Last week I wrote about the dawn of “cyborgs” descending upon us, with mechanical and electronic enhancements now available (or soon to be available) to help people overcome various ailments. Many of these were in the form of intelligent prosthetics for limbs and other body parts including eyes and organs. But what about the brain — can the human brain be enhanced by technology too?
Well, there’s already some of that going on. Electrodes and even electronic implants are currently being used for medical purposes to help people deal with various ailments such as Parkinson’s epilepsy and other neuro-degenerative diseases. They’re also used for enabling motor control for people who are paralysed.
There was a big breakthrough last year when a man, Bill Kochevar, who was paralysed from the neck down, was able to regain use of his hands through the use of brain implants. Kochevar had undergone surgery whereby electrical implants were placed in the motor cortex of his brain and sensors into his forearm. This procedure actually made it possible for the muscles of his arm to be stimulated by signals from his brain, through the help of a computer.
After the surgery, Kochevar underwent four months of intensive training, thinking about the turn of the wrist or grip of the fingers while the computer tracked the signals that were being generated from the motor cortex of his brain. His brain signals were then able to be decoded into electrical impulses that could trigger movement in the muscles and nerves in his arm. It was reported in March last year that he’s now able to feed and drink without assistance.
What’s even more remarkable is the case of Nathan Copeland, a paralysed man who became the first person to have his sense of touch restored when using a mind-controlled robotic hand.
The hand, which was surgically wired to his brain allowed him to have a two-way electrical feedback — from the brain to the hand and vice versa. The sensations he felt when his robotic fingers were touched were almost natural, according to Copeland.
“I can feel just about every finger... it’s a really weird sensation,” Copeland told The Guardian newspaper. “Sometimes it feels electrical and sometimes it is pressure, but for the most part, I can tell most of the fingers with definite precision. It feels like my fingers are getting touched or pushed.”
Copeland’s sense of touch was not a Placebo Effect. When blindfolded, he could tell which of the fingers on the prosthetic were being touched with 84 per cent accuracy. The scientists were able to evoke sensory feedback from the hand by electrically stimulating the exact brain areas that would normally light up when different areas of the hand are touched in a non-paralysed person’s hand.
Kochevar and Copeland’s cases are amazing but what a couple of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, namely Elon Musk and Bryan Johnson, are looking at doing will exceed all that. What they want to do is to enhance the human brain, via electronics and computers, so that the human race can keep up with artificial intelligence (AI).
Enhancing the human brain
To that end, Musk has created a company called Neuralink. It’s much lower-key than his other glamorous projects like Tesla (electric car), SpaceX (mission to Mars) and The Boring Company (underground tunnels for supersonic transportation between cities). But its mission could be more important than the rest.
Musk, who is famous for warning about the dangers of AI, believes the best way to avoid becoming “house cats” to AI, is to upgrade human intelligence. This can’t be achieved purely through organic means but through what he calls a “merger of biological intelligence and machine intelligence”.
To date, there’s not much information about Neuralink beyond the few public comments Musk has made but what we know is that he envisions a high-bandwidth digital interface that allows the brain to be enhanced by computers — basically to make us smarter and improve memory, etc.
Another start-up that’s working more or less along the same lines is Kernel, which was founded by Bryan Johnson, co-founder of Braintree (a start-up that was sold to PayPal for US$800 million/RM3.19 billion). He has invested US$100 million of his own money to assemble a team of neuroscientists and software engineers to first work on reversing the effects of neuro-degenerative diseases but eventually to enhance our brains with technology so we can become smarter.
For sure, both Musk and Johnson have many hurdles ahead of them. Brain surgery is not only very difficult but it’s also a risky procedure which very few people would be willing to undergo unless they had to. If someone is paralysed or have severe ailments that can only be ameliorated through such procedures, they might be willing to do it. But how many people are willing to do this for the sake of becoming smarter or having more memory? They’d be hard pressed to find volunteers.
Still early days
The technology that Musk and Johnson are looking at would not be as invasive as surgery on the skull but rather something that can be inserted into the skull through perhaps the jugular vein.
The technology for something like this has been successfully tested on mice. Scientists at Harvard University have reported on a new kind of flexible circuit that’s implanted via injection. These are grid wires that can mesh with living neurons and can monitor the brain activity of the mice.
Made from strands of metal and plastic and woven together like a fishing net, this grid-like circuit is supposed to be a hundred thousand times more flexible than other implantable electronics. Once injected into a mouse’s brain, it unfurls and becomes embedded into its brain. Autopsies on the test mice have shown that the wires had successfully woven themselves with the neurons of the mice even after just a few weeks.
This kind of neural lace is probably the future of brain hacking. But it must be said that we’re still in early days when it comes to enhancing human intelligence through the use of computers. It’s one thing to monitor brain waves and to stimulate motor movements in prosthetic limbs. It’s quite another to make people’s brains smarter, faster, more creative. That would require much more in-depth research and knowledge about how the brain works.
Kernel Johnson put it best when he explained the gargantuan task ahead for him and his team. “We have over 80 billion neurons in the brain,” he said. “Our tools currently give us access to an extremely small number of neurons. With prosthetics, we’re maybe talking about 100 neurons.”