People who grew up in the digital age care little about of privacy on the Internet. What if technology permitted the direct transmission of our thoughts to the internet without input devices, filters, or editing?

To some, this is a horrifying scenario, heralding not just the death of privacy but also the death blow to reason and sanity that had languished in intensive care in social media. Is it even technically feasible? What would it mean in terms of applications?

Crossing the Barrier from Brains to Digital Networks

Eventually, our brains may become directly connected to a vast communications Internet and who knows where that might lead (1). Will it open up the floodgates to a golden age of and individualism? Or will it generate a stifling uniformity of ideas and beliefs together with the atrophy of curiosity, originality, and creativity?

Those who worry today about the insecurity of their electronic communications may find that their inmost thoughts will become an open book and that the entire concept of privacy is passe.

At present, that scenario is science fiction but it may not remain so. Already, there are some exciting medical advances where brain neurons are externally stimulated by electrodes.

Transdermal nerve stimulation is used to manage pain and control movement. Spinal electrodes stimulate nerves so as to generate leg movement of patients with spinal injury.

Then there are the intelligent prosthetic limbs that users learn to control merely by thinking about movement, as though they were natural limbs (2). Such devices prove that the electrical information in our can communicate with digitally operated devices. Yet, many breakthroughs are needed before direct interfaces between our brains and the communications Internet are possible.

The first major problem is as much philosophical as technological. If our thoughts are to be communicated directly on an electronic network, what does that mean?

Does Thought Exist Separately from Expression?

As it is, thoughts are easily communicated because they are translated into the common currency of language and words. If we are to tap what is happening in the brain, most of this is nonverbal, or preverbal.

If we listen in to the electrical activity in the brain, can we somehow interpret underlying thoughts? Does this electrical activity contain meaningful ideas, or is it just nonsensical chatter analogous to the collective sounds emitted by drunken participants in a crowded party?.

For over a century, neuroscientists have struggled to decode brain activity with varying degrees of success. Sleep researchers use characteristic patterns of electrical activity in the brain to distinguish between different sleep states and wakefulness. This has proven useful in studying the importance of sleep for formation and other functions but it is a long way from extracting the sort of refined message that might be useful for communicating ideas seamlessly.

Functional magnetic resonance imagery has also been useful for investigating which parts of the brain are active in various cognitive tasks. Yet, this does not solve the problem of decoding the noise at a drunken party. It is analogous to walking around outside a large apartment building and determining which of many rooms the party is being held in.

all we can say for certain is that it is possible for neural networks and electronic networks to communicate with each other using electrical signals. This is a modest conclusion but it is not trivial given that electronic systems are capable of learning so that mastery of an electronic limb involves learning by the control system as well as the human.

Given that both sides can play a role in improving communication, a great deal is theoretically possible. Supposing that a brain interface is perfected that works as reliably as the best of modems, of what use might such an interface be?

Applications of Direct Transmission of thoughts on Digital Networks

Of course, extracting intelligible thoughts from the jumble of neural impulses is a tall order, even assuming that it is possible. What is extractable is very unlikely to have much communicative value, unless one happens to be the sort of person who enjoys reading Finnegan's Wake. Like the James Joyce novel, such information is rather unlikely to rise to the level of ordinary words in any ordinary language.

Even accepting such limitations, some sort of printout is likely to be interpretable to computer programs using machine learning and . This information might be stored for further analysis after the fashion of the Human Genome Project where long strings of seemingly meaningless information were not only mined for research purposes but used to solve all manner of medical problems.

For psychologists, digitized brain output could be used to further analyze the mysteries of sleep states versus waking. It might also shed light on the differences in brain function related to , , and other abnormal states.

The brain is not linear, like a molecule and actually consists of numerous processing facilities operating in parallel that greatly complicates the project of recording its electrical output.

Still, the attempt might offer clues into how the brain operates as an integrated whole. Eventually, it might be possible to build electronic simulators that mimic brain activity. This may be the closest we get to understanding the brain's holistic function.

Then researchers could think about how to devise digital tweaks to correct for problems of a disordered brain from schizophrenia to senile . This would open the floodgates for all sorts of dystopian about totalitarian mind control.

Such objectives are far enough off that they can be categorized as science fiction. Even so, they are worth thinking about. It is only by imagining currently fictitious achievements that they are brought to life in the future. If there had been no Jules Verne, there would likely never have been submarines.

Sources

1 Kurzweil, R. (2005). The singularity is near. New York: Viking/Penguin.

2 Lundborg, . (2014). The Mind-controlled robotic hand. In The Hand and the Brain (pp. 173-190). Springer London.