Everything we do is controlled by our brain, but it is one of the areas of the body we neglect the most.

“We sustain psychological injuries even more often than we do physical ones, injuries like failure or rejection or loneliness,” said psychologist Guy Winch in a talk at the end of last year. “And they can also get worse if we ignore them, and they can impact our lives in dramatic ways.”

He continued to say that there are scientific ways that we can treat our psychological injuries but we’re not aware that we should.

The fact is we rarely take care of our minds and they are becoming overwhelmed with constant demands for attention as more and more information is being thrust towards us by mobile notifications, emails, round-the clock news coverage, television – and the list goes on.

Nevertheless, brain-enhancing technology is on the rise and at its furthest reaches, experts believe, we will be able to enhance our knowledge to levels that we can’t even imagine.

Brain analytics

From crosswords to the Rubik’s Cube to the Wii Big Brain Academy computer games, the ways in which we attempt to flex our brain is changing.

With each of these games we are able to push our brain into directly thinking to solve a problem in front of us, but they are not able to tell us much about the condition our brain is in.

A brain-sensing headband from Muse is trying to change the way we think about our brain and its capabilities. The headband, which will undoubtedly attract peculiar looks if worn in public, uses ECG technology and detects responses in the brain. The creators say it can help to improve how you respond to stress as well as improving the emotional state of the wearer, who should use the headband on a regular basis.

In many ways this technology could help us track the brain’s activity much like other wearables let us monitor various other parts of our body. Knowing our fitness activity, for instance, gives us the ability to change our daily habits.

In theory, it is the same with the brain: by knowing what it does, we could increase what we are able to achieve.

“There’s this other thing that is happening where people are trying to develop technologies that are incredibly helpful at developing people as human beings,” said Muse co-founder Trevor Coleman.

“If you look in the fitness space there are all these technologies that are motivating people to be happier and healthier, and by tracking your steps and heart rate and all of that you can really become a healthier person.” Doing this for the brain, he said, would allow us to be more authentic and be ourselves more.

“When we start to do that you can start to see us unlocking the next level of human potential,” he added.

The implant

While it is becoming universally acknowledged that we should take better care of our brains, there exists a much more radical element to developing brain technology. It’s one that could see the need to care for our brains severely diminish, and according to some futurists this technology could entirely replace the brain.

Many of us have certainly had thoughts along the lines of, ‘Wouldn’t it be easier if the knowledge of the internet was connected to my brain?’

Indeed brain implants, and the idea of replacing or uploading our brains with computer chips, are not as far-fetched as they sound. Brain pacemakers have been used since 1997 to help those suffering from diseases, while cochlear implants have been used in restoring hearing. Neural implants offer the potential to be used for everything from medical devices to allowing us to increase our knowledge.

Neil Harbisson claimed to the be the world’s first cyborg in 2012 after he installed an ‘electronic eye’ which, as a solution to achromatopsia that makes him colour blind, helped him to hear colours rather than see them.

The technology, which Harbisson has called an “extension of his brain”, detects colour frequencies and sends it to a chip implanted in the back of his head.

“So, when I started to dream in colour is when I felt that the software and my brain had united, because in my dreams, it was my brain creating electronic sounds. It wasn’t the software, so that’s when I started to feel like a cyborg,” Harbisson said at a TED talk in 2012.

“It’s when I started to feel that the cybernetic device was no longer a device. It had become a part of my body, an extension of my senses, and after some time, it even became a part of my official image.”

Harbisson is proof that technologies can be implanted into our brain and made to work to enhance our lives. However there is still the potential to take the brain to a new level and expand its ability.

Ray Kurzweil, leading futurist and director of engineering at Google, has said that we will be able to upload out entire brains to computers by 2045. A computer chip by IBM, which has been heralded as the “most brain-like” chip to date, includes one million artificial neurons, proving that computing power is getting closer to the natural ability of the brain.

“We’re going to have million of virtual environments to explore that we’re going to literally expand our brains,” Kurzweil said before the Importality by 2045 conference.

“Right now we only have 300 million patterns organised in a grand hierarchy that we create ourselves. But we could make that 300 billion or 300 trillion.

“The last time we expanded it with the frontal cortex we created language and art and science. Just think of the qualitative leaps we can’t even imagine today when we expand our near cortex again.”

The ethical concerns

Given the speed at which technology is advancing it is likely that brain implants will become available in the not-so-distant future – it may take 25 years, or 100.

Futurist and write Zoltan Istvan, like Kurzweild, has said that brain implants aren’t that far into the future and we could all be having them sooner than we think.

I felt that the software and my brain had united… that’s when I started to feel like a cyborg

“In ten years I think the technology will probably go from headsets to microchip implants.

“There’s about half a million people around the world that already have implants,” Istvan said.

“I believe that probably in ten years most people will be chipped and at least 50% of people in first world countries will have chips in them for either tracking reasons or for just monitoring health levels.

“Within 20 years probably everyone will have brain implants, and that’s the one where we start using this uploading concept where we interact with our chips, we interact with each other, our telephone conversations will eventually be just pure telepathy, we won’t have spoken voice.”

What we do have to consider is the ethics behind the technology –the line where stop being human and the machine takes over.

Will we exist just as digital data rather than in a physical sense? And at what point will our human minds be deleted? The questions are limitless.

The decisions that need to be made don’t just relate directly to our bodies either.

When a day comes where everyone has almost all the knowledge inside their heads and does not need to learn it, what will happen to our educational establishments, what will work become, and what will happen to political structures?

There are clearly no easy answers to any of these questions, but as brain augmentation technology becomes more advanced they should be in the back of minds, along with the implanted chip.

Featured image courtesy of Ivan via Flickr/Creative Commons Licence