Neuroscience-as-a-Service (NaaS) — Basics (Part 1)
co-authored by Alexandria Pabst
Mind Power
Mind power. Many of us must have heard of this from stories, films and some mainstream psychic posts online. It is indeed a fascinating as well as a puzzling concept with deep roots in philosophy, anthropology, religion, archeology as well as the world of science and technology. In this article, we’ll focus on the latter and how neuroscience explains mind power and applies in technology.
Brief Introductions
First of all, couple of introductions are due before exploring the mind power any further. We’ll briefly touch on the brain, the human experience, neurons, the connections they form and the brainwaves. The human brain is one of the most complex structures in our universe. Made up of billions of cells and trillions of connections, it fires off rapid signals. The pulsing, fluctuating and vibing signals contained within our skulls create what we know as life — the human experience: how we feel, how we sense and perceive, and how we make sense of the world around us. A neuron (image A) is type of a nerve cell. It is responsible for communicating with other nerve cells via electrical currents. It typically has three parts: a body, axon and dendrites. The axon is like a tail and extends from the cell body to reach out to other neurons to send out signals. The dendrites branch from the body and make thousands of connections with other neurons to receive signals.
Now, imagine the ripples when you drop a pebble on a still lake and how they move away. When neurons, their axons and dendrites, are activated, they too create a similar ripple effect, producing electrical pulses. These pulses are what we call as the brainwaves. Now, think about how white light can be refracted into many colours. Those who listen to Pink Floyd can imagine the album cover of The Dark Side of The Moon. Others, just imagine how a rainbow is formed! Like colours, brainwaves can be categorised into 5 basic groups based on their frequency bands (image B) — we’ll talk about them in more detail in another post.
Neurotechnology
In the above section, we talked about a number of cool concepts from neurons to brainwaves. Now, it is time to explore how technology, namely neurotechnology or neurotech, can harness the mind power. This is possible in two fundamental ways: (i) detecting what’s happening with the brain activity (a.k.a. neuromonitoring); (ii) changing the brain activity with some external stimulation (a.k.a. neurostimulation).
Let’s talk about neuromonitoring first (Image C). When neurons are active in synchrony, our brain activity become strong enough to be detected and measured from outside the brain. Neurotech devices with fancy sensors can then capture some of these signals and interpret them in meaningful ways. Researchers often use wearable devices that either measure the brainwaves (electroencephalography, or EEG) and blood flow (functional near-infrared spectroscopy, or fNIRS). Both of these monitoring techniques tell a powerful story about the human experience. EEG can precisely capture the moment brain states change — often with less than a millisecond delay. This is useful for understanding when we make decisions and how we react to changes in our environment. On the other hand, fNIRS captures oxygenated blood flow in the brain. Our brains deliver oxygen to areas that require more resources to operate — oxygen “activates” these regions in the brain, and fNIRS can detect which areas of the brain are activated during different activities. This neuromonitoring technique is much slower than EEG (with delays on the order of seconds), but provides valuable information about which locations are necessary during cognition — this becomes incredibly relevant when diagnosing brain health.
Neurostimulation, on the other hand, can stimulate targeted areas of the brain to change the activity of the neurons (Image D). Some forms of stimulation can excite neurons, making them more susceptible to fire, whereas other forms of stimulation can depress neural activity, making them less likely to activate. Stimulation that excites neurons is performed by sending activation patterns to brain areas in specific intermittent rhythms — similar to a base line in a song. This activity increases the excitement in neuron populations, and when the base line is removed, these cells are more “amped up” and more ready to respond than they normally would be. Stimulation that decreases neural activity can be thought of as providing tiring out neurons by providing them with a constant stream of activity. Along the same lines, if you were to take a constant tone and listen to it for a while, eventually you might drone out the noise and disregard audio coming in at that frequency. In the same way, a brain area can receive a constant stream of activity and become overstimulated to the point of exhaustion, and it takes a while to recover. Neurotech devices that stimulate can target many areas of the brain to excite and deactivate neurons, providing us insight into the brain’s flexibility and how it adapts when changes in activity are introduced. Currently, consumer-facing neurostimulation technology is available for some clinical applications and their usage is highly recommended to be supervised with a specialist.
Neuroscience-as-a-Service
For simplicity sake, the rest of the Neuroscience-as-a-Service series will focus on future of neuromonitoring. As you can recall, neuromonitoring is similar to measuring heart rate but on steroids, given some neuromonitoring devices can capture around 10,000 data points per second. The image below (Image E) represents a very tiny snapshot of such data that I collected using my portable EEG device while writing this paragraph.
One might then ponder the astronomical number of data points that can potentially be collected from just listening to their own brain — hmm, what is it saying? Only if you had the right tools and expertise to analyse and interpret the brain activity data in real time… Good news for those who want instant and meaningful view of how their brain is doing. This is where Neuroscience-as-a-Service (NaaS) can bridge the gap between the raw data from brain activity and users, by delivering real-time analytics and insights from brain data using the power of cloud computing (Image F).
NaaS, in some degree, is already being implemented for specific cases. One company, Kernel, has recently announced two neurotech devices which will build the foundation of their NaaS platform: Flow and Flux. Flow relies on blood flow, measured through time-domain functional near-infrared spectroscopy (TD-fNIRS), whereas Flux utilises the magnetic fields of neural activity detected through optically-pumped magnometers for magnetoencephalography (OP-MEG). fNIRS and MEG are two additional forms of neuromonitoring that aren’t focused on brain waves, but other kinds of brain activity as described previously. Kernel partners with businesses and other organisations to bring insights, and while secretive, are hinting that they may be building scalable models to understand how these data can be applied in multiple contexts.
Other companies are also following suit — Immersion Neuroscience has created an app based on neuroscience and oxytocin insights. Through something as simple as your smart watch, they can understand how immersed a person is in a given experience, quantifying levels of psychological safety and engagement through heart rate measurements. They have leveraged these data alongside industry partners, including Accenture, to understand how to design, develop, and assess new experiences. With increased awareness of the potential of neuroscience insights in consumer spaces, we anticipate that the demand for harnessing mind power is going to increase as new technologies and softwares make it easier to understand what is happening within our brains.
In the coming posts, we’ll talk more about the applications and use cases of NaaS, its implications and challenges in go-to-market and how to build a responsible NaaS framework to tackle issues such as privacy and security. Stay tuned!
Image and icon sources:
Image A: <a href=”https://www.flaticon.com/free-icons/neuron" title=”neuron icons”>Neuron icons created by Flat Icons — Flaticon</a>
Image B: <a href=”https://www.flaticon.com/free-icons/prism" title=”prism icons”>Prism icons created by Freepik — Flaticon</a>
Image C: <a href=”https://www.flaticon.com/free-icons/brain" title=”brain icons”>Brain icons created by Becris — Flaticon</a>
Image D: <a href=”https://www.flaticon.com/free-icons/brain" title=”brain icons”>Brain icons created by Smashicons — Flaticon</a>
Image F: <a href=”https://www.flaticon.com/free-icons/brain-computer-interface" title=”brain computer interface icons”>Brain computer interface icons created by Becris — Flaticon</a>
