BBIs: The Future of the Brain is Now
Human telepathy and mind control are closer than ever to becoming a reality, and that’s a bit frightening to think about. Who knows how long it’ll be before Leonardo DiCaprio and Joseph Gordon Levitt start infiltrating all our subconsciouses?
Brain-to-Brain Interfaces, like many new technologies appearing left and right, do seem like sci-fi. And let me tell you, as someone who’s been researching them for the past few weeks, it doesn’t ever get more believable. “So how do they even work” you ask? Let me explain.
Understanding BMIs
Brain-to-Brain Interfaces (which we will call BBIs for short) are a type of BMI (no — not Body Mass Index, it stands for Brain Machine Interface). They’re exactly what they sound like: a connection between the brain and a computer, or any other type of device. They allow us to do crazy things, like control someone else’s arm with your thoughts, or give paraplegics the power to walk again.
This might seem like crazy, new-age technology, but BMIs have in fact been around for decades, and electroencephalography, a method of brain monitoring used for most BMIs, for almost a century. And before you dismiss this as an attempt to turn humans into robots, consider this:
Humans have revolutionized every single aspect of life. Diseases have been eradicated, communication is optimized, transportation is more convenient. Upon reflection, it seems almost absurd that we have yet to optimize the one thing that gives us superiority over other living beings: our brains.
Over the past few years, as people start to realize the scale on which this technology will affect us, more and more companies have been created in the attempts of making wireless devices that connect our brains to the Internet. Earbuds, headsets and the much more impressive neural dust allow us to monitor neural activity, meditate, and control things with our minds. Some notable companies are Emotiv, Muse, Neurosky, and of course, Elon Musk’s Neuralink.
Cool. So now that we all understand regular BMIs, let’s get on to the fun stuff.
BBI Research and Experiments
Brain-to-Brain Interfaces combine two BMIs in order to take information from one brain and input it into a second. So far, experiments have connected two rat brains, two human brains and even a human brain to a rat brain (I don’t completely understand the logic behind that last one).
In the experiment connecting rat brains, conducted at Duke University, a first rat, the encoder, was put in a box with two levers. It was trained to respond to visual stimuli, in the form of a flashing light, with 95% accuracy by pressing the button above which the light flashed. The neural activity of the encoder’s primary motor cortex (M1) during this process is then recorded, and transformed into an intracortical micro-stimulation (ICMS) pattern by means of a calculated Zscore and a sigmoid function. ICMS is the process of sending repetitive electrical pulses to the brain using a micro-electrode.
The pattern is delivered to the brain of the second rat, the decoder, who then presses a lever solely based on the neural cues it received. The success rate of the decoder was impressive, ranging from 60–72% correct trials.
At U of Washington, researchers were able to connect two brains located a mile apart on the campus using electrical brain recordings and magnetic stimulation to play a video game. The sender of the information would see the game on a computer screen, but had no way of controlling it, and the receiver would have a trackpad but would not see the screen.
The BBI was built with electroencephalography (EEG) and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) technologies. The former would record neural activity of the sender and the latter would stimulate the brain of the receiver. The sender would imagine moving his right hand to control the game, and the EEG machine would pick up that neural activity, which was then sent to the receiver’s computer. The command would trigger a TMS pulse to the motor region of the receiver’s brain, causing her to move her hand up and down, thus clicking the trackpad.
This entire process occurs within less than a second: the transfer of information from the sender’s mind to the receiver’s happens within 20 milliseconds, and the motor response in 600 milliseconds.
Similarly to the experiment at UW, researchers at Harvard used a human brain to stimulate the motor cortex of a rat with EEG, focused ultrasound (FUS) and visual evoked potential technologies. Steady state visual evoked potential (SSVEP) is a method of spiking neural activity in response to visual stimulation. A circle flickering at 5, 10, 15 and 20 Hz was displayed on a screen, and when the subject looked at the circle their brain activity would spike.
Every time the subject wanted the rat to move its tail, they would look at the screen. The EEG would then pick up the spikes in neural activity and send the signal to the FUS based BMI implanted in the rat’s brain. Focused ultrasound uses multiple sources of high frequency acoustic energy to target a specific focal point in the brain, in this case the rat’s motor cortex. The average response time between subject engagement and the physical response of the rat was 1.6 seconds.
Applications & Considerations
Now that we know about the research being done to advance BBIs, there are several things to consider. After BMIs hit the inflection point and are ready for general adoption, it won’t be long until the same happens for BBIs, so it’s important to understand how they will change the world and what needs to happen before they do.
Communication
We communicate ideas, thoughts and emotions using speech, written word, art, etc. It’s been this way for an eternity, and only recently has this been improved with technology: texting, blogs, digital media content. Obviously, this was a massive advancement in the way we share our lives and communicate, save for one big problem: it’s still slow and tedious.
Technology might have made it more convenient, but let’s face it — it’s way slower to type than to speak. And of course if I want to text my friend I could just use the speech-to-text feature on my phone, but then the people on the bus would look at me funny, I mean I’m already the weirdo laughing at my phone screen. This is where BBIs come in.
Imagine being able to receive someone’s exact thoughts, directly from their mind as they think them. That’s insane. If thoughts can be detected by a machine, they could potentially be transferred from one brain to another, in the same way electric activity is. We could even take this a step further and consider ideas, emotions and experiences — things that we often struggle to express in linguistic form. You could share your memories, a piece of music, a feeling of joy with someone else without having to say a thing.
Learning
Much of the information in our brain is in our subconscious, making it difficult for us to vocalize. For example, a master violin player could have difficulty explaining to a novice how to move and position the fingers in order to play more effectively because the actions have become a subconscious effort. With a BBI, that information could be transferred from one brain to another and in theory, we could learn anything in an instant.
Shared Consciousness
If you’ve seen Season 4 of Black Mirror, you might know what I mean by ‘shared consciousness’. If you haven’t seen it, why the hell not? (Seriously, watch it.)
If we could capture a person’s thoughts, we could perhaps even capture their consciousness, their whole mind, the essence of who they are. Once that happens, there’s nothing stopping us from sharing that with each other. You would be able to fully understand everything about a person. You could experience life as if you were them: think, move and feel the way they do. This is also a way that someone could be kept alive: keep their consciousness in another body or item. The thought of this is being possible is crazy to me, which leads me to my last point.
Security & Ethics
Is shared consciousness even a good thing? What if I send a thought to someone that I didn’t want to, or that I sent by accident? Will people be able to read my thoughts? Could my mind be hacked? When I first started researching BBIs I had a million and one questions, most relating to security and ethics, which is why it is my last, and, in my opinion, most important point.
Whenever something revolutionary comes about this is always a debate. It happens to every technology, every medical device, every new development. With BBIs, there will be a debate about security and ethics and it’ll be a necessary one. The risks of something going wrong are just too high — we’re dealing with our brains here.
Boundaries will have to be set and security put in place to prevent anything damaging from happening. The mind is fragile and hacking into a BBI could mean terrorizing people, mind-control, and even inception.
If something goes wrong with this technology, the stakes are too high, hence why people like Elon Musk are working on developing it: to ensure that it is done right, and it does not fall into the hands of the wrong people.
So… Now What?
As mind-blowing as this technology is, it’s also terrifying. If after reading this article you’re at all interested in BBIs/BMIs, I encourage you to go do your own research. There’s tons of videos and research papers available online, and I would even say that you should watch Black Mirror and Inception (if you haven’t already).
As for me, I’ll continue to research BMIs, and I’ve found a few workshops and tutorials online that would allow me to build my own BMI. I’m not sure what the future will look like once general adoption of BBIs happens, but one thing’s for sure — the future of the brain is now.
