Miguel Nicolelis recounts Juliano Pinto’s ceremonial first kick of the 2014 World Cup in São Paulo. “The pass was unremarkable except that Juliano had been paralyzed from the waist down for almost a decade,” he writes in The Wall Street Journal. “Thanks to a robotic exoskeleton he controlled with his brain, he was able to kick the ball a few feet down the field.”
Nicolelis, the Duke School of Medicine Distinguished Professor of Neuroscience and Co-Director of Duke’s Center for Neuroengineering, adds, “That moment was the culmination of two decades of work in brain-machine interface technology, a research field I pioneered with my colleagues at Duke University.” Nicolelis believes the work could be applied to “…a range of neurological diseases, including Parkinson’s disease, epilepsy, stroke, cerebral palsy, and even autism.”
And in related news, imec earlier this month announced it has designed and fabricated a neural-probe demonstrator with unprecedented electrode density within the framework NeuroSeeker, a large-scale EU project, as part of an effort to find a cure for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and other brain diseases.
Marleen Welkenhuysen, NeuroSeeker project manager at imec, commented, “Our goal was to fabricate a brain probe that would enable a breakthrough in the level of detail by which microcircuits of the brain cortex and also deep brain structures can be studied. Previous probes were severely restricted in the number of signals that could be captured simultaneously, which limited their use as a basis for research and therapeutic tools. With this new probe, we demonstrate that it is possible to create powerful electronics that can interface with the brain on the level of small neuronal circuits and even individual neurons.”
Beyond disease treatment, Nicolelis at Duke presents two additional ideas conceived in his lab: “…connecting brains to form a network, or brainet, and developing a communication method that lets people message one another directly brain-to-brain.”
He calls this the “stuff of science fiction” and cautions it isn’t without its perils: connected brains become hackable—enabling thoughts and actions to be manipulated. He cites a 2013 University of Washington experiment in which two scientists wearing caps that connected their brains to the Internet collaborated on a video game. One sat in a room with a screen but no controller, while the other occupied a separate room with a controller but no screen. The scientist viewing the screen could cause the finger of the scientist with the controller to involuntarily twitch, firing a virtual weapon.
“Imagine if that weapon were real instead of virtual—a reality that could be around the corner,” he writes, advising that military uses of brain-machine interfaces be banned by the international community.
He then cites a less dramatic but potentially more damaging outcome: the brain is plastic and adaptive, and when connected to a computer may take on the computer’s binary decision-making process, losing the ability to innovate and intuit.
In fact, this can happen without a direct hardwired connection, via an ECG-like cap or imec neural probe. “A study has shown that if people know information is available on the Internet, they begin forgetting it—including their address and phone number,” Nicolelis writes.
That may seem benign or even beneficial—why waste valuable neurons storing phone numbers that are readily available? However, this forgetfulness can be the first step to “automation addiction,” which, Nicolelis says, led to 51 aviation accidents over a 5-year period, killing hundreds, according to a 2011 FAA report. Beyond death and destruction, he warns that brain-computer connectivity could threaten central aspects of humanity including sympathy, intuition, creativity, improvisation, and artistic and social skills. It’s incumbent on humans, he adds, to control the creation and decision-making process for art, science, and politics.
“Digital technology will never surpass what our brains can do—but it can shape them, and that is the biggest danger,” he concludes.
