EEG, these applications are growing and being utilized in SO many different things.
This is where my narcissism comes in.
Merging Thought and Actions 🤯
Neurable is, hands down, one of the most exciting and innovative company in this space.
When Dr. Ramses Alcaide was only 8 years old, his uncle suffered a traumatic trucking accident that resulted in him losing both his legs. As Alcaide observed his uncle gain and repair his prosthetics, he became motivated to help the less able.
Being a first-generation American and witnessing his parent’s sacrifices, Alcaides co-founded Neurable in 2016 with a vision to create a world without limitations.
Neurable combines deep neuroscience knowledge with proprietary machine-learning algorithm systems to measure and classify EEG signals in real-time. With their software, users can easily control objects in real life. Using their VR-compatible brain-sensing device, DK1, users can also manipulate VR, AR, and XR environments.
Imagine moving a cereal box closer to you. Then imagine pouring cereal into a bowl. Neurable can do that. All this, with your brain. What’s not to love???
Don’t believe me? Watch for yourself:
Their practical applications and current progress far surpass many counterparts. Currently, they are working towards creating hands-free and voice free control of mobile devices.
Crazy right?!
Use the Force. . . No, really 💪
Arguably one of the most recognizable characters in pop culture is Luke Skywalker. Apart from his trusty lightsaber, Luke’s robotic arm has long remained one of the most iconic science-fiction creations of all time — but not any longer.
Inspired by the legendary Jedi himself, the LUKE arm is a DARPA funded bionic arm developed by Mobius Bionics. The arm is controlled by EMG (Electromyography) which is similar to EEG but senses nerve signals for moving certain muscles and decodes those signals to intended movement patterns.
Simply stated, a person thinks of moving, and the arm is able to move.
The arm took nearly 8 years to manufacture and has 10 electronically powered joints as well as multiple grip patterns. It gives amputees a level of freedom that is far superior to conventional prosthetics.
Not only that, but it’s an early step in creating fully neural controlled prosthetics that feel and act like normal limbs. Plus it looks freaking cool.
Hacking Meditation🧘
Meditation is one of the most powerful practices in the modern world. People like Ray Dalio, Oprah Winfrey, and Bill Gates have all stated the numerous benefits meditation has had in their life.
Enter Muse.
The Muse EEG headband can decipher your neural waves and tell you when you’re focusing or in deep meditation. It’s a calibration device for your brain that helps you practice healthy meditation practices.
More than that, it’s an affordable and easy to use EEG research device. Countless EEG headsets have been commercialized with their APIs for easy use for an average person. Companies like Muse and Emotiv are leading this movement and possibly leading to the next innovation in brain-machine interfaces coming from a passionate teenager’s bedroom!
Like me!
My Love Story with Muse💗
When I realized that my brain is capable of all of this, I knew I had to do something. I become obsessed with what my brain can do and wanted to apply it in different and unconventional ways. So I did what any normal 17-year-old, would do: I made it happen.
Earlier this year, I reached out to Muse asking for one of their EEG headsets. Luckily, they gave me and my friend Wilson a student sponsorship. Perks of the sponsorship was getting two free headsets ;)
Now that I had my headset, I had to quickly figure out how to start doing stuff with it. The main issue was that Muse’s SDKs were all outdated and discontinued. So I had to find a third-party alternative, which after a few days of looking through GitHub and YouTube, I did.
After setting up some prerequisite Bluetooth addons, I was able to use a program called Muse-lsl to stream my headset data to my laptop. I had the data, now I needed some preprocessing on top of it.
Once again, I looked around the internet and found this EEG preprocessing software called EEG Notebooks. Because the software was streamlined for Mac OS, I had to make some minor source code and library changes, and then it was working for Windows 10. (Thanks to Mark for the help!)
Now I was good to go.
My first program was simple and only utilized one EEG artifact (distinguishable readings in data caused by certain actions). I divided on using the blink because it’s one of the most detectable readings on an EEG graph.
So with just a blink, I thought it would be fun to control a single control game, like the Chrome Dino Game. By using a Python library that controls the keyboard I was able to set my program to hit [space] every time my EEG reading passed a certain calibrated threshold (blinking).
Here’s a video showing off the program!
Successfully using one artifact, I did the next best thing and used
For my next program, I used jaw clenching as my second artifact due to its distinguishable — yet distinct — reading.
Initially, I was going to continue along the video game path and control Pong with my mind. But due to problems with keyboard inputs not be received by the flash game, I settled on controlling my computer volume instead.
This time the task was more difficult since I had set up an algorithm to distinguish between normal readings, eye blinks, and jaw clenches. After some observations, however, I noticed that jaw clenches remained in heightened alpha waves for 3 seconds which was easily measured using a Python’s time module.
After that, it was smooth sailing and I was able to turn my computer volume from 0% to 100% and back to 0% with no user interference what so ever.
Task Time 🕰️
Next, I thought of putting my coding skills to the test and creating a more original program and made TaskTime.
TaskTime is a focusing program that tells you the time until you stop working by just thinking about it rather than checking the time yourself and thus being distracted from work.
Let’s say you’re writing an essay and want to write it from 7 pm to 8 pm. Upon running TaskTime, you enter your stop time (8:00 PM) and start working. TaskTime reads your brain waves every 15 seconds and looks out for a certain threshold for alpha relaxation — something easily triggered by taking deep intentional breaths and focusing, similar to meditating.
Depending on calibration, if you try to focus on your breaths for even 5 seconds, your alpha relaxation spikes and slowly makes it way down over the next 10–15 seconds. In that time, the program will re-check for heightened alpha relaxation and, if present, will speak the time over your computer speakers and tell you how much time you have left.
Think of it as asking Alexa for the time and asking how much time till a timer ends. But without doing either.
Next Steps: Machine Learning + BCI 💻
For the past month, I’ve stopped working with EEGs and rather have been focusing on gaining practical experience in artificial intelligence — specifically machine learning.
I’ve created some practice models following tutorials such as simple linear regression and clustering but I’m continuing to work my way up through the complexities of the different types of learnings. Once I have a sufficient understanding and execution with ML, I’m going to take that expertise back to my EEG research and create an EEG classifier. Not sure how or what, but, just like the rest of the work I did, I’ll figure it out. 😎
Now, do you get it? 🧠
Our brains have SO much untapped potential.
With modern technologies and innovations, we can accomplish so many feats with the right applications. Over the next few years, this will only evolve into bigger and better things!
As the National BRAIN Initiative is done decoding all 100 billion of our neurons we’ll have a tremendous level of understanding about neural pathways.
A similar level of understanding was present when the human genome project was completed; there was a whole new world to explore. That exploration led to revolutionary breakthroughs in gene editing and is ongoing in research to cure genetic disorders.
I'm optimistic that a similar revolution is just waiting to start with the human brain and when it does, brain narcissism will be all the hype.
Before you go:
Please allow me to introduce myself :)
Hi! I’m Sabeeh and I’m a curious 17-year-old who is super passionate about emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, brain-computer interfaces, gene-editing, and more. I would love to connect and learn more about you as well — Shoot me a DM!
Connect with me on Linkedin, Medium (oh look! you’re already here), or Twitter!