Brain-computer interface technology is at the heart of films like Ready Player One, The Matrix and Avatar. But beyond the realm of science fiction, BCI is used on Earth to help paralyzed people communicate, study dreams and control robots.
Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk announced in January – to much fanfare – that his neurotechnology company Neuralink had implanted a computer chip in a human for the first time. In February he announced that the patient could control a computer mouse with his thoughts.
Neuralink’s goal is noble: to help people who would otherwise be unable to communicate and interact with the environment. But details are scarce. The project immediately sounded alarm bells about brain privacy, the risk of hacking and other things that could go wrong.
Related: Elon Musk says Neuralink has implanted his first brain chip in humans
Dr. Steve Kassem, a senior research fellow at Neuroscience Research Australia, says there are “tons of grains of salt” to take with the Neuralink news. It is not the first company to make a neural implant, he says. In fact, Australia is a ‘hotspot’ for related neurological research.
Do patients dream of electric sheep?
A University of Technology Sydney project, which has received millions in funding from the Department of Defense, is currently in its third phase of demonstrating how soldiers can use their brain signals to control a robotic dog.
“We were successful [demonstrating] that a soldier can use their brain to give a command to instruct the dog to reach a destination completely hands-free… so they can use their hands for other purposes,” says Prof. CT Lin, Director of the UTS Computational Intelligence and BCI Center, says.
The soldier uses Assisted Reality glasses with a special graphene interface to give brain signal commands to send the robot dog to different places. Lin says they are working to make the technology multi-user, faster and capable of controlling other vehicles such as drones.
Meanwhile, Sydney company Neurode has created a headset to help people with ADHD by monitoring their brains and delivering electronic pulses to address changes. Another UTS team is working on the DreamMachine, which aims to reconstruct dreams from brain signals. It uses artificial intelligence and electroencephalogram data to generate images from the subconscious mind.
And then there are the implants.
Good signal
Synchron started at the University of Melbourne and is now also based in New York. It uses a mesh placed in the brain’s blood vessels, allowing patients to use the Internet and send a signal that looks a bit like Bluetooth. People can shop, email and communicate online using the technology to control a computer.
Synchron has developed a brain-computer interface that uses pre-existing technologies such as the stent and catheter to allow insertion into the brain without the need for open brain surgery. pic.twitter.com/Cooh77oukU
— CNET (@CNET) September 26, 2023
Synchron has implanted the mesh in a number of patients and is monitoring them, including one in Australia. Patient P4, who has motor neuron disease, had the mesh implanted a few years ago.
“I believe he has had over 200 sessions,” said Gil Rind, senior director of advanced technology at Sychron. “He is still doing well with the implants and has worked very closely with us.
“He has been able to use his computer through the system… As the disease progresses, it becomes very difficult to use physical buttons.
“This has provided him with an alternative method of communicating with his computer – for online banking, communicating with his caregiver, [with] loved ones.”
Dr. Christina Maher from the University of Sydney’s Brain and Mind Center says Synchron’s technology is “miles ahead” of Elon Musk’s and is more advanced and safer because it does not require open brain surgery. The researchers have also published more than 25 articles, she says.
“At Neuralink we don’t know much about it.
“My understanding is that testing the efficacy and safety of their surgical robots is a big priority for them… so they are much more concerned with the robotic side of things, which makes sense from a commercial perspective.”
The need for regulation
However, amid the hype and promise of neurotechnology, there are concerns about who will have access to the useful technologies and how they will be protected.
Maher says it’s a matter of balancing the need for innovation with good regulation, while providing access to people who really need it. She says the “inequality between the haves and the have-nots” is being discussed both in Australia and globally.
Related: The big idea: should we all put chips in our brains?
“As brain-computer interfaces become more common, people will really be divided into those who can afford it and those who cannot,” she says.
Rind says Synchron focuses on those who have the most to gain, such as quadriplegics. “We’d like to expand that as far as possible – we hope we can reach bigger markets and help more people in need,” he says.
A personal, pivotal moment for him was seeing the faces of the doctors, team and family of the first patient to successfully receive the implant, he says.
On Neuralink, Kassem warns that there will always be dangers when technology is developed by a company that exists to make a profit. “A cell phone subscription for your brain is not what we want,” he says.
“And what if this gets hacked? There is always a risk if it is not a closed system.”
More likely, however, is that Neuralink will use people’s data.
“Just like every single app on your phone and on your computer, Neuralink will monitor as much as possible. Everything that is possible,” says Kassem.
“It will be stored somewhere.”
Protecting brain data
Maher says hacking remains a risk when devices are connected to the internet, and agrees that data is a major problem. She says much of our social media, biometric and other data is already available, but brain data is different.
“While [BCI companies] are subject to the same data privacy laws… the difference, many people say, is that brain data is quite private, it’s your private thoughts.
“The big picture here is that once we start capturing a lot of brain data, there will be an absolute megaton of data available,” she says.
Kassem says that despite privacy concerns, interacting with the brain offers exciting possibilities.
“We need to remember how powerful and important the brain is… everything you are now, everything you have been and everything you will be is only your brain, and nothing else,” he says.
There are trillions of neural connections in the brain, leading to “limitless possibilities,” he says, quoting American physicist Emerson Pugh: “If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we could understand it.” T.”