Health aside, the exciting stuff is yet to come. Here are some possibilities:

Brain to Computer

Here are some potential advantages of why you would want to connect your brain to a computer:

Being able to capture your ideas into words, images or even video in real time, without the need to “recreate” them with software

Access information and data from the Internet on the fly

Upload your memories

Download knowledge and possibly skill sets (questionable as of now)

Have a cognitive AI assistant to aid you in decision making and task management

Adding extra sensory inputs

countless more

Brain to Brain

Things get even more interesting when people are able to interact via BCIs, which would usher in a major paradigm shift in human communication.

For thousands of years, our language hasn’t evolved past writing. Sure, our methods have gotten more advanced, but it has essentially remained the same, as we still type out individual letters on our phones or speak.

BCI’s could turn telekinesis into reality- being able to send thoughts and even emotions to your friends and family wirelessly from anywhere in the world. And instead of describing your thoughts in words, you send them in a “raw” format; the abstract concept in your mind before you form it into a word. Multi-dimensional concepts that would otherwise take thousands of words to explain, could all the sudden become intuitive to others in seconds.

This all sounds great, but where do we even start?

It’s All in Your Head

“If the human brain was so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t”

In order to understand how to connect to the brain, we need to cover some fundamental neurophysiology principles…

The Three Brains

Let’s start with the big picture first-

This is a gross oversimplification of the configuration of the human brain, but you can think of it in 3 distinct layers that evolved over time:

The Reptilian Brain

The first and oldest layer that sits at the base. As the name suggests, it evolved before homo sapiens and is shared by all reptiles and mammals. It is responsible for basic involuntary functions like heart rate, breathing, blinking, etc as well as survival instincts such as fear and aggression.

The Mammalian Brain

Evolved on top of the reptilian brain houses the limbic system and is responsible for memories and emotions. It governs the fight or flight reflex, along with desire for food and sex.

The Neocortex

Last but certainly not least, the neocortex is essentially what makes us human. It’s responsible for thinking, reasoning, planning and executive functions.

The Brain’s Building Blocks

The main cells of the brain are called neurons and they are cognitive highways on which electric signal travels to communicate with other neurons. There’s about 80 billion of them and they all connect to each other, forming a massive network of 100 trillion synapses (the connection between neurons.)

Neurons have to two sets of cables to to speak:

dendrites: receive electric impulses from other neurons

axons: transmit electric impulses to other neurons

How neurons “talk” to each other

When the axons of one neuron releases neurotransmitters to the dendrites of another, that chemical reaction changes the receiving neuron’s charge to positive, causing it to fire an electric signal which is called an “action potential”

Action Potential diagram

These action potentials are binary- it’s either on or off with no middle state and could travel anywhere between 1 to 100 meters per second depending the axon layering of myelin sheath, which not only coats and protects axons, but speeds up the electric impulse.

Ok, now that we covered some basic neuroscience premises, and got the dull part out of the way, let’s move on…

BCI Challenges

As if the sheer number of neurons and synaptic connections is not challenging enough there’s another layer of complexity- neuroplasticity.

Neurons are always rewiring themselves to other neurons and even changing their structure and functionality based on our life experiences in order to optimize us to our environment.

By this point it should be apparent that we understand extremely little of the brain. Harvard professor Jeff Lichtman is quoted stating:

“If everything we need to know about the brain is a mile long, how far do you think we’ve walked that mile? …Three inches”

Depressing, I know, but here’s the good news…

Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff

The good news is that we don’t actually need to fully understand the brain in order to create BCI’s that work. We just need a really good grasp of it’s high level functionality. We don’t fully understand what happens inside of A.I. neural networks either, but that didn’t stop us from building an AI to beat one of the top Go players in the world.

Quantifying Thoughts

Our next logical step towards achieving the potential wonders of BCI’s is to scale up our neuron capturing capabilities as we’ve already made significant progress in that area.

When it comes to capturing neural activity, there are two promising methods

Record an electron’s electric activity when it fires (action potential) Record the oxygen spike (oxygenated hemoglobin) as blood flow increases to the neuron’s general area, which has a 2–4 second delay

Comparing BCI Capturing Approaches

When it comes to recording brain activity here are the 6 major devices. We’ll analyze them by the following attributes:

Scale -How much information could be captured from the whole brain)

-How much information could be captured from the whole brain) Resolution -The quality of information captured

In order to have useful BCIs, we need an approach that ranks highly in both of those ares.

Let’s start with the non-invasive methods which don’t require surgery…

fMRI

(functional magnetic resonance imagine)

-Neuroimaging procedure that captures neural activity by tracking changes in blood flow, which due to its nature is delayed by several seconds, not providing real-time information. It also requires strong magnetic activity.

Scale: high (shows info across the brain)

Resolution: medium-low spatial, very low temporal

EEC

(electroencephalography)

One of the most ubiquitous method due to low cost and easy deployment that uses external electrodes to track electric activity.

Scale: High

Resolution: low spatial, medium-high temporal

Now, let’s move to the further end of the invasiveness spectrum that require some form of surgery…

ECoG

(electrocarticography)

Similar to EEG, except it’s deployed below the scalp, on surface of the brain.

Scale: High

Resolution: low-spatial, high temporal

LFP

(Local Field Potential)

Similar to ECoG except it’s pinned on the actual cortex of the brain using micro electrodes.

Scale: low

Resolution: medium-low spatial, high temporal

Single-Unit Recording

Similar to LFP, it uses a neural electrodes to capture single neuron activity.

Scale: Extremely small

Resolution: Extremely high

Patch Clamps

A suction cup that clamps a neuron and can record its activity with a super-high resolution with very little noise. What makes this technique unique is the fact that the clamp can actually stimulate the neuron as well with electric current.

Scale: Extremely small

Resolution: Extremely high

Sharp Electrode Recording

This is the only intracellular technique that actually penetrates the neuron to record individual electric activity. This however will never scale as it kills the neuron.

Scale: impossible

Resolution: As high as it gets.

Stevenson’s Law

Ian Stevenson, PhD has observed:

The number of neurons we can simultaneously records doubles every 7.4 years, if continued, end of this century will reach million, entire brain by 2225

It’s disheartening to hear that even with exponential progress we’re more than 200 years away from a full brain capture according to Stevenson, but a counter observation by Ray Kurzweil keeps our hopes alive to witness an entire brain capture in our lifetimes:

Exponential trends themselves have experienced exponential growth

“when the Internet went from 20,000 to 80,000 nodes over a two year period during the 1980s, this progress remained hidden from the general public. A decade later, when it went from 20 million to 80 million nodes in the same amount of time, the impact was rather conspicuous.”

State of the Art Instruments

We’ve covered a wide breadth of neuroimaging methods, but techniques by themselves are not enough- we need sufficient advancements in the instruments we use in order to increase overall bandwidth, less invasively.

To put things in perspective, today, a couple hundred electrodes measure the activity of ~500 neurons. In order to achieve meaningful advances, we need to be capturing 100k to 1 million, depending on who you ask.

Here are the most promising instruments that could take us to where we want to be…

Neural Silk

A silk film embedded with probes that wraps around the crevices of the brain’s surface.

Silicon Mesh

This electronic tattoo has the potential to be applied to organs like the heart and brain.

Neural Mesh

Soft mesh that’s so flexible that it could be injected through a needle and then unfold and wrap around the brain.

Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS)

A magnetic coil that stimulates the brain externally via magnetic waves.

Neural Dust

As the name implies, tiny 100µm silicon sensors are sprinkled all over the brain to capture neural activity and transmit it wirelessly through your skull. It is highly promising as it could scale extremely high and cover the entirety of the brain, while providing very high spatial and temporal resolution. (I was actually present at the GF2045 conference when it was announced in 2013 *slight flex)

Optogenetics

This could be the wildest and possibly most drastic paradigm-shifting mechanism. It involves injecting a virus into the brain which delivers light sensitive probing molecules which can be controlled through light. Optogenetics has perhaps the highest potential for resolution and scaling.