Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to Forward Thinking. Hey there, and welcome to Horward Thinking, the podcast that looks at the future says, I blame myself and I blame the machines. I'm Jonathan Strickland and I'm Joe McCormick. In today, we're going to be revisiting a topic we've looked at on this show before, but coming coming at you with an update on the subject of brain computer interfaces. Okay, the concept here is that you train a computer to interpret your brain waves. Then you think really hard about doing something, I mean not just anything like like moving a cursor or or typing a word or something like that, and then it happens. It's like magic, but with more electrones. Exactly. So, brain computer interfaces could be anything from an ability to to be able to, like you say, move a cursor, type of war and communicate or manipulate a robotic limb. There are a lot of different like that, exactly. There are a lot of different potential applications. But honestly, it just it boils down to stripping away any sort of of interface that would require movement, and it relies purely on thought right, And of course that's the output half of it. There's also the input half of it, where you could say a brain you know, input oriented brain computer interface would be getting stimuli without the use of your senses, maybe like having an idea sent directly to your brain instead of through your eyes or something so something like like a a an interface where you are receiving information from the outside world in some manner. For example, Uh, let's one one thing we'll talk about towards the end of the episode is the idea of being able to access, say, the Internet, directly through your brain. Yeah. A common example would be, you know, could we put some micro electrodes in your visual corte x that would allow you to see without seeing. You could have your you know, your eyes closed but still perceive an image in your brain. Man, sleeping would be so weird. Okay, I'm just looking through the top of my head. No. Anyway, So we've got a lot to say about this, but you may think, if you're a long time listener, haven't you guys addressed this before, Joe, you alluded to that. We actually have quite a few times. A Yeah, and one of our very early episodes was about this technology that was called Computers on the Mind all from all the way back in April. Pretty sure I titled that one. I'm pretty sure that's accurate. That is not one of the greatest of our punny title No, no, they're not all home runs. Anyway, you're saying, I wish that we had a cricket sound board, and here's that anyway. Yes, yes, as when we recorded that first episode about it, there was some exploratory research into brain computer interfaces that was really amazing that there was this team out of out of mostly Brown University, also involving Stanford and a bunch of other researchers calling themselves brain Gate brain Gate, uh, that that had created this interface that allowed a woman with quadriplegia to feed herself using a robotic arm um. Uh. They also created the first wireless implantable electrode that was being used at the time in animal testing. But all of this was fairly foundational work. Uh. And we've also talked of course about brain computer interfaces more recently during discussions into computer interfaces in general, episodes like your Body as a Computer Interface from April of sixteen and did Minority Report shape user interfaces, which was from September. The answer was yeah, surprisingly like kind of upsettingly. Uh, that Minority Report is a fine film, um, but but precog thing though serious. No, I'm not going to get off on that. If I do that the episodes over, I'll just be granting and raving. Pray continue, thank you sir. Um. But yeah, so, so all of those episodes focused more on on physical computer controls, you know, like like a keyboards or or mice, or or even touch screens or some some voice and gesture controls, which are things that most of us use and are used to. Um, But wouldn't it be nice if we could just think at our computers and have them execute our commands. It would be pretty sexy for everybody, really, but but really especially useful for folks, uh, like that woman with quadriplegia, who for whatever reason have trouble with fine motor controls and or speech. So we thought that today we would look into this topic again and kind of see what the state of the brain computer interface union is. But first let's let's talk Let's talk about kind of like the basics, Like like, let's get that ground level placed poor as it is, how how do you make connection between a brain and a computer anyway. It's not necessarily easy, but it's also not necessarily as hard as you might imagine, because we already do share a semi common language between brains and electronic machines, electrical machines, which is electricity. Sure. Yeah, so so the brain, you would say, communicates between cells via electrochemical potential, and by using electrical charge, you can make the brain do what it would normally be doing when when part of it was activating. That's very imprecise language activating. But well it's a pretty imprecise uh practice as well. I mean I think I think we've gotten pretty good and making the brain like totally overwhelmed. It's it's hard, Yeah, it's harder to get very specific outcomes, right, like like to to cause someone to have a specific sensation shin or trigger a memory or anything like that. I mean, overwhelming the brain not a problem if you want to just are you just talking about electric shock there? Essentially. What's a little easier, though, is training a computer training software. What different brain signals in our our meaning? Like like like if a person's brain lights up in a certain way, Ah, what does that mean? Right? Right? So are they thinking about what are they trying to do? So there's a training process in any brain computer interface that has two components. You're training the person to use the interface and your train the computer on what the person's brain waves actually are are linked towards. So you have a long, uh training process. I hate to keep using that phrase, but it's the most accurate. You have a very long training process to get to a point where you can actually do something useful. So a very very simple exam bowl would be all right, let's let's talk about your your basic brain computer interface, which tends to involve invasive surgery. Right, you have to because e e g. S don't really cut it, is the thing. Yeah, they're not electrodes. Um your your brain, your your skull is not the very best fair day cage, but it's pretty effective, actually exactly right. So you need to get access to those sweet sweet electrical uh ilse impulses on the brain surface. So typically it involves uh brain surgery. You're actually opening up the skull cap and you're putting overlaying maybe an array of of sensors of electrodes on the surface of the brain. Typically you don't go into the brain for this, it does tend to be along the surface of the brain, and then you have usually some sort of transcranial connector, so it actually is going through the skull when you reattach the skull to then wire typically to a computer system. There are wireless ones as well, though those are earlier in development and they still require transcranial ports. Right right, You're still you're still putting something in the brain and then like plugging a wireless device into the outside of your skull. Yeah, yeah, it's there's not there's not a way right now where we have truly wireless where it's all within the skull itself and it's contained and therefore you don't have any sign of a connector there. And because again um that the bone is really surprisingly effective at keeping electrical signals inside and outside based on where they are. Yeah, it turns out, it turns out that's a good thing for most of us most of the time. Yes, yeah, but it's it does make it very difficult to interface with a machine this way. So you then once you have the connection, the physical connection or the wireless connection from the person to the computer, you establish some form of test that will start to train both the person with the interface and the machine itself on working together. And a typical one might be that the person is looking at a picture of a ball, and there's a second picture of a ball, and their job is to imagine trying to force the one ball so that overlays on top of the other one. So let's say one's green and one's yellow, and so your your job is to to imagine moving the green ball over top the yellow ball, and you do this over and over and over again. And there's actually a scoring system typically, and it's one to help motivate the person who's who's training. It's also meant to give feedback on all right, well, because this was inconsistent between trials three and four, we have to keep working on this in order for the machine to understand what it is you are trying to do. Otherwise it will misinterpret your thought and you could get an erroneous salt. So if you're getting into something where you're trying to say, type out a word and you're thinking, I want the cursor to move to the letter T, but the machine has misinterpreted that, you could end up with typos and mistakes. So you go through this laborious process where both the machine and the person learn and then ultimately you reach a point where the machine has a pretty good feel for what it means when you think in a certain way in order to manipulate stuff, and and that's when you get the results you wanted. It is. I'm not gonna say it's inelegant. I think it's an elegant solution, but it's an elegant solution that takes a good deal of work and effort and time. Well, I mean, one thing about that that occurs to me immediately is that it seems quite personalized to the individual user, not necessarily like if you design, say you're working on a speech to text program or something, hopefully what you're doing is you're you're training it for universal speech to text. You know, if you're speaking, as long as you're speaking in a way that people would normally be able to understand the words you're saying without some kind of incredibly thick accent or something, it's going to be able to turn that into text. Would the same thing necessarily be true? Would you know? So you would hook up one person's brain and learn how to how to allow them to control a computer cursor without touching the mouse or the keys, just their brain. Could you then come and bring somebody else in and hook their brain up and have them do the same thing, certainly not yet. Yeah, it's I mean you'd have to retrain them. Basically, you have to retrain both the person and computer. Yeah, exactly, Yeah, it's it's it's not a one size fits all kind of solution, which is also why I get very skeptical whenever I see any of those distractions, the games that have the little e g. Style headset and you're supposed to focus in order to make the game work, I get a little I mean, if it's just trying to pick up an increase in brainwave activity and that's all it's doing, then it's kind of like just a dimmer switch, right, Like there's nothing super sophisticated about it. But when it gets to like more uh complicated claims that hey, if you if you concentrate on the ball to go up, the ball goes up, and if you concentrate on the ball to go down, the ball goes down, and it's a one size fits all kind of thing, I often think that's more or less bologny. I mean, not that it doesn't work at all, But it doesn't I doubt it works in the way they're saying it works, and it probably I mean, if it does work even vaguely in the way that they say that it works, it probably doesn't work very well. Yeah, because again, unfortunately, right now, that surgery is an integral part of getting getting to those juicy, juicy brainwaves. Yeah. So it was just last year that we actually got to the point where a wireless solution was even a thing. In that case, it's not for humans, well yeah, yeah, well, and and the wireless solution is is so exciting because because previously the thing that you plug into your skull to to access those electrodes is a tether. That's that's meaning the ear, the ear tied to a laboratory in which that that tether exists or or I mean, even if even if it was available for like home use, you wouldn't be able to be mobile while you were using this kind of device. So so getting that that mobility and a little bit more comfort for subjects who are who are testing out this kind of stuff is is really critical in moving towards a place where where it could be actually useful for actual people in their actual lives, right, And we've also seen progress that's akin to Moore's law, the idea that over time, you can increase the abilities of say a microprocessor by reducing the size of the individual components. The same thing has been true for the electrodes that have been used in this kind of thing, all right, which is so cool because because anytime that you put an implant in the brain, it's it's going to cause a little bit of scarring in the brain tissue. And that's scarring uh gets larger over time. Um. The eventually the scar tissue begins to uh to degrade the quality of the signal that the electrodes can send out because it's it's it's a thicker it's a thicker material than your normal brain stuff. It's almost like a callous exactly exactly so um so so smaller implants equal less scarring, equal better technology over time equal yea yeah. And obviously, if you were to undergo a procedure where you are going to have some sort of electrode array implanted in your brain, you want it to last for as long as it possibly can so that you don't have to undergo a future procedure in order to correct any issues from scarring exactly. So this is a this is a huge advance, even though it's very talian. Uh. Yeah, and hope hopefully, I like Jonathan said, it's currently that the wireless stuff is only available for animal testing. Um, hopefully a wireless device will be cleared for human testing soon. That the last I heard about it in I believe December of there was one company that was that was working with the brain Gate project that was was submitting a proposal to the FDA. So no word on that as of Google today, right, but but you know, fingers cressed. Yeah, and so let's kind of segue into some of the work that's been done recently to help improve the approach of brain computer interfaces. We we have to say, Ralph the Bat, there's nothing that's like the the holy Grail of brain computer interfaces that magically makes them work perfectly. But we've seen some pretty cool advances. Yeah. There was one story in particular that kind of spurred this this episode two into creation that involved alves, monkeys, and hamlet. Yeah. Yeah, and I I really I campaigned hard to cover this for a show that we do called Hell Stuff Works. Now because I'm a technology freak and a Shakespeare freak, So the dual punch hit me right in the stern um. Uh. So we're talking about a project that came out of Stanford bio x. There was a group of scientists at Stanford who were looking specifically at ways to improve brain computer interfaces for people who have mobility issues. They said that one of the biggest challenges they were facing was that the interfaces that existed up to that point were relatively slow, and frequently people were finding, uh it difficult to use that they were there were it was inserting errors. They were getting misspellings or typos or whatever. And that causes frustration obviously. And I don't I know you guys, like, if you've ever been working on a task that's particularly hard and then you get frustrated, it suddenly seems like the difficulty of that task is skyrocketed. It's like if you're already trying to do something difficult on your computer and then your computer starts getting slow. Yeah, isn't that the best feeling? It's so frustrating. And have you ever been playing a video game where there was a glitch in it and and you were like like the controls maybe like especially in older games, where like the controls were already a little bit like like rough, like tank like, and then all of a sudden, you just get to a glitch where you're like, well, it's it's physically impossible for me to beat this. Yeah, they're there's great. There are times where you just you know, you feel that level of frustration, and it it makes something that is already challenging even more difficult, right like even if that barrier were not there anymore, because of your frustration, your ability to focus has has decreased, and so there was a real need to try and improve this tech. Uh. And in fact, there's a quote specifically from a piece in Stanford News that said earlier versions of this technology have already been tested successfully in people with paralysis, but the typing was slow and imprecise. This latest work tests improvements to the speed and accuracy of the technology that interprets brain signals and drives the cursor. So in this case, they're talking about an interface where you have like a screen with a bunch of letters on it, and there's a cursor as well, and you can concentrate and move the cursor to the appropriate letter and then concentrate again as if you were clicking on that letter and its selects. It. It acts as a type, you know, like a typewriter, but you're doing it very much a point like a search and pack kind of approach, where instead of a finger, you're using your brain. Now, the way they tested the improvements to this technology, it was a bit unusual. They used monkeys as test subjects. Not unusual, right, not unusual for this. But they trained them to concentrate on symbols, and then they had them transcribe passages from a couple of different sources, the New York Times, some articles from the New York Times. They used that as a test um text to transcribe, and in one case Hamlet. So that of course prompted people to make reference to that old idea that if you stuck an infinite number of monkeys in a room with an infinite number of typewriters, sooner or later one of them would produce the complete works of Shakespeare just by chance. Because the definition of infinite is in an infinite number of monkeys. I always thought it was this finite number of monkeys given infinite time. Either way, it's same thing right. I feel like the Douglas Adams version was infinite monkeys, infinite typewriters, and infinite If it were infinite monkeys and just one typewriter, boy, who I'd imagine. But the infinite monkeys get the Shakespeare done a lot faster than finite monkeys, you would imagine, Yeah, infinite monkey. I don't know, do they. I mean, at a certain point, is adding more monkeys help or hurt the situation? It always helps. Adding more monkeys always happens. Why you're the optimist. Three things. If you take nothing else from this show, Ladies and gentlemen, take the words of wisdom from Joe. Adding monkeys always helps. Um So in this case, obviously the monkeys weren't typing up Hamlet purely by chance, they were transcribing it, and in fact only one was doing it. But yeah, and so, so what what the researchers did here is they they implanted electrodes into the monkey's motor cortexes and and the monkeys were trained to move cursors around the screen first with actual gestures, and the camera watched their movements while the software was watching their brain waves. Thus the computer learned what the monkeys intent to move looked like right, And keep in mind, they had no comprehension of the text as far as we are aware, they weren't suddenly all. But they didn't all become subscribers to The New York Times or aficionados of The Bard As far as we know, none of them, as far as I'm aware, contacted Kenneth Bruna, but several of them did become oxford Ians. There were a couple of bacon Vans in the group. I'm not gonna lie. Uh. They were literally just just replicating those words by doing that that kind of cursor click approach we were talking about, by concentrating. But despite those limitations, despite those qualifiers, they were able to reach a speed of around twelve words per minute, which was pretty impressive for a monkey, Really pretty impressive considering the technology at all. Absolutely so for fun, because I was curious. I thought it might be interested to see how long it would take a monkey to type out Hamlet in this way, keeping in mind the monkey is again transcribing Hamlet, not actually just spontaneously typing up the play. Right, Sure, but I guess this means you have to pick a certain version of Hamlet that's true. I I picked I picked a pretty standard version, and I was I actually did go to a site that gave like a number of words for every work. Hamlet, by the way, in case you're curious, is the longest of Shakespeare's plays by number of words and by running time. If they're doing the whole darn thing, it has thirty seven words. So at twelve words per minute, it would take a monkey about forty two point four hours to type out the whole thing. But to replicate all of Shakespeare's plays and not as sonnets, I didn't include the sonnets. But if you were to replicate all of Shakespeare's plays, it would take about forty days of typing at twelve words per minute. Uh so now we know, right, Um, if you remove the chance part, we got chance in there. We still that's still a mystery, but it's it's still it's still like like certainly not an infinite amount of time. No, that's a pretty I mean, yeah, a month and a half right now, we do still need to add more monkeys to Joe's point in order to answer the other question. Now. They also pointed out that they were not using any completion algorithms. The kind of stuff that you might find in smartphones or some computer programs, where you start type being a word and it tries to guess what word you intend based upon context and your frequency of using certain words, and it's always wrong. It's frequently wrong, not necessarily. I actually had autocomplete back before I started using swipe text, which is just another exercise of futility that I apparently am determined to continue to pursue. Um. When I was typing in letter by letter, I noticed that autocomplete was more right than wrong. But when it was wrong, it was hilariously wrong. Yeah, and often in a way that makes you feel bad about yourself or or it makes you feel weird about who ever programmed that algorithm, because you're like, why would they ever think I would use that word? Um? Oh, I assume it's being like tailored to you. Right, it is paying attention to your typing patterns well, and is it not? It depends, right. Sometimes it's simply an algorithm that just looks at the letters that you have typed in so far, looks for words that have that sequence of letters, and sometimes even can context within the sentence. Right, So if if the letter the words leading up to the word you are typing. If it would make sense for you to say, like a, did I what's a good one? Um? Did I leave the refrigerator door open? And you're like r e u F. It might say, well, it's probably refrigerator. Did I leave the It's either refrigerator or it's referee. They've either left something in the fridge or they've left a baseball game. I'm gonna take a guess that this guy, who has never cared about sports ball, I's talking about a fridge. Um. So it depends there's some there's some typing in Uh, I don't know what Oxford I in and it says, did you mean Tim Tebow? It mind? Does that to me? Okay, well, that that specific example. I was about to say, that's a very expecific example on very odd but at any rate, they did not use any completion algorithms this. However, they said that that could potentially be something that to be included in future implementations that could help speed up communication, as long as it could be implemented in a way that again did not increase frustration. If it's one of those things where you know you you start searching the internet, for all the the unintentionally hilarious auto complete or autocorrect mistakes like, yeah, it's funny and a meme. But if you're if you're someone for whom this is the only way you can really communicate with others, it would be incredibly awful. It would just be so frustrating. So, um it's it's something that may and be incorporated into future implementations, but as of right now, it is not part of their their approach. Um Now, a lot of different uh, research facilities have been looking into this, not just Stanford, right, Uh, I mean there's there have been several research facilities around the world, and there's some pretty um what's a good word to put it, enthusiastic, but shadowy organizations that have interests in this. So okay, here's the part where we talk about a creepy thing that dark has been doing. Um So, another barrier to this technology going mainstream is the inherent danger in drilling a hole in someone's skull and and implanting stuff in your brain. That's that's not a good Tuesday for anybody, right, um so so So, DARPA has been funding the development of a new medical technology that they're calling a stent trode. Stent trode, Yes, stent trode like a stint an electrode. Yeah, yeah yeah. And with this no skull holes are required or no new ones anyway, keep the ones that you already have. Um. But but the the electrode. You take a stent and you and you go in through a blood vessel in the next to read the electrode up into the brain and then you can monitor electrical signals happening in neurons nearby. And I had the exact same reaction that Joe just had when I was reading about this. That's creepy. There's someone else who has a very similar idea that we'll talk about in just a minute. But I think it's probably the same general technological approach that you're talking about. It's just that's not the way I read it when I was looking into it. But it makes way more sense the way you're describing it. I mean, one thing we should emphasize again is that there are also people talking about non invasive methods and and using noninvasive methods of reading the brain. They just lack precision and power, or in some cases they're they're plenty precise, and there are plenty powerful, but they require you to be inside an m R I machine. Right, Yeah, yeah, we haven't mentioned that part yet. Uh. Yes, some of you might have been thinking earlier in this episode when we were talking about how surgery is necessary because of the preciseness imprecisity of of other methods of reading brain signals. You're thinking, oh, m R I. M r s are really great at reading brain signals, but they also require you to lay perfectly still in a very giant, very expensive, very noisy machine, um for the entirety of the time that you were using them. Therefore, if you're trying to do it to like talk to somebody or you know, eat food, that's not as practical. That's a pretty good premise for a future sci fi scenario where people are walking around with m R I hats like they've got a they've got a giant machine propped on their shoulders. They've got really powerful bodies from walking around with these things. I guess the supervillain in this in this world would be Phero magnetic Man, because you don't want to have any of that near you. Um so so other other than Pharaoh magnetic Man. And uh and this lovely Mr I future. What else could the future possibly hold for brain computer interface type devices, y'all? So obviously, just getting a deeper understanding of the brain in general is going to be a huge help for multiple disciplines, not just creating better brain computer interfaces, but all sorts of things. Uh. And we have have stressed on this show multiple times how we are at just the very dawn of our understanding of the human brain. It is an incredibly complex oregon, and we only have an inkling of what is going on up there. We've got a pretty good grasp of some basics, but when it gets down to the particulars, it gets really complicated. Uh. Well, we're also going to see improvements in the machine learning side, as computers get better and better at interpreting what our signals mean. Similar to what we saw with the Stanford experiment, I would imagine that we would see that words per minute start to climb a little more each time we get a little bit better at this. Ah, the surgical procedure thing, that's obviously a huge barrier. Obviously, I mean people who are are going this, uh, they often are are people who feel like they have really no other alternative. And that is something that they want for themselves. And uh yeah, like like having a whole drilled in your skull will lead to a better quality of life kind of situations, which which of course I'm not making light of it, like like that's that's a very real reality for for for a good number of people. And this kind of this kind of volunteer research has has been tremendous. Yes, yes, there's some really inspiring videos about people who have undergone procedures like this and when you see the change in their behaviors after the procedure is done. I mean, if you're any sort of empathetic person like me, you will find yourself holding back tears at your desk. Yeah, there's a video I think from of of a woman using the brain Gate robotic arm technology to to serve herself coffee for the first time in years. And it's and it's and it sounds like very simple things. The one I saw, I'm gonna get a all Tier two Joe's like, good Greek guys, come on, I want to get out of here. The one I saw it was a guy who um had suffered an accident, was paralyzed from the neck down and under he underwent uh surgical procedure, and in that case it was also to control a robotic arm. He did the whole training procedure I talked about. In fact, the video showed the example I gave about moving a ball over another ball with you know, doing that over and over again. And that was just to train the brain so that when the the they hooked him up to the robotic arm, which was you know, just completely separate from him, that um that it would the robotic arm would would follow general instructions based upon that training sequence. He uh then the first time they hooked him up, was able to uh reach out and take his girlfriend's hand, and that killed me. He's like, I was able to hold my girlfriend's hand for the first time in years because of this. And I was like, I'm like, I'm done. I'm done. I need a quiet room. Gonna go book the quiet room. Like when you hear the muffled snuffling, that's me. So but this, this is this is obviously a very dramatic procedure, something that people cannot take lightly. The there's so many possible complications, including the complication of infection. Anytime you have any sort of transcranial implant. You know, in general, having anything that protrudes from the body outward, you know that that that breaks that skin barrier, that is that is obviously a huge risk factor. So you've got to be super super careful. Um, non invasive approaches are problematic, like we said, but perhaps we will see advances in that technology to make them more accurate, more precise, so that if youwer, invasive surgeries have to be performed. But that's a tall order. I mean, how do you do that. We don't have the answer to that question yet. Doesn't mean that we won't in the future, but right now, it's just not a practical approach. Um, there's the possibility of using this technology. We could do things beyond just controlling robotic arms and cursors. And I don't mean to diminish those accomplishments either, they are amazing. But we might see an approach where exoskeleton suits could be uh come into the pictures, where where people are actually able to use their brains to control things like robotic legs and regain movement, you know, actual mobility. Um, beyond you know, laying in a bed and controlling something. They might actually be able to move around with the assistance of technology, which is again phenomenal that this is giving independence to people who previously you would have said they're going to be dependent upon caregivers for as long as they are alive. Um and it's again a phenomenal kind of thing to think about. It's further off in the future. We're not anywhere close to where someone could actually um have control of an exo skeleton suit in that manner, but it's a goal to reach for. And then there's Elon Musk's idea, which this is the one I was saying, probably similar to what you were talking about with the stint uh electrode the stint trode um. He also I wrote it's Elon Musk and the Neural Lace, which sounds a lot like a J. K. Rowling novel Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Elon Musk and the Neural Lace um. So. Musk is of course famous for being a co founder for Tesla and for SpaceX UM and he proposed an implanable computer technology that would enhance human intelligence. So this is more about what we were talking about at the top of the show, the idea of instead of using your brain necessarily to control some other outward computer. This would be like a two way communication device where you're not just sending signals out, You're you're accepting signals as they come in. And the term neural lace comes from a novelist named Ian M. Banks Favorites on stuff to blow your mind. Interesting. I have not read any of Banks's work, so I am. I was unfamiliar with his work until I read this that, and he writes a lot of science fiction that's uh full of ideas that are worth talking about. Interesting. I'll have to I'll definitely have to look into it. Then. Um, so this would come in the form these these electrodes would come in the form of flexible circuits that would be injected into the bloodstream very similar to what Lauren was talking about, through the neck and make their way up to the brain. And then you bypass the need for invasive surgery. Um. Assuming that you would be able to send a signal out from the brain through the skull, that could be you know, interact with whatever infrastructure you have around you. Right, It's not like you could just magically control things with your brain. You still have to have that infrastructure that's designed to work with that her face. But his thought is this is a way for human beings to get ahead of that problem of h yeah, head and shoulders above the problem of super intelligent artificial intelligence. Like his his fear and muss I hope I'm not projecting too much based upon my interpretation, But to me, it seems that Musk's fear is that if we continue down the road of developing artificial intelligence, sooner or later we will receive we get to a point where we have super human artificial intelligence, and then we will become nothing more than pets to the AI. And that if we were instead to incorporate technology so that AI becomes an inherent component of humanity, that our intelligence is boosted by artificial intelligence that's incorporated directly onto our brains, everything's fine, do super math, Yes, we will the super intelligent to us, the super intelligent AI will be us. Although I mean I would I would argue, well, what stops the super intelligent AI from tweaking the technology so that we all just become its meat puppets? But who's who am I to ask these questions? Yeah? That's interesting, But also I'm thinking, okay, so it's better to first achieve super intelligence in uh in on a substrate that is full of greed and lust and revenge. Yeah, I also I also started thinking. I also started thinking like, wouldn't computers maybe be a better place to try it? I also think I also started thinking about how the implications of this and immediately started to feel kind of sick to my stomach because he's talking about an interface where you would be able to do things like excess Google without needing to touch a computer. Right that you just think it, and you can access it, and you can get the information, and you've got it. It does not take a great leap from that idea to go to the idea of essentially the idea of telepathic communication. What what amounts to uh technological telepathy where objecting ads into your brain? No, no, no, I'm not thinking about ads. I'm thinking YouTube comments. I'm thinking harassment, not being able to turn that off? Right? Just imagine or so let's say, guys, I know that you're familiar. The people in this room are familiar with the idea of how sometimes certain sections of the Internet can get upset about something and their response is to attack whatever the target is relentlessly. Imagine that's happening, but with essentially the technological equivalent to telepathy, that a person has appeared to have done a wrong in some form, whether they have or not is immaterial, because that's not how the Internet works. The Internet doesn't really care if the person is truly guilty. You were in a movie I didn't like, so yeah, exactly really drive you crazy? Yeah? That, And I mean I know that I'm going like super twilight Zone with this idea, but but I mean I see some potential drawbacks to solution. That's what I'm saying. I would want these things to have, yes, like off switch, like a mute switch. Yeah, like where you're like you're blocked, You're blocked, you're blocked, You're blocked, everyone is blocked. I'm just alone with my thoughts. Going to get some pancakes, yes, yeah, except you can't order because you've turned off the signal and they're like, I don't know what you want. I'm like, I'm I am pointing to the picture. I am saying the word pancakes isn't yeah, but are if you want to order, you've gotta think pancakes. That's just the way. I'm sorry, it's chip and pin and telepathy. Those are the technologies that way depend on. I don't know. I mean, I think as long as restaurants accept cash, they'll accept words. Cash is meaningless in the in the the technological telepathic future, it's just not gonna happen. I was assuming that if you're that done with humanity, you're making your own pancakes. You've not left your home, You're in your pajamas, your cat is judging you, and you're making your own pancakes. That's that's pretty much now. I mean, I don't have a cat, but if I did have a cat, I know it would be judging me. Yes, the incredible future kind of like now, so interesting ideas, I don't I mean, obviously, these are all things that would be pretty far away. Even developing the technology where you would be able to physically overlay those stent troads without invasive surgery, you still have enormous barriers. Like it's one thing to put the to physically put the electrodes on the surface of the brain. It's a totally different thing to allow the brain to actually access and receive information from an outside source wirelessly just beamed in. It's not like we have a way of doing that, right, Sure, and I should also put in if I if I didn't mention explicitly that that that DARPA research project was was being done in cheap We're we're not quite human level at that one yet. Yeah, telepathic sheep, that's actually scarier. So many different science fiction novels are just coming to my mind as we go through this, But that kind of wraps up where we are today the update we wanted to give. Specifically, I am very eager to see how this technology progresses because its capacity to help people who are otherwise in in very uh difficult situations, I think is phenomenal. Yeah, even in the three years since we did that first uh podcast episode about these types of projects, it's it's technology has advanced so much. It's been amazing. It's it's pretty it's pretty inspiring, honestly when you when you start looking into these stories. And guys, if you have any suggestions for future episodes, or you've got any questions, please send them our away our email addresses FW thinking at how stuff works dot com, or you can drop us a line on Facebook or Twitter. If you go to Facebook and search w thinking, our profile will pop up you can leave us a message. We are f w Thinking on Twitter, so you can always tweet at us and we will talk to you again Willison. For more on this topic in the future of technology, visit forward thinking dot Com, brought to you by Toyota. Let's Go Places

Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to Forward Thinking. Hey there, and welcome to Horward Thinking, the podcast that looks at the future says, I blame myself and I blame the machines. I'm Jonathan Strickland and I'm Joe McCormick. In today, we're going to be revisiting a topic we've looked at on this show before, but coming coming at you with an update on the subject of brain computer interfaces. Okay, the concept here is that you train a computer to interpret your brain waves. Then you think really hard about doing something, I mean not just anything like like moving a cursor or or typing a word or something like that, and then it happens. It's like magic, but with more electrones. Exactly. So, brain computer interfaces could be anything from an ability to to be able to, like you say, move a cursor, type of war and communicate or manipulate a robotic limb. There are a lot of different like that, exactly. There are a lot of different potential applications. But honestly, it just it boils down to stripping away any sort of of interface that would require movement, and it relies purely on thought right, And of course that's the output half of it. There's also the input half of it, where you could say a brain you know, input oriented brain computer interface would be getting stimuli without the use of your senses, maybe like having an idea sent directly to your brain instead of through your eyes or something so something like like a a an interface where you are receiving information from the outside world in some manner. For example, Uh, let's one one thing we'll talk about towards the end of the episode is the idea of being able to access, say, the Internet, directly through your brain. Yeah. A common example would be, you know, could we put some micro electrodes in your visual corte x that would allow you to see without seeing. You could have your you know, your eyes closed but still perceive an image in your brain. Man, sleeping would be so weird. Okay, I'm just looking through the top of my head. No. Anyway, So we've got a lot to say about this, but you may think, if you're a long time listener, haven't you guys addressed this before, Joe, you alluded to that. We actually have quite a few times. A Yeah, and one of our very early episodes was about this technology that was called Computers on the Mind all from all the way back in April. Pretty sure I titled that one. I'm pretty sure that's accurate. That is not one of the greatest of our punny title No, no, they're not all home runs. Anyway, you're saying, I wish that we had a cricket sound board, and here's that anyway. Yes, yes, as when we recorded that first episode about it, there was some exploratory research into brain computer interfaces that was really amazing that there was this team out of out of mostly Brown University, also involving Stanford and a bunch of other researchers calling themselves brain Gate brain Gate, uh, that that had created this interface that allowed a woman with quadriplegia to feed herself using a robotic arm um. Uh. They also created the first wireless implantable electrode that was being used at the time in animal testing. But all of this was fairly foundational work. Uh. And we've also talked of course about brain computer interfaces more recently during discussions into computer interfaces in general, episodes like your Body as a Computer Interface from April of sixteen and did Minority Report shape user interfaces, which was from September. The answer was yeah, surprisingly like kind of upsettingly. Uh, that Minority Report is a fine film, um, but but precog thing though serious. No, I'm not going to get off on that. If I do that the episodes over, I'll just be granting and raving. Pray continue, thank you sir. Um. But yeah, so, so all of those episodes focused more on on physical computer controls, you know, like like a keyboards or or mice, or or even touch screens or some some voice and gesture controls, which are things that most of us use and are used to. Um, But wouldn't it be nice if we could just think at our computers and have them execute our commands. It would be pretty sexy for everybody, really, but but really especially useful for folks, uh, like that woman with quadriplegia, who for whatever reason have trouble with fine motor controls and or speech. So we thought that today we would look into this topic again and kind of see what the state of the brain computer interface union is. But first let's let's talk Let's talk about kind of like the basics, Like like, let's get that ground level placed poor as it is, how how do you make connection between a brain and a computer anyway. It's not necessarily easy, but it's also not necessarily as hard as you might imagine, because we already do share a semi common language between brains and electronic machines, electrical machines, which is electricity. Sure. Yeah, so so the brain, you would say, communicates between cells via electrochemical potential, and by using electrical charge, you can make the brain do what it would normally be doing when when part of it was activating. That's very imprecise language activating. But well it's a pretty imprecise uh practice as well. I mean I think I think we've gotten pretty good and making the brain like totally overwhelmed. It's it's hard, Yeah, it's harder to get very specific outcomes, right, like like to to cause someone to have a specific sensation shin or trigger a memory or anything like that. I mean, overwhelming the brain not a problem if you want to just are you just talking about electric shock there? Essentially. What's a little easier, though, is training a computer training software. What different brain signals in our our meaning? Like like like if a person's brain lights up in a certain way, Ah, what does that mean? Right? Right? So are they thinking about what are they trying to do? So there's a training process in any brain computer interface that has two components. You're training the person to use the interface and your train the computer on what the person's brain waves actually are are linked towards. So you have a long, uh training process. I hate to keep using that phrase, but it's the most accurate. You have a very long training process to get to a point where you can actually do something useful. So a very very simple exam bowl would be all right, let's let's talk about your your basic brain computer interface, which tends to involve invasive surgery. Right, you have to because e e g. S don't really cut it, is the thing. Yeah, they're not electrodes. Um your your brain, your your skull is not the very best fair day cage, but it's pretty effective, actually exactly right. So you need to get access to those sweet sweet electrical uh ilse impulses on the brain surface. So typically it involves uh brain surgery. You're actually opening up the skull cap and you're putting overlaying maybe an array of of sensors of electrodes on the surface of the brain. Typically you don't go into the brain for this, it does tend to be along the surface of the brain, and then you have usually some sort of transcranial connector, so it actually is going through the skull when you reattach the skull to then wire typically to a computer system. There are wireless ones as well, though those are earlier in development and they still require transcranial ports. Right right, You're still you're still putting something in the brain and then like plugging a wireless device into the outside of your skull. Yeah, yeah, it's there's not there's not a way right now where we have truly wireless where it's all within the skull itself and it's contained and therefore you don't have any sign of a connector there. And because again um that the bone is really surprisingly effective at keeping electrical signals inside and outside based on where they are. Yeah, it turns out, it turns out that's a good thing for most of us most of the time. Yes, yeah, but it's it does make it very difficult to interface with a machine this way. So you then once you have the connection, the physical connection or the wireless connection from the person to the computer, you establish some form of test that will start to train both the person with the interface and the machine itself on working together. And a typical one might be that the person is looking at a picture of a ball, and there's a second picture of a ball, and their job is to imagine trying to force the one ball so that overlays on top of the other one. So let's say one's green and one's yellow, and so your your job is to to imagine moving the green ball over top the yellow ball, and you do this over and over and over again. And there's actually a scoring system typically, and it's one to help motivate the person who's who's training. It's also meant to give feedback on all right, well, because this was inconsistent between trials three and four, we have to keep working on this in order for the machine to understand what it is you are trying to do. Otherwise it will misinterpret your thought and you could get an erroneous salt. So if you're getting into something where you're trying to say, type out a word and you're thinking, I want the cursor to move to the letter T, but the machine has misinterpreted that, you could end up with typos and mistakes. So you go through this laborious process where both the machine and the person learn and then ultimately you reach a point where the machine has a pretty good feel for what it means when you think in a certain way in order to manipulate stuff, and and that's when you get the results you wanted. It is. I'm not gonna say it's inelegant. I think it's an elegant solution, but it's an elegant solution that takes a good deal of work and effort and time. Well, I mean, one thing about that that occurs to me immediately is that it seems quite personalized to the individual user, not necessarily like if you design, say you're working on a speech to text program or something, hopefully what you're doing is you're you're training it for universal speech to text. You know, if you're speaking, as long as you're speaking in a way that people would normally be able to understand the words you're saying without some kind of incredibly thick accent or something, it's going to be able to turn that into text. Would the same thing necessarily be true? Would you know? So you would hook up one person's brain and learn how to how to allow them to control a computer cursor without touching the mouse or the keys, just their brain. Could you then come and bring somebody else in and hook their brain up and have them do the same thing, certainly not yet. Yeah, it's I mean you'd have to retrain them. Basically, you have to retrain both the person and computer. Yeah, exactly, Yeah, it's it's it's not a one size fits all kind of solution, which is also why I get very skeptical whenever I see any of those distractions, the games that have the little e g. Style headset and you're supposed to focus in order to make the game work, I get a little I mean, if it's just trying to pick up an increase in brainwave activity and that's all it's doing, then it's kind of like just a dimmer switch, right, Like there's nothing super sophisticated about it. But when it gets to like more uh complicated claims that hey, if you if you concentrate on the ball to go up, the ball goes up, and if you concentrate on the ball to go down, the ball goes down, and it's a one size fits all kind of thing, I often think that's more or less bologny. I mean, not that it doesn't work at all, But it doesn't I doubt it works in the way they're saying it works, and it probably I mean, if it does work even vaguely in the way that they say that it works, it probably doesn't work very well. Yeah, because again, unfortunately, right now, that surgery is an integral part of getting getting to those juicy, juicy brainwaves. Yeah. So it was just last year that we actually got to the point where a wireless solution was even a thing. In that case, it's not for humans, well yeah, yeah, well, and and the wireless solution is is so exciting because because previously the thing that you plug into your skull to to access those electrodes is a tether. That's that's meaning the ear, the ear tied to a laboratory in which that that tether exists or or I mean, even if even if it was available for like home use, you wouldn't be able to be mobile while you were using this kind of device. So so getting that that mobility and a little bit more comfort for subjects who are who are testing out this kind of stuff is is really critical in moving towards a place where where it could be actually useful for actual people in their actual lives, right, And we've also seen progress that's akin to Moore's law, the idea that over time, you can increase the abilities of say a microprocessor by reducing the size of the individual components. The same thing has been true for the electrodes that have been used in this kind of thing, all right, which is so cool because because anytime that you put an implant in the brain, it's it's going to cause a little bit of scarring in the brain tissue. And that's scarring uh gets larger over time. Um. The eventually the scar tissue begins to uh to degrade the quality of the signal that the electrodes can send out because it's it's it's a thicker it's a thicker material than your normal brain stuff. It's almost like a callous exactly exactly so um so so smaller implants equal less scarring, equal better technology over time equal yea yeah. And obviously, if you were to undergo a procedure where you are going to have some sort of electrode array implanted in your brain, you want it to last for as long as it possibly can so that you don't have to undergo a future procedure in order to correct any issues from scarring exactly. So this is a this is a huge advance, even though it's very talian. Uh. Yeah, and hope hopefully, I like Jonathan said, it's currently that the wireless stuff is only available for animal testing. Um, hopefully a wireless device will be cleared for human testing soon. That the last I heard about it in I believe December of there was one company that was that was working with the brain Gate project that was was submitting a proposal to the FDA. So no word on that as of Google today, right, but but you know, fingers cressed. Yeah, and so let's kind of segue into some of the work that's been done recently to help improve the approach of brain computer interfaces. We we have to say, Ralph the Bat, there's nothing that's like the the holy Grail of brain computer interfaces that magically makes them work perfectly. But we've seen some pretty cool advances. Yeah. There was one story in particular that kind of spurred this this episode two into creation that involved alves, monkeys, and hamlet. Yeah. Yeah, and I I really I campaigned hard to cover this for a show that we do called Hell Stuff Works. Now because I'm a technology freak and a Shakespeare freak, So the dual punch hit me right in the stern um. Uh. So we're talking about a project that came out of Stanford bio x. There was a group of scientists at Stanford who were looking specifically at ways to improve brain computer interfaces for people who have mobility issues. They said that one of the biggest challenges they were facing was that the interfaces that existed up to that point were relatively slow, and frequently people were finding, uh it difficult to use that they were there were it was inserting errors. They were getting misspellings or typos or whatever. And that causes frustration obviously. And I don't I know you guys, like, if you've ever been working on a task that's particularly hard and then you get frustrated, it suddenly seems like the difficulty of that task is skyrocketed. It's like if you're already trying to do something difficult on your computer and then your computer starts getting slow. Yeah, isn't that the best feeling? It's so frustrating. And have you ever been playing a video game where there was a glitch in it and and you were like like the controls maybe like especially in older games, where like the controls were already a little bit like like rough, like tank like, and then all of a sudden, you just get to a glitch where you're like, well, it's it's physically impossible for me to beat this. Yeah, they're there's great. There are times where you just you know, you feel that level of frustration, and it it makes something that is already challenging even more difficult, right like even if that barrier were not there anymore, because of your frustration, your ability to focus has has decreased, and so there was a real need to try and improve this tech. Uh. And in fact, there's a quote specifically from a piece in Stanford News that said earlier versions of this technology have already been tested successfully in people with paralysis, but the typing was slow and imprecise. This latest work tests improvements to the speed and accuracy of the technology that interprets brain signals and drives the cursor. So in this case, they're talking about an interface where you have like a screen with a bunch of letters on it, and there's a cursor as well, and you can concentrate and move the cursor to the appropriate letter and then concentrate again as if you were clicking on that letter and its selects. It. It acts as a type, you know, like a typewriter, but you're doing it very much a point like a search and pack kind of approach, where instead of a finger, you're using your brain. Now, the way they tested the improvements to this technology, it was a bit unusual. They used monkeys as test subjects. Not unusual, right, not unusual for this. But they trained them to concentrate on symbols, and then they had them transcribe passages from a couple of different sources, the New York Times, some articles from the New York Times. They used that as a test um text to transcribe, and in one case Hamlet. So that of course prompted people to make reference to that old idea that if you stuck an infinite number of monkeys in a room with an infinite number of typewriters, sooner or later one of them would produce the complete works of Shakespeare just by chance. Because the definition of infinite is in an infinite number of monkeys. I always thought it was this finite number of monkeys given infinite time. Either way, it's same thing right. I feel like the Douglas Adams version was infinite monkeys, infinite typewriters, and infinite If it were infinite monkeys and just one typewriter, boy, who I'd imagine. But the infinite monkeys get the Shakespeare done a lot faster than finite monkeys, you would imagine, Yeah, infinite monkey. I don't know, do they. I mean, at a certain point, is adding more monkeys help or hurt the situation? It always helps. Adding more monkeys always happens. Why you're the optimist. Three things. If you take nothing else from this show, Ladies and gentlemen, take the words of wisdom from Joe. Adding monkeys always helps. Um So in this case, obviously the monkeys weren't typing up Hamlet purely by chance, they were transcribing it, and in fact only one was doing it. But yeah, and so, so what what the researchers did here is they they implanted electrodes into the monkey's motor cortexes and and the monkeys were trained to move cursors around the screen first with actual gestures, and the camera watched their movements while the software was watching their brain waves. Thus the computer learned what the monkeys intent to move looked like right, And keep in mind, they had no comprehension of the text as far as we are aware, they weren't suddenly all. But they didn't all become subscribers to The New York Times or aficionados of The Bard As far as we know, none of them, as far as I'm aware, contacted Kenneth Bruna, but several of them did become oxford Ians. There were a couple of bacon Vans in the group. I'm not gonna lie. Uh. They were literally just just replicating those words by doing that that kind of cursor click approach we were talking about, by concentrating. But despite those limitations, despite those qualifiers, they were able to reach a speed of around twelve words per minute, which was pretty impressive for a monkey, Really pretty impressive considering the technology at all. Absolutely so for fun, because I was curious. I thought it might be interested to see how long it would take a monkey to type out Hamlet in this way, keeping in mind the monkey is again transcribing Hamlet, not actually just spontaneously typing up the play. Right, Sure, but I guess this means you have to pick a certain version of Hamlet that's true. I I picked I picked a pretty standard version, and I was I actually did go to a site that gave like a number of words for every work. Hamlet, by the way, in case you're curious, is the longest of Shakespeare's plays by number of words and by running time. If they're doing the whole darn thing, it has thirty seven words. So at twelve words per minute, it would take a monkey about forty two point four hours to type out the whole thing. But to replicate all of Shakespeare's plays and not as sonnets, I didn't include the sonnets. But if you were to replicate all of Shakespeare's plays, it would take about forty days of typing at twelve words per minute. Uh so now we know, right, Um, if you remove the chance part, we got chance in there. We still that's still a mystery, but it's it's still it's still like like certainly not an infinite amount of time. No, that's a pretty I mean, yeah, a month and a half right now, we do still need to add more monkeys to Joe's point in order to answer the other question. Now. They also pointed out that they were not using any completion algorithms. The kind of stuff that you might find in smartphones or some computer programs, where you start type being a word and it tries to guess what word you intend based upon context and your frequency of using certain words, and it's always wrong. It's frequently wrong, not necessarily. I actually had autocomplete back before I started using swipe text, which is just another exercise of futility that I apparently am determined to continue to pursue. Um. When I was typing in letter by letter, I noticed that autocomplete was more right than wrong. But when it was wrong, it was hilariously wrong. Yeah, and often in a way that makes you feel bad about yourself or or it makes you feel weird about who ever programmed that algorithm, because you're like, why would they ever think I would use that word? Um? Oh, I assume it's being like tailored to you. Right, it is paying attention to your typing patterns well, and is it not? It depends, right. Sometimes it's simply an algorithm that just looks at the letters that you have typed in so far, looks for words that have that sequence of letters, and sometimes even can context within the sentence. Right, So if if the letter the words leading up to the word you are typing. If it would make sense for you to say, like a, did I what's a good one? Um? Did I leave the refrigerator door open? And you're like r e u F. It might say, well, it's probably refrigerator. Did I leave the It's either refrigerator or it's referee. They've either left something in the fridge or they've left a baseball game. I'm gonna take a guess that this guy, who has never cared about sports ball, I's talking about a fridge. Um. So it depends there's some there's some typing in Uh, I don't know what Oxford I in and it says, did you mean Tim Tebow? It mind? Does that to me? Okay, well, that that specific example. I was about to say, that's a very expecific example on very odd but at any rate, they did not use any completion algorithms this. However, they said that that could potentially be something that to be included in future implementations that could help speed up communication, as long as it could be implemented in a way that again did not increase frustration. If it's one of those things where you know you you start searching the internet, for all the the unintentionally hilarious auto complete or autocorrect mistakes like, yeah, it's funny and a meme. But if you're if you're someone for whom this is the only way you can really communicate with others, it would be incredibly awful. It would just be so frustrating. So, um it's it's something that may and be incorporated into future implementations, but as of right now, it is not part of their their approach. Um Now, a lot of different uh, research facilities have been looking into this, not just Stanford, right, Uh, I mean there's there have been several research facilities around the world, and there's some pretty um what's a good word to put it, enthusiastic, but shadowy organizations that have interests in this. So okay, here's the part where we talk about a creepy thing that dark has been doing. Um So, another barrier to this technology going mainstream is the inherent danger in drilling a hole in someone's skull and and implanting stuff in your brain. That's that's not a good Tuesday for anybody, right, um so so So, DARPA has been funding the development of a new medical technology that they're calling a stent trode. Stent trode, Yes, stent trode like a stint an electrode. Yeah, yeah yeah. And with this no skull holes are required or no new ones anyway, keep the ones that you already have. Um. But but the the electrode. You take a stent and you and you go in through a blood vessel in the next to read the electrode up into the brain and then you can monitor electrical signals happening in neurons nearby. And I had the exact same reaction that Joe just had when I was reading about this. That's creepy. There's someone else who has a very similar idea that we'll talk about in just a minute. But I think it's probably the same general technological approach that you're talking about. It's just that's not the way I read it when I was looking into it. But it makes way more sense the way you're describing it. I mean, one thing we should emphasize again is that there are also people talking about non invasive methods and and using noninvasive methods of reading the brain. They just lack precision and power, or in some cases they're they're plenty precise, and there are plenty powerful, but they require you to be inside an m R I machine. Right, Yeah, yeah, we haven't mentioned that part yet. Uh. Yes, some of you might have been thinking earlier in this episode when we were talking about how surgery is necessary because of the preciseness imprecisity of of other methods of reading brain signals. You're thinking, oh, m R I. M r s are really great at reading brain signals, but they also require you to lay perfectly still in a very giant, very expensive, very noisy machine, um for the entirety of the time that you were using them. Therefore, if you're trying to do it to like talk to somebody or you know, eat food, that's not as practical. That's a pretty good premise for a future sci fi scenario where people are walking around with m R I hats like they've got a they've got a giant machine propped on their shoulders. They've got really powerful bodies from walking around with these things. I guess the supervillain in this in this world would be Phero magnetic Man, because you don't want to have any of that near you. Um so so other other than Pharaoh magnetic Man. And uh and this lovely Mr I future. What else could the future possibly hold for brain computer interface type devices, y'all? So obviously, just getting a deeper understanding of the brain in general is going to be a huge help for multiple disciplines, not just creating better brain computer interfaces, but all sorts of things. Uh. And we have have stressed on this show multiple times how we are at just the very dawn of our understanding of the human brain. It is an incredibly complex oregon, and we only have an inkling of what is going on up there. We've got a pretty good grasp of some basics, but when it gets down to the particulars, it gets really complicated. Uh. Well, we're also going to see improvements in the machine learning side, as computers get better and better at interpreting what our signals mean. Similar to what we saw with the Stanford experiment, I would imagine that we would see that words per minute start to climb a little more each time we get a little bit better at this. Ah, the surgical procedure thing, that's obviously a huge barrier. Obviously, I mean people who are are going this, uh, they often are are people who feel like they have really no other alternative. And that is something that they want for themselves. And uh yeah, like like having a whole drilled in your skull will lead to a better quality of life kind of situations, which which of course I'm not making light of it, like like that's that's a very real reality for for for a good number of people. And this kind of this kind of volunteer research has has been tremendous. Yes, yes, there's some really inspiring videos about people who have undergone procedures like this and when you see the change in their behaviors after the procedure is done. I mean, if you're any sort of empathetic person like me, you will find yourself holding back tears at your desk. Yeah, there's a video I think from of of a woman using the brain Gate robotic arm technology to to serve herself coffee for the first time in years. And it's and it's and it sounds like very simple things. The one I saw, I'm gonna get a all Tier two Joe's like, good Greek guys, come on, I want to get out of here. The one I saw it was a guy who um had suffered an accident, was paralyzed from the neck down and under he underwent uh surgical procedure, and in that case it was also to control a robotic arm. He did the whole training procedure I talked about. In fact, the video showed the example I gave about moving a ball over another ball with you know, doing that over and over again. And that was just to train the brain so that when the the they hooked him up to the robotic arm, which was you know, just completely separate from him, that um that it would the robotic arm would would follow general instructions based upon that training sequence. He uh then the first time they hooked him up, was able to uh reach out and take his girlfriend's hand, and that killed me. He's like, I was able to hold my girlfriend's hand for the first time in years because of this. And I was like, I'm like, I'm done. I'm done. I need a quiet room. Gonna go book the quiet room. Like when you hear the muffled snuffling, that's me. So but this, this is this is obviously a very dramatic procedure, something that people cannot take lightly. The there's so many possible complications, including the complication of infection. Anytime you have any sort of transcranial implant. You know, in general, having anything that protrudes from the body outward, you know that that that breaks that skin barrier, that is that is obviously a huge risk factor. So you've got to be super super careful. Um, non invasive approaches are problematic, like we said, but perhaps we will see advances in that technology to make them more accurate, more precise, so that if youwer, invasive surgeries have to be performed. But that's a tall order. I mean, how do you do that. We don't have the answer to that question yet. Doesn't mean that we won't in the future, but right now, it's just not a practical approach. Um, there's the possibility of using this technology. We could do things beyond just controlling robotic arms and cursors. And I don't mean to diminish those accomplishments either, they are amazing. But we might see an approach where exoskeleton suits could be uh come into the pictures, where where people are actually able to use their brains to control things like robotic legs and regain movement, you know, actual mobility. Um, beyond you know, laying in a bed and controlling something. They might actually be able to move around with the assistance of technology, which is again phenomenal that this is giving independence to people who previously you would have said they're going to be dependent upon caregivers for as long as they are alive. Um and it's again a phenomenal kind of thing to think about. It's further off in the future. We're not anywhere close to where someone could actually um have control of an exo skeleton suit in that manner, but it's a goal to reach for. And then there's Elon Musk's idea, which this is the one I was saying, probably similar to what you were talking about with the stint uh electrode the stint trode um. He also I wrote it's Elon Musk and the Neural Lace, which sounds a lot like a J. K. Rowling novel Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Elon Musk and the Neural Lace um. So. Musk is of course famous for being a co founder for Tesla and for SpaceX UM and he proposed an implanable computer technology that would enhance human intelligence. So this is more about what we were talking about at the top of the show, the idea of instead of using your brain necessarily to control some other outward computer. This would be like a two way communication device where you're not just sending signals out, You're you're accepting signals as they come in. And the term neural lace comes from a novelist named Ian M. Banks Favorites on stuff to blow your mind. Interesting. I have not read any of Banks's work, so I am. I was unfamiliar with his work until I read this that, and he writes a lot of science fiction that's uh full of ideas that are worth talking about. Interesting. I'll have to I'll definitely have to look into it. Then. Um, so this would come in the form these these electrodes would come in the form of flexible circuits that would be injected into the bloodstream very similar to what Lauren was talking about, through the neck and make their way up to the brain. And then you bypass the need for invasive surgery. Um. Assuming that you would be able to send a signal out from the brain through the skull, that could be you know, interact with whatever infrastructure you have around you. Right, It's not like you could just magically control things with your brain. You still have to have that infrastructure that's designed to work with that her face. But his thought is this is a way for human beings to get ahead of that problem of h yeah, head and shoulders above the problem of super intelligent artificial intelligence. Like his his fear and muss I hope I'm not projecting too much based upon my interpretation, But to me, it seems that Musk's fear is that if we continue down the road of developing artificial intelligence, sooner or later we will receive we get to a point where we have super human artificial intelligence, and then we will become nothing more than pets to the AI. And that if we were instead to incorporate technology so that AI becomes an inherent component of humanity, that our intelligence is boosted by artificial intelligence that's incorporated directly onto our brains, everything's fine, do super math, Yes, we will the super intelligent to us, the super intelligent AI will be us. Although I mean I would I would argue, well, what stops the super intelligent AI from tweaking the technology so that we all just become its meat puppets? But who's who am I to ask these questions? Yeah? That's interesting, But also I'm thinking, okay, so it's better to first achieve super intelligence in uh in on a substrate that is full of greed and lust and revenge. Yeah, I also I also started thinking. I also started thinking like, wouldn't computers maybe be a better place to try it? I also think I also started thinking about how the implications of this and immediately started to feel kind of sick to my stomach because he's talking about an interface where you would be able to do things like excess Google without needing to touch a computer. Right that you just think it, and you can access it, and you can get the information, and you've got it. It does not take a great leap from that idea to go to the idea of essentially the idea of telepathic communication. What what amounts to uh technological telepathy where objecting ads into your brain? No, no, no, I'm not thinking about ads. I'm thinking YouTube comments. I'm thinking harassment, not being able to turn that off? Right? Just imagine or so let's say, guys, I know that you're familiar. The people in this room are familiar with the idea of how sometimes certain sections of the Internet can get upset about something and their response is to attack whatever the target is relentlessly. Imagine that's happening, but with essentially the technological equivalent to telepathy, that a person has appeared to have done a wrong in some form, whether they have or not is immaterial, because that's not how the Internet works. The Internet doesn't really care if the person is truly guilty. You were in a movie I didn't like, so yeah, exactly really drive you crazy? Yeah? That, And I mean I know that I'm going like super twilight Zone with this idea, but but I mean I see some potential drawbacks to solution. That's what I'm saying. I would want these things to have, yes, like off switch, like a mute switch. Yeah, like where you're like you're blocked, You're blocked, you're blocked, You're blocked, everyone is blocked. I'm just alone with my thoughts. Going to get some pancakes, yes, yeah, except you can't order because you've turned off the signal and they're like, I don't know what you want. I'm like, I'm I am pointing to the picture. I am saying the word pancakes isn't yeah, but are if you want to order, you've gotta think pancakes. That's just the way. I'm sorry, it's chip and pin and telepathy. Those are the technologies that way depend on. I don't know. I mean, I think as long as restaurants accept cash, they'll accept words. Cash is meaningless in the in the the technological telepathic future, it's just not gonna happen. I was assuming that if you're that done with humanity, you're making your own pancakes. You've not left your home, You're in your pajamas, your cat is judging you, and you're making your own pancakes. That's that's pretty much now. I mean, I don't have a cat, but if I did have a cat, I know it would be judging me. Yes, the incredible future kind of like now, so interesting ideas, I don't I mean, obviously, these are all things that would be pretty far away. Even developing the technology where you would be able to physically overlay those stent troads without invasive surgery, you still have enormous barriers. Like it's one thing to put the to physically put the electrodes on the surface of the brain. It's a totally different thing to allow the brain to actually access and receive information from an outside source wirelessly just beamed in. It's not like we have a way of doing that, right, Sure, and I should also put in if I if I didn't mention explicitly that that that DARPA research project was was being done in cheap We're we're not quite human level at that one yet. Yeah, telepathic sheep, that's actually scarier. So many different science fiction novels are just coming to my mind as we go through this, But that kind of wraps up where we are today the update we wanted to give. Specifically, I am very eager to see how this technology progresses because its capacity to help people who are otherwise in in very uh difficult situations, I think is phenomenal. Yeah, even in the three years since we did that first uh podcast episode about these types of projects, it's it's technology has advanced so much. It's been amazing. It's it's pretty it's pretty inspiring, honestly when you when you start looking into these stories. And guys, if you have any suggestions for future episodes, or you've got any questions, please send them our away our email addresses FW thinking at how stuff works dot com, or you can drop us a line on Facebook or Twitter. If you go to Facebook and search w thinking, our profile will pop up you can leave us a message. We are f w Thinking on Twitter, so you can always tweet at us and we will talk to you again Willison. For more on this topic in the future of technology, visit forward thinking dot Com, brought to you by Toyota. Let's Go Places