In a&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-10994-4" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">paper</a> published in July 2019, researchers described a way in which neuroprosthetic devices — capable of monitoring and making sense of electrical signals in the human brain — will soon be able to help patients incapable of physical speech to be able to fully take part in interactive verbal exchanges.We are well on our way as Homo sapiens to becoming a species that fully merges technology with our organic bodies. In some ways, we’ve been getting at this for centuries already, beginning with the first use of eyeglasses, at the end of the thirteenth century in Italy, to improve vision by making it easy for someone to wear two magnifying lenses on the bridge of their nose.But ever since the invention of the computer and the first human-machine interfaces were born (HMIs), a dream of many technologists has been to create direct connections between computers and the human brain. These brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) — also known as Brain-Machine Interfaces (BMIs) — would eliminate the lag inherent in the translation between thought → physical action → computer response. BCIs also allow people who cannot perform physical actions required for HMIs to bypass that real-world step and directly control powerful computer tools with the electrical impulses in their brains.One of the dreams is that BCIs will eventually place the entire canon of human knowledge within the realm of immediate recall: No more searching the internet via typing or voice commands needed. In the near future, we will be able to think about what we need and pull whatever relevant information is available directly from a cloud and into the forefront of our minds.BCIs work because we are able to detect the signals sent between neurons in our brains between the dendrites and axons connecting them. These tiny bits are the differences in electrical potential expressed by ions on every neuron. Scientists can find and measure these signals using implantable electrodes.The signals become digital information which is then translated by algorithms that have been developed over many years of painstaking research and experimentation. Thus, our brain’s signals become a director for machine intelligence that can then be used to control specially-enabled prosthetic limbs and wheelchairs and move cursors and click buttons on monitors. The software can also be trained to recognize the signals that account for very specific “thoughts” that represent numbers and letters, which enables writing (of a sort) for people otherwise unable to physically write.Just like any software application, though, BCIs are susceptible to hacking, as already shown in some intentional attempts at&nbsp;<a href="http://brl.ee.washington.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/07128844.pdf" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">malicious brain-spyware creation</a>. If a BCI can move numbers and letters across a digital gulf, it isn’t going to be difficult for someone to hijack that data and be able to translate whether it represents a banking PIN or a social security number.While the holy grail for the medical community is to use BCIs in neuroprosthetics to change the lives of disabled people for the better (even to the point of the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/01/mind-controlled-robotic-suit-exoskeleton-world-cup-2014" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">mind-controlled exoskeleton</a> a soccer player used to kick-off the 2014 World Cup), an entire ecosystem of business opportunities is growing around this cutting edge technology:—&nbsp;<a href="https://kernel.co/" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Kernel</a> is capturing memories from the hippocampus, reading them with AI and “recording” them with up to 80% accuracy.— Elon Musk’s&nbsp;<a href="https://www.neuralink.com/" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Neuralink</a> initiatives aim to create implantable interfaces between the brain and computers. The early goals will be to offer treatments for brain and nervous system disorders, with the eventual path leading to enhancing normally-functioning brains — i.e. increasing memory and processing speed, adding built-in cloud and internet access, and expanding our senses. This has been tested successfully in monkeys so far, with plans on track for human testing in 2020.— A company called&nbsp;<a href="https://www.foc.us/" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Foc.us&nbsp;</a>is marketing “brain stimulators” to improve reaction speeds for gamers.— <a href="https://www.neuropace.com/" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Neuropace</a> is working on ways to predict, detect and stop the signals sent among neurons that cause seizures.<iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/TcAvtglo9Jg?&amp;wmode=opaque" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="" class="fr-draggable" style="width: 788px; height: 583px;"></iframe>—&nbsp;<a href="https://www.mindmaze.com/" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Mindmaze</a> is creating a&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nanalyze.com/2016/05/augmedix-and-mindmaze-virtual-reality-in-healthcare/" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">motion-capture VR/AR game system</a> to give paralyzed people a more full experience, while&nbsp;<a href="http://neurable.com/" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Neurable</a> is using similar tech to give people the ability to control toys and games with their thoughts.— The Pittsburgh-based startup Cerêve has already secured commercial clearance from the FDA to sell their&nbsp;<a href="https://ebbsleep.com/" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">“Sleep System”</a> that can ameliorate insomnia.—&nbsp;<a href="https://www.brainco.tech/" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Brainco</a> is making wearable devices that will help teachers monitor the level of focus their students have in the classroom and better find and help those students with learning difficulties.—&nbsp;<a href="https://thenextweb.com/neural/2020/02/25/this-startup-is-building-a-brain-reading-device-to-take-on-elon-musks-neuralink/" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Neurosity</a> is also working on wearable devices with a keen eye for design and allowing app developers to use it as a playground for innovation.— The United State government, through the&nbsp;<a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vsbDQm2yISc&t=1s" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency</a> (DARPA), is researching BCIs for a large number of potential applications.All of these uses are possibilities, and there are hundreds of other potential applications for BCIs. Most come with a number of limitations are exactly how practical they would be in the real world. For instance, monitoring students’ focus in a classroom is all well and good until one realizes that actually helping those students would require more staff. Even greater problems need to be resolved before such technology will actually be all that useful.And then there is the fact that most EEG-based BCI systems are very obfuscated: Users and designers don’t actually know all of the possible commands that are available and how to use them in a given BCI. Nataliya Kosmyna of MIT Media Lab has&nbsp;<a href="https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0210145" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">proposed a new conceptual</a> and design space that will allow researchers to properly track, taxonomize, and compare all of their various work, which in turn should help in generating new uses for it.There are a number of ethical considerations that come along for the ride with the implementation of BCIs. One big one, which is evident across almost all technological breakthroughs, is the further stratification of society. There will be those people who can afford BCIs that can improve their lives drastically — whether for strictly medical reasons or to enhance human performance and quality of life in other ways.Next, there is the issue of just exactly how aware and mentally capable certain BCI patients will be, especially concerning those who exist in “locked-in”, comatose states. A BMI may allow these patients to communicate to a degree with the outside world, but there is no way (yet) for us to know exactly their degree of consciousness.<blockquote>All relevant parties need to be cautious and not infer that a BCI indicating certain levels of brain activity and semantic processing in a subject is evidence of an understanding of the ethical magnitude of life-and-death decisions and the ability to make them.</blockquote><a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4115612/" rel="noopener nofollow" target="_blank">-Walter Glannon</a>, Bioethics Professor at University of CalgaryYet another, and somewhat more immediately worrying for most of us, is that this technology essentially creates a bridge between the human mind and the outside world that might be manipulated by those with dark purposes. Plowing ahead at full-speed without devoting tremendous effort, concern, and diligence toward keeping the information in our brains safe — as well as the physical structure itself — will lead to some truly terrible outcomes. If software can be hijacked, and now the brain is a part of that software, might we see people themselves being hijacked by hackers and terrorists? Could a new kind of computer virus be engineered to create deleterious effects in the biology of a human mind and body?Every new and extremely powerful technological advance comes with the potential for amazingly good as well as nightmarishly bad results. Atomic power, satellites, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence: Brain-computer interfaces are no different. It only takes supremely smart people to make these great things, but it takes good and ethical smart people to monitor them and make sure the human race is not threatened by such inventions.

The merging of humanity with the technology we have created has begun…

Brain-Computer Interfaces: The Next Step in Human Evolution

During the Olympics, skiers think through the twists and spins they will make in an aerial competition, a speed skater visualizes how he will sneak past a competitor on the inside line, and a curler imagines the perfect sweep.&nbsp;It&rsquo;s called mental rehearsal, and psychologists and athletes alike know that it works: picturing ourselves going through routines, whether it&rsquo;s figure skating or something more mundane, improves our chances of success. Now, neuroscientists report Feb. 15 in&nbsp;Neuron, they&rsquo;ve learned how the brain learns physical tasks, even in the absence of real-world movement, and found that it could hinge on getting the mind to the right starting place, ready to perfectly execute everything that follows.A new study suggests that mental rehearsal&mdash;picturing oneself going through a routine, such as a skiing competition&mdash;improves performance by preparing the mind for action.&ldquo;Mental rehearsal is tantalizing, but difficult to study,&rdquo; said <a href="https://profiles.stanford.edu/intranet/saurabh-vyas" target="_blank">Saurabh Vyas</a>, a graduate student in bioengineering and the paper&rsquo;s lead author. That&rsquo;s because there&rsquo;s no easy way to peer into a person&rsquo;s brain as he imagines himself racing to a win or practicing a performance. &ldquo;This is where we thought brain-machine interfaces could be that lens, because they give you the ability to see what the brain is doing even when they&rsquo;re not actually moving,&rdquo; he said.Although there are some important caveats, the results could point the way toward a deeper understanding of what mental rehearsal is and, the researchers believe, to a future where brain-machine interfaces, usually thought of as prosthetics for people with paralysis, are also tools for understanding the brain, said <a href="https://profiles.stanford.edu/krishna-shenoy" target="_blank">Krishna Shenoy</a>, the Hong Seh and Vivian W. M. Lim Professor in the School of Engineering, a member of <a href="http://biox.stanford.edu/" target="_blank">Stanford Bio-X</a> and the <a href="https://neuroscience.stanford.edu/" target="_blank">Stanford Neurosciences Institute</a> and the study&rsquo;s senior author.<h2>What are you thinking?</h2>The idea for the study came while thinking about how people learn to use brain-machine interfaces to perform a task, Vyas said. In a typical setup, a person&mdash;or, very often, a monkey&mdash;has to learn to move a cursor around a computer screen using only patterns of activity in the brain, not hand or other movements. That got Vyas wondering whether what people (or monkeys) learned using brain-machine interfaces might somehow transfer, in a way similar to mental rehearsal, to physical movements.&ldquo;He&rsquo;s just sitting there thinking, and as he&rsquo;s thinking he&rsquo;s getting better and better&rdquo; at moving the cursor, Vyas said, referring to one of the monkeys he studied.&ldquo;The natural question becomes: What happens if you switch to another context, where now he actually has to generate muscle activity? Do you see the effects of that learning in that new context?&rdquo;The short answer is yes, mental learning does transfer to physical performance. Vyas initially taught two monkeys outfitted with brain-machine interfaces to move a cursor from one place to another on a computer screen using only their minds, then introduced a complication, called a visuomotor rotation: what mental signals they previously used to move a cursor up would now move it at an angle, say 45 degrees clockwise. The monkeys easily adapted, and that adaptation carried over when they repeated the same task using their hands, rather than the brain-machine interface, to control the cursor directly. Now, if the monkeys wanted to move the cursor up, they moved their hands 45 degrees clockwise.This suggested that the monkeys were doing something like mental rehearsal, Vyas said&mdash;what they had learned to do in their minds, they could then do with their hands. Some additional experiments and an analysis of recorded neural activity suggest the reason why: rehearsing the task with a brain-machine interface got patterns of activity in the monkeys&rsquo; brains into just the right spot, so they could carry out the same rotation task with their hands, even though they had never done so before.<h2>A new way to probe the mind</h2>&ldquo;There are key differences between our paradigm and true mental rehearsal,&rdquo; Vyas said, and there are reasons to be cautious about interpreting the results too broadly. For one thing, one can&rsquo;t just ask a monkey to imagine skiing down a mountain slope, as one could with a person. For another, mentally rehearsing a task is not the same as using a brain-machine interface to do it. In the latter case, people get feedback on how they&rsquo;re doing, something they can only imagine in mental rehearsal.&ldquo;We can&rsquo;t prove the connection beyond a shadow of a doubt,&rdquo; Shenoy said, but &ldquo;this is a major step in understanding what mental rehearsal may well be in all of us.&rdquo; The next steps, he and Vyas said, are to figure out how mental rehearsal relates to practice with a brain-machine interface&mdash;and how mental preparation, the key ingredient in transferring that practice to physical movements, relates to movement.Meanwhile, Shenoy said, the results demonstrate the potential of an entirely new tool for studying the mind. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s like building a new tool and using it for something,&rdquo; Shenoy said. &ldquo;We used a brain-machine interface to probe and advance basic science, and that&rsquo;s just super exciting.&rdquo;

Mentally preparing for physical activities primes the mind to perfectly execute tasks like skiing. | Getty Images​/Marcin Wiklik

A new tool explores how mental learning processes translate into physical performance.

Brain-machine interfaces visualize how the mind prepares for real-world action

Is there a way to preserve the fleeting, fragile stuff that makes us who we are?

Memory, Neuralink, and Immortality of Consciousness

Future cars will be both self-driving and manual. &quot;We wanted to harness technology to enhance drivers&rsquo; skills without interfering with the enjoyment of being behind the wheel,&quot; explains Jos&eacute; del R. Mill&aacute;n, who holds the <a href="https://cnbi.epfl.ch/" target="_blank">Defitech Foundation Chair in Brain-Machine Interface</a> (CNBI). As part of a joint project with Nissan researchers based at the CNBI, the team managed to read the brain signals that indicate a driver is about to do something &ndash; such as accelerate, brake or change lanes &ndash; in order to send that information to the vehicle. With this advance notice of a few hundreds of milliseconds, the smart vehicle can anticipate the driver&#39;s movements and make the ensuing maneuver easier. The car is also equipped with sensors to monitor its environment, which means it can help the driver when traffic conditions are difficult.An easier and more personalized driving experienceThe signals produced in the driver&#39;s frontal motor cortex are detected using a sensor-equipped EEG (electroencephalography) headset. They are then sent to the smart vehicle for processing. By combining that data with the information detected by its own sensors, the car can react to the situation at hand. &quot;If you&#39;re coming to a red light and getting ready to brake, the car will assist you by starting to brake 200&ndash;500 milliseconds before you do. But if you approach a red light and your brain shows no intention of slowing the car down, the car will warn you that the light is red to make sure you&#39;ve seen it,&quot; says Mill&aacute;n.We all generate different patterns of brain signals, so the vehicle learns from each driver and customizes its software. It stores each driver&#39;s regular routes, as well as their driving habits and style, using this information to more accurately anticipates what each driver might do at any time. The brain-machine interface not only makes driving easier, it also creates a more personalized experience, as the car will always be in sync with the driver. Even the car&rsquo;s setting can be transparently adapted to the driver&rsquo;s preferences. For instance, if the driver has adopted a more relaxed driving style, the interface will detect that the selected sports mode is not appropriate and switch the car to a more comfortable setting.Tech transferIn 2014, after four years of research, scientists from the CNBI delivered the brain-machine interface to their industry partner Nissan. The carmaker then continued the research through a senior innovation research program with support from the CNBI. The resulting technology was integrated into a prototype, creating the interface that enables the vehicle to communicate with the driver. This prototype was unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January.Since 2015, Nissan and the CNBI researchers have been working on further developing this brain-vehicle technology, mainly by adding an eye tracker function. &quot;Our eyes are always moving and observing what&#39;s going on around us,&quot; says Mill&aacute;n. &quot;But not everything we see is relevant or important. So we are studying ways to detect brain signals that indicate that a certain object or situation has caught our attention and needs to be factored in by the vehicle.&quot;For several years now, Mill&aacute;n&#39;s team has been developing scientific knowledge in detecting and using brain signals to control objects and our environment. They have been focusing on driver-assist technology with Nissan since 2011. In parallel, they have been exploring other applications for their expertise as well, such as helping people with motor disabilities.

EPFL and Nissan researchers are able to read a driver’s brain signals and send them to a smart vehicle so that it can anticipate the driver’s moves and facilitate the driving process. Nissan recently unveiled this brain-to-vehicle (B2V) technology. 

Future cars will be both self-driving and manual. "We wanted to harness technology to enhance drivers’ skills without interfering with the enjoyment of being behind the wheel," explains José del R. Millán, who holds the Defitech Foundation Chair in Brain-Machine Interface (CNBI).

A smart car that can read brain signals

<img src="https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/wevolver-project-images/froala%2F1570181911758-inputtest2.jpeg" style="width: 461px;" class="fr-fic fr-dib">Study participants tapped Morse Code into Google Glass after four hours&nbsp;It&rsquo;s not exactly beating something into someone&rsquo;s head. More like tapping it into the side.Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a system that teaches people Morse code within four hours using a series of vibrations felt near the ear. Participants wearing Google Glass learned it without paying attention to the signals &mdash;they played games while feeling the taps and hearing the corresponding letters. After those few hours, they were 94 percent accurate keying a sentence that included every letter of the alphabet and 98 percent accurate writing codes for every letter.This is the latest chapter of passive haptic learning (PHL) studies at Georgia Tech. The same method &mdash; using vibrations while participants aren&rsquo;t paying attention &mdash;&nbsp;<a href="https://www.news.gatech.edu/2014/06/23/wearable-computing-gloves-can-teach-braille-even-if-you%E2%80%99re-not-paying-attention" target="_blank">has taught people braille</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.news.gatech.edu/2008/11/07/reinventing-way-people-learn-play-piano" target="_blank">how to play the piano</a> and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.news.gatech.edu/hg/item/140221" target="_blank">improved hand sensation for those with partial spinal cord injury.</a>The PHL projects are all led by Georgia Tech Professor Thad Starner and his Ph.D. student Caitlyn Seim. The team decided to use Glass for this study because it has both a built-in speaker and tapper (Glass&rsquo;s bone-conduction transducer).In the study, participants played a game while feeling vibration taps between their temple and ear. The taps represented the dots and dashes of Morse code and passively &ldquo;taught&rdquo; users through their tactile senses &mdash; even while they were distracted by the game.&nbsp;The taps were created when researchers sent a very low-frequency signal to Glass&rsquo;s speaker system. At less than 15 Hz, the signal was below hearing range but, because it was played very slowly, the sound was felt as a vibration.&nbsp;Half of the participants in the study felt the vibration taps and heads a voice prompt for each corresponding letter. The other half &mdash; the control group &mdash; felt no taps to help them learn.<img src="https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/wevolver-project-images/froala%2F1570181952817-tap2.jpeg" style="width: 630px;" class="fr-fic fr-dib">The findings demonstrate silent, eyes-free text entry on a mobile device without a keyboard (participants touched on Glass&#39;s touchpad to enter Morse code during quizzes). &nbsp;Many mobile or wearable devices cannot accommodate a full keyboard, so it is a challenge to enable text entry on these devices. This research demonstrates a successful system and a rapid, low-effort way to learn it. Participants were tested throughout the study on their knowledge of Morse code and their ability to type it. &nbsp;After less than four hours of feeling every letter, everyone was challenged to type the alphabet in Morse code in a final test.The control group was accurate only half the time. &nbsp;Those who felt the passive cues were nearly perfect.The research was recently presented in Germany at the 20th International Symposium on Wearable Computers.&ldquo;Does this new study mean that people will rush out to learn Morse code? Probably not,&rdquo; said Starner. &ldquo;It shows that PHL lowers the barrier to learn text-entry methods &mdash; something we need for smartwatches and any text-entry that doesn&rsquo;t require you to look at your device or keyboard.&rdquo;Previous research on PHL used custom hardware to provide the tactile stimuli, but here researchers use an existing wearable device.&nbsp;&ldquo;This research also shows that other common devices with an actuator could be used for passive haptic learning,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;Your smartwatch, Bluetooth headset, fitness tracker or phone.&rdquo;&ldquo;In our Braille and piano PHL studies, people felt vibrations on their fingers, then used their fingers for the task,&rdquo; said Seim. &ldquo;This study was different and surprising. People were tapped on their heads, but the skill they learned was using their finger.&rdquo;Seim&rsquo;s next study will go a step further, investigating whether PHL can teach people how to type on the trusted QWERTY keyboard. That would mean several letters assigned to the same finger, rather than using only one finger like Morse code.

New study demonstrates silent, eyes-free text entry

Learning Morse Code without Trying

We are well on our way as Homo sapiens to becoming a species that fully merges technology with our organic bodies. In some ways, we’ve been getting at this for centuries already, beginning with the first use of eyeglasses, at the end of the thirteenth century in Italy, to improve vision by making it easy for someone to wear two magnifying lenses on the bridge of their nose.But ever since the invention of the computer and the first human-machine interfaces were born (HMIs), a dream of many technologists has been to create direct connections between computers and the human brain. These brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) — also known as Brain-Machine Interfaces (BMIs) — would eliminate the lag inherent in the translation between thought → physical action → computer response. BCIs also allow people who cannot perform physical actions required for HMIs to bypass that real-world step and directly control powerful computer tools with the electrical impulses in their brains.One of the dreams is that BCIs will eventually place the entire canon of human knowledge within the realm of immediate recall: No more searching the internet via typing or voice commands needed. In a near future, we will be able to think about what we need and pull whatever relevant information is available directly from a cloud and into the forefront of our minds.BCIs work because we are able to detect the signals sent between neurons in our brains between the dendrites and axons connecting them. These tiny bits are the differences in electrical potential expressed by ions on every neuron. Scientists can find and measure these signals using implantable electrodes.The signals become digital information which is then translated by algorithms that have been developed over many years of painstaking research and experimentation. Thus, our brain’s signals become a director for machine intelligence that can then be used to control specially-enabled prosthetic limbs and wheelchairs and move cursors and click buttons on monitors. The software can also be trained to recognize the signals that account for very specific “thoughts” that represent numbers and letters, which enables writing (of a sort) for people otherwise unable to physically write.Just like any software application, though, BCIs are susceptible to hacking, as already shown in some intentional attempts at <a href="http://brl.ee.washington.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/07128844.pdf?source=post_page---------------------------" target="_blank">malicious brain-spyware creation</a>. If a BCI can move numbers and letters across a digital gulf, it isn’t going to be difficult for someone to hijack that data and be able to translate whether it represents a banking PIN or a social security number.While the holy grail for the medical community is to use BCIs in neuroprosthetics to change the lives of disabled people for the better (even to the point of the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/01/mind-controlled-robotic-suit-exoskeleton-world-cup-2014?source=post_page---------------------------" target="_blank">mind-controlled exoskeleton</a> a soccer player used to kick-off the 2014 World Cup), an entire ecosystem of business opportunities is growing around this cutting edge technology:— <a href="https://kernel.co/?source=post_page---------------------------" target="_blank">Kernel</a> is capturing memories from the hippocampus, reading them with AI and “recording” them with up to 80% accuracy.<img src="https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/wevolver-project-images/froala%2F1564154397662-Neuralink.jpg" style="width: 766px;" class="fr-fic fr-dib">Elon Musk unveiling his plans for embedding Bluetooth-enabled implants into a human brain.— Elon Musk’s <a href="https://www.neuralink.com/?source=post_page---------------------------" target="_blank">Neuralink</a> initiatives aim to create implantable interfaces between the brain and computers. The early goals will be to offer treatments for brain and nervous system disorders, with the eventual path leading to enhancing normally-functioning brains — i.e. increasing memory and processing speed, adding built-in cloud and internet access, and expanding our senses.— A company called <a href="https://www.foc.us/?source=post_page---------------------------" target="_blank">Foc.us&nbsp;</a>is marketing “brain stimulators” to improve reaction speeds for gamers.— <a href="https://www.neuropace.com/?source=post_page---------------------------" target="_blank">Neuropace</a> is working on ways to predict, detect and stop the signals sent among neurons that cause seizures.<iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/TcAvtglo9Jg?&amp;wmode=opaque" allowfullscreen="" class="fr-draggable" style="width: 767px; height: 479px;" frameborder="0"></iframe>— <a href="https://www.mindmaze.com/?source=post_page---------------------------" target="_blank">Mindmaze</a> is creating a <a href="https://www.nanalyze.com/2016/05/augmedix-and-mindmaze-virtual-reality-in-healthcare/?source=post_page---------------------------" target="_blank">motion-capture VR/AR game system</a> to give paralyzed people a more full experience, while <a href="http://neurable.com/?source=post_page---------------------------" target="_blank">Neurable</a> is using similar tech to give people the ability to control toys and games with their thoughts.— The Pittsburgh-based startup Cerêve has already secured commercial clearance from the FDA to sell their <a href="https://ebbsleep.com/?source=post_page---------------------------" target="_blank">“Sleep System”</a> that can ameliorate insomnia.— <a href="https://www.brainco.tech/?source=post_page---------------------------" target="_blank">Brainco</a> is making wearable devices that will help teachers monitor the level of focus their students have in the classroom and better find and help those students with learning difficulties.All of these uses are possibilities, and there are hundreds of other potential applications for BCIs. Most come with a number of limitations are exactly how practical they would be in the real world. For instance, monitoring students’ focus in a classroom is all well and good until one realizes that actually helping those students would require more staff. Even greater problems need to be resolved before such technology will actually be all that useful.And then there is the fact that most EEG-based BCI systems are very obfuscated: Users and designers don’t actually know all of the possible commands that are available and how to use them in a given BCI. Nataliya Kosmyna of MIT Media Lab has <a href="https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0210145&source=post_page---------------------------" target="_blank">proposed a new conceptual</a> and design space that will allow researchers to properly track, taxonomize, and compare all of their various work, which in turn should help in generating new uses for it.There are a number of ethical considerations that come along for the ride with the implementation of BCIs. One big one, which is evident across almost all technological breakthroughs, is the further stratification of society. There will be those people who can afford BCIs that can improve their lives drastically — whether for strictly medical reasons or to enhance human performance and quality of life in other ways.Next, there is the issue of just exactly how aware and mentally capable certain BCI patients will be, especially concerning those who exist in “locked-in”, comatose states. A BMI may allow these patients to communicate to a degree with the outside world, but there is no way (yet) for us to know exactly their degree of consciousness.<blockquote>All relevant parties need to be cautious and not infer that a BCI indicating certain levels of brain activity and semantic processing in a subject is evidence of an understanding of the ethical magnitude of life-and-death decisions and the ability to make them.</blockquote><a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4115612/?source=post_page---------------------------" target="_blank">-Walter Glannon</a>, Bioethics Professor at University of CalgaryYet another, and somewhat more immediately worrying for most of us, is that this technology essentially creates a bridge between the human mind and the outside world that might be manipulated by those with dark purposes. Plowing ahead at full-speed without devoting tremendous effort, concern and diligence toward keeping the information in our brains safe — as well as the physical structure itself — will lead to some truly terrible outcomes. If software can be hijacked, and now the brain is a part of that software, might we see people themselves being hijacked by hackers and terrorists? Could a new kind of computer virus be engineered to create deleterious effects in the biology of a human mind and body?Every new and extremely powerful technological advance comes with the potential for amazingly good as well as nightmarishly bad results. Atomic power, satellites, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence: Brain-computer interfaces are no different. It only takes supremely smart people to make these great things, but it takes good and ethical smart people to monitor them and make sure the human race is not threatened by such inventions.Thank you for reading and sharing! This article was first published on <a href="https://medium.com/predict/the-future-of-brain-computer-interfaces-and-the-human-machine-4890d6550102" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Medium.com</a>

brain–machine interface (BMIs)

Latest Posts

Brain-Computer Interfaces: The Next Step in Human Evolution

Brain-machine interfaces visualize how the mind prepares for real-world action

Memory, Neuralink, and Immortality of Consciousness

A smart car that can read brain signals

Learning Morse Code without Trying

The future of brain-computer interfaces and the human machine

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