The Future of the Mind
The person was then asked to say ten common words, such as “yes” and “no,” “hot” and “cold,” “hungry” and “thirsty,” “hello” and “good-bye,” and “more” and “less.” Using a computer to record the brain signals when these words were uttered, the scientists were able to create a rough one-to-one correspondence between spoken words and computer signals from the brain. Later, when the patient voiced certain words, they were able to correctly identify each one with an accuracy ranging from 76 percent to 90 percent. The next step is to use grids with 121 electrodes to get better resolution.
In the future, this procedure may prove useful for individuals suffering from strokes or paralyzing illnesses such as Lou Gehrig’s disease, who would be able to speak using the brain-to-computer technique.
TYPING WITH THE MIND
At the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, Dr. Jerry Shih has hooked up epileptic patients via ECOG sensors so they can learn how to type with the mind. The calibration of this device is simple. The patient is first shown a series of letters and is told to focus mentally on each symbol. A computer records the signals emanating from the brain as it scans each letter. As with the other experiments, once this one-to-one dictionary is created, it is then a simple matter for the person to merely think of the letter and for the letter to be typed on a screen, using only the power of the mind.
Dr. Shih, the leader of this project, says that the accuracy of his machine is nearly 100 percent. Dr. Shih believes that he can next create a machine to record images, not just words, that patients conceive in their minds. This could have applications for artists and architects, but the big drawback of ECOG technology, as we have mentioned, is that it requires opening up patients’ brains.
Meanwhile, EEG typewriters, because they are noninvasive, are entering the marketplace. They are not as accurate or precise as ECOG typewriters, but they have the advantage that they can be sold over the counter. Guger Technologies, based in Austria, recently demonstrated an EEG typewriter at a trade show. According to their officials, it takes only ten minutes or so for people to learn how to use this machine, and they can then type at the rate of five to ten words per minute.
TELEPATHIC DICTATION AND MUSIC
The next step might be to transmit entire conversations, which could rapidly speed up telepathic transmission. The problem, however, is that it would require making a one-to-one map between thousands of words and their EEG, MRI, or ECOG signals. But if one can, for example, identify the brain signals of several hundred select words, then one might be able to rapidly transmit words found in a common conversation. This means that one would think of the words in entire sentences and paragraphs of a conversation and a computer would print them out.
This could be extremely useful for journalists, writers, novelists, and poets, who could simply think and have a computer take dictation. The computer would also become a mental secretary. You would mentally give instructions to the robo-secretary about a dinner, plane trip, or vacation, and it would fill in all the details about the reservations.
Not only dictation but also music may one day be transcribed in this way. Musicians would simply hum a few melodies in their head and a computer would print them out, in musical notation. To do this, you would ask someone to mentally hum a series of notes, which would generate certain electrical signals for each one. A dictionary would again be created in this way, so that when you think of a musical note, the computer would print it out in musical notation.
In science fiction, telepaths often communicate across language barriers, since thoughts are considered to be universal. However, this might not be true. Emotions and feelings may well be nonverbal and universal, so that one could telepathically send them to anyone, but rational thinking is so closely tied to language that it is very unlikely that complex thoughts could be sent across language barriers. Words will still be sent telepathically in their original language.
TELEPATHY HELMETS
In science fiction, we also often encounter telepathy helmets. Put them on, and—presto!—you can read other people’s minds. The U.S. Army, in fact, has expressed interest in this technology. In a firefight, with explosions going off and bullets whizzing overhead, a telepathy helmet could be a lifesaver, since it can be difficult to communicate orders amid the sound and fury of the battlefield. (I can personally testify to this. Years ago, during the Vietnam War, I served in the U.S. Infantry at Fort Benning, outside Atlanta, Georgia. During machine-gun training, the sound of hand grenades and rounds of bullets going off on the battlefield next to my ear was deafening; it was so intense I could not hear anything else. Later, there was a loud ringing in my ear that lasted for three full days.) With a telepathy helmet, a soldier could mentally communicate with his platoon amid all the thunder and noise.
Recently, the army gave a $6.3 million grant to Dr. Gerwin Schalk at Albany Medical College, but it knows that a fully functional telepathy helmet is still years away. Dr. Schalk experiments with ECOG technology, which, as we have seen, requires placing a mesh of electrodes directly on top of the exposed brain. With this method, his computers have been able to recognize vowels and thirty-six individual words inside the thinking brain. In some of his experiments, he approached 100 percent accuracy. But at present, this is still impractical for the U.S. Army, since it requires removing part of the skull in the clean, sterile environment of a hospital. And even then, recognizing vowels and a handful of words is a far cry from sending urgent messages to headquarters in a firefight. But his ECOG experiments have demonstrated that it is possible to communicate mentally on the battlefield.
Another method is being explored by Dr. David Poeppel of New York University. Instead of opening up the skulls of his subjects, he employs MEG technology, using tiny bursts of magnetic energy rather than electrodes to create electrical charges in the brain. Besides being noninvasive, the advantage of MEG technology is that it can precisely measure fleeting neural activity, in contrast to the slower MRI scans. In his experiments, Poeppel has been able to successfully record electrical activity in the auditory cortex when people think silently of a certain word. But the drawback is that this recording still requires the use of large, table-size machines to generate a magnetic pulse.
Obviously, one wants a method that is noninvasive, portable, and accurate. Dr. Poeppel hopes his work with MEG technology will complement the work being done using EEG sensors. But true telepathy helmets are still many years away, because MEG and EEG scans lack accuracy.
MRI IN A CELL PHONE
At present, we are hindered by the relatively crude nature of the existing instruments. But, as time goes by, more and more sophisticated instruments will probe deeper into the mind. The next big breakthrough may be MRI machines that are handheld.
The reason why MRI machines have to be so huge right now is that one needs a uniform magnetic field to get good resolution. The larger the magnet, the more uniform one can make the field, and the better accuracy one finds in the final pictures. However, physicists know the exact mathematical properties of magnetic fields (they were worked out by physicist James Clerk Maxwell back in the 1860S). In 1993 in Germany, Dr. Bernhard Blümich and his colleagues created the world’s smallest MRI machine, which is the size of a briefcase. It uses a weak and distorted magnetic field, but supercomputers can analyze the magnetic field and correct for this so that the device produces realistic 3-D pictures. Since computer power doubles roughly every two years, they are now powerful enough to analyze the magnetic field created by the briefcase-sized device and compensate for its distortion.
As a demonstration of their machine, in 2006 Dr. Blümich and his colleagues were able to take MRI scans of Ötzi, the “Iceman,” who was frozen in ice about 5,300 years ago toward the end of the last ice age. Because Ötzi was frozen in an awkward position, with his arms spread apart, it was difficult to cram him inside the small cylinder of a conventional MRI machine, but Dr. Blümich’s portable machine easily took MRI photographs.
These physi
cists estimate that, with increasing computer power, an MRI machine of the future might be the size of a cell phone. The raw data from this cell phone would be sent wirelessly to a supercomputer, which would process the data from the weak magnetic field and then create a 3-D image. (The weakness of the magnetic field is compensated for by the increase in computer power.) This then could vastly accelerate research. “Perhaps something like the Star Trek tricorder is not so far off after all,” Dr. Blümich has said. (The tricorder is a small, handheld scanning device that gives an instant diagnosis of any illness.) In the future, you may have more computer power in your medicine cabinet than there is in a modern university hospital today. Instead of waiting to get permission from a hospital or university to use an expensive MRI machine, you could gather data in your own living room by simply waving the portable MRI over yourself and then e-mailing the results to a lab for analysis.
It could also mean that, at some point in the future, an MRI telepathy helmet might be possible, with vastly better resolution than an EEG scan. Here is how it may work in the coming decades. Inside the helmet, there would be electromagnetic coils to produce a weak magnetic field and radio pulses that probe the brain. The raw MRI signals would then be sent to a pocketsize computer placed in your belt. The information would then be radioed to a server located far from the battlefield. The final processing of the data would be done by a supercomputer in a distant city. Then the message would be radioed back to your troops on the battlefield. The troops would hear the message either through speakers or through electrodes placed in the auditory cortex of their brains.
DARPA AND HUMAN ENHANCEMENT
Given the costs of all this research, it is legitimate to ask: Who is paying for it? Private companies have only recently shown interest in this cutting-edge technology, but it’s still a big gamble for many of them to fund research that may never pay off. Instead, one of the main backers is DARPA, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which has spearheaded some of the most important technologies of the twentieth century.
DARPA was originally set up by President Dwight Eisenhower after the Russians sent Sputnik into orbit in 1957 and shocked the world. Realizing that the United States might quickly be outpaced by the Soviets in high technology, Eisenhower hastily established this agency to keep the country competitive with the Russians. Over the years, the numerous projects it started grew so large that they became independent entities by themselves. One of its first spinoffs was NASA.
DARPA’s strategic plan reads like something from science fiction: its “only charter is radical innovation.” The only justification for its existence is “to accelerate the future into being.” DARPA scientists are constantly pushing the boundaries of what is physically possible. As former DARPA official Michael Goldblatt says, they try not to violate the laws of physics, “or at least not knowingly. Or at least not more than one per program.”
But what separates DARPA from science fiction is its track record, which is truly astounding. One of its early projects in the 1960s was Arpanet, which was a war-fighting telecommunications network that would electronically connect scientists and officials during and after World War III. In 1989, the National Science Foundation decided that, in light of the breakup of the Soviet bloc, it was unnecessary to keep it a secret, so it declassified this hush-hush military technology and essentially gave codes and blueprints away for free. Arpanet would eventually become the Internet.
When the U.S. Air Force needed a way to guide its ballistic missiles in space, DARPA helped create Project 57, a top-secret project that was designed to place H-bombs on hardened Soviet missile silos in a thermonuclear exchange. It would later become the foundation for the Global Positioning System (GPS). Instead of guiding missiles, today it guides lost motorists.
DARPA has been a key player in a series of inventions that have altered the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including cell phones, night-vision goggles, telecommunications advances, and weather satellites. I have had a chance to interact with DARPA scientists and officials on several occasions. I once had lunch with one of the agency’s former directors at a reception filled with many scientists and futurists. I asked him a question that had always bothered me: Why do we have to rely on dogs to sniff our luggage for the presence of high explosives? Surely our sensors are sensitive enough to pick up the telltale signature of explosive chemicals. He replied that DARPA had actively looked into this same question but had come up against some severe technical problems. The olfactory sensors of dogs, he said, had evolved over millions of years to be able to detect a handful of molecules, and that kind of sensitivity is extremely difficult to match, even with our most finely tuned sensors. It’s likely that we will continue to rely on dogs at airports for the foreseeable future.
On another occasion, a group of DARPA physicists and engineers came to a talk I gave about the future of technology. Later I asked them if they had any concerns of their own. One concern, they said, was their public image. Most people have never heard of DARPA, but some link it to dark, nefarious government conspiracies, everything from UFO cover-ups, Area 51, and Roswell to weather control, etc. They sighed. If only these rumors were true, they could certainly use help from alien technology to jump-start their research!
With a budget of $3 billion, DARPA has now set its sights on the brain-machine interface. When discussing the potential applications, former DARPA official Michael Goldblatt pushes the boundary of the imagination. He says, “Imagine if soldiers could communicate by thought alone.… Imagine the threat of biological attack being inconsequential. And contemplate, for a moment, a world in which learning is as easy as eating, and the replacement of damaged body parts as convenient as a fast-food drive-through. As impossible as these visions sound or as difficult as you might think the task would be, these visions are the everyday work of the Defense Sciences Office [a branch of DARPA].”
Goldblatt believes that historians will conclude that the long-term legacy of DARPA will be human enhancement, “our future historical strength.” He notes that the famous army slogan “Be All You Can Be” takes on a new meaning when contemplating the implications of human enhancement. Perhaps it is no accident that Michael Goldblatt is pushing human enhancement so vigorously at DARPA. His own daughter suffers from cerebral palsy and has been confined to a wheelchair all her life. Since she requires outside help, her illness has slowed her down, but she has always risen above adversity. She is going to college and dreaming of starting her own company. Goldblatt acknowledges that his daughter is his inspiration. As Washington Post editor Joel Garreau has noted, “What he is doing is spending untold millions of dollars to create what might well be the next step in human evolution. And yet, it has occurred to him that the technology he is helping create might someday allow his daughter not just to walk, but to transcend.”
PRIVACY ISSUES
When hearing of mind-reading machines for the first time, the average person might be concerned about privacy. The idea that a machine concealed somewhere may be reading our intimate thoughts without our permission is unnerving. Human consciousness, as we have stressed, involves constantly running simulations of the future. In order for these simulations to be accurate, we sometimes imagine scenarios that wade into immoral or illegal territory, but whether or not we act on these plans, we prefer to keep them private.
For scientists, life would be easier if they could simply read people’s thoughts from a distance using portable devices (rather than by using clumsy helmets or surgically opening up the skull), but the laws of physics make this exceedingly difficult.
When I asked Dr. Nishimoto, who works in Dr. Gallant’s Berkeley lab, about the question of privacy, he smiled and replied that radio signals degrade quite rapidly outside the brain, so these signals would be too diffuse and weak to make any sense to anyone standing more than a few feet away. (In school, we learned about Newton’s laws and that gravity diminishes as the square of the distance, so that if you doubled your di
stance from a star, the gravity field diminishes by a factor of four. But magnetic fields diminish much faster than the square of the distance. Most signals decrease by the cube or quartic of the distance, so if you double the distance from an MRI machine, the magnetic field goes down by a factor of eight or more.)
Furthermore, there would be interference from the outside world, which would mask the faint signals coming from the brain. This is one reason why scientists require strict laboratory conditions to do their work, and even then they are able to extract only a few letters, words, or images from the thinking brain at any given time. The technology is not adequate to record the avalanche of thoughts that often circulate in our brain as we simultaneously consider several letters, words, phrases, or sensory information, so using these devices for mind reading as seen in the movies is not possible today, and won’t be for decades to come.
For the foreseeable future, brain scans will continue to require direct access to the human brain in laboratory conditions. But in the highly unlikely event that someone in the future finds a way to read thoughts from a distance, there are still countermeasures you can take. To keep your most important thoughts private, you might use a shield to block brain waves from entering the wrong hands. This can be done with something called a Faraday cage, invented by the great British physicist Michael Faraday in 1836, although the effect was first observed by Benjamin Franklin. Basically, electricity will rapidly disperse around a metal cage, such that the electric field inside the cage is zero. To demonstrate this, physicists (like myself) have entered a metallic cage on which huge electrical bolts are fired. Miraculously, we are unscratched. This is why airplanes can be hit by lightning bolts and not suffer damage, and why cable wires are covered with metallic threads. Similarly, a telepathy shield would consist of thin metal foil placed around the brain.