The Future of Computing: How Brain-Computer Interfaces Will Change Our Relationship with Computers
Ever since Elon Musk’s Neuralink showcased the monkey Pager controlling a game with its mind, Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) came to the spotlight.
A brain-computer interface (BCI), also known as a brain-machine interface, mind-machine interface, or neural-control interface, has been around for a while. In fact, the research on BCIs started already in the 1970s at the University of California.
This initial research focused on restoring damaged sight, hearing and movements, and BCI research has made significant progress since then. The focus of the research is on pattern recognition, and together with developments in AI and machine learning, this has enabled researchers to become very good at this. A BCI detects minuscule changes in the energy radiated by the brain when you think, recognising patterns in the brain.
Thanks to Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), we can now understand in extreme detail which parts of the brain light up when thinking about something. This has enabled scientists to read dreams, read our thoughts and know our feelings.
However, an MRI machine is not very portable, is very expensive – an entry-level machine starts at $250.000, and it requires a team of researchers or doctors to operate. Therefore, the race is on to create brain-computer interfaces that are cheap, small and can be operated by anyone. Within this category, there are two types of BCI: internal BCI using delicate cybernetic implants such as developed by Neuralink or external BCI devices such as developed by NextMind.
Let’s first look at Neuralink, the company that made headlines with the monkey controlling a game of Ping Pong. It is truly amazing to see a monkey playing games just with its thoughts and to be very good at it. I have covered Neuralink before, in one of my recent Tech Journals by The Digital Speaker.
The vision of Neuralink is to develop ultra-high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect humans and computers to survive the upcoming age of AI. Elon Musk believes that our only way to stand a chance when super-intelligent AI arrives is to merge with AI, hence Neuralink’s mission statement: “if you can’t beat them, join them”.
They have made remarkable progress. In the summer of 2020, they demonstrated three pigs with a surgically implanted Neuralink, recording their everyday brain activities like smelling and moving. Only a year later, they showed Pager playing games with its mind.
Pager had the coin-sized link disc installed in its brain via a surgical robot, connecting thousands of micro threads from the chip to specific neurons to record the brain patterns. After a lot of training, it could play the game simply by thinking about its actions. If this is what a monkey can achieve with an internal BCI, imagine what humans can do when our brains are connected to computers. It also immediately raises a plethora of ethical considerations, which I will cover below.
However, implanting a tiny computer in your brain is not everyone’s idea of connecting with computers. Fortunately, there are also wearable BCIs on the market that do not require a robot operating on your most precious organ.
These less invasive options for a Brain-Computer Interface are using an external device that records your brainwaves. These have been around for a long time as well, in the form of EEG caps. Electroencephalography, or EEG, is probably the second-best known technique for recording neural activity, next to the use of an MRI machine.
Using electrodes placed on the scalp, it can record the brain’s electrical activity. While they are cheap to buy – you can find them on Alibaba for just $20 – they are not the most comfortable, or fashionable, to wear. In addition, it requires a lot of software development to make them useful.
This is where NextMind comes in. They have developed a portable, easy to use, plug-and-play device that can measure your brain’s activity using EEG sensors that are comfortable and easy to wear.
