Brain Jacking

I read an interesting article today, in the “Scientific American” magazine (November 2008, Page. #34). It was about something called “Brain Jacking” or plugging into the brain. What this basically means is creating an interface between machines and the human brain such that we can control them by the means of thought alone. This concept is not entirely futuristic. There are bionic ears (cochlear implants) available which enable the completely deaf or those extremely hard of hearing hear normally. This is achieved by implanting a device into the cochlea that stimulates the auditory nerve.

The author (Gary Stix) explored this concept a little further. Researchers in the University of Pittsburgh have been doing many experiments with controlling machines with the power of thought alone. They (the researchers) trained a monkey to use its thought to manipulate a robotic arm to grab a morsel of food. Though this is far from the science fiction tales of storing many megabytes of data in one’s memory (a la Johnny Mnemonic), it is real enough to be experienced by anyone who wants to experience it.

The next level of this would be to reverse the flow of information, i.e. from machines into our minds. Much like our eyes, ears, tongue, and skin do. Such technology could help us develop things like night vision and help us enhance the power of our sensory perception. But this requires technology we do not have at our disposal today. This requires something that has yet to be invented or discovered. Now, let’s say that we did have all the requisite technology. We would still be unable to send information into our brains unless we figure out exactly how it is that the different neurons that make up our brains communicate with each other. In other words, we have to learn the language of the brain something known as “neural code”.

Unravelling the neural code is one of the most imposing challenges in neuroscience. There are many theories as to how neural codes work, one of them is that the code corresponds to the rate of firing of the voltage spikes generated by a neuron. More recent work has focused on the precise timing between each spike (temporal codes) and the constantly changing patterns of how neurons fire together (population codes).

A collaboration between the University of Southern California and the Wake Forest University has worked to fashion a replacement for a part of the brain known as the hippocampus which is responsible for forming new memories. The hippocampus is the part of the brain which sustains damage in stroke or Alzheimer’s. This project is funded by the National Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). 

They hope that this research work may pave the way to a stage where a person can be taught how to fly an F-15 fighter jet just by downloading the requisite literature into their brains.

They have successfully created an artificial hippocampus for consolidating a rat’s memory of pressing a lever to get a drop of water. Normally the hippocampus emits signals that are relayed to the cortical areas responsible for storing long term memories of an experience. For the experiment, a chemical temporarily incapacitated the rat’s hippocampus. When the rat pressed the bar, electrical inputs from the sensory and other areas of the cortex were channeled through a microchip, which, the scientists say dispatched the same signals the hippocampus would have sent. A demonstration that an artificial device mimicked the hippocampal (sic) output would mark a step towa4rd deducing the underlying code that could be used to create a memory in the motor cortex.

Though these are giant leaps in their own right, they are small steps towards our ultimate goal of understanding how the brain works. Would the neural code for the sentence “see spot run” mean the same to an English speaker as it would to a, say, native Tamil speaker?

“Complex information like the contents of a book weould requite the interaction os a veru large number of brain cells over a veru large area of the nervous system,” observes neuroscientist John Donoghue, of the Brown University. “Therefore you couldn’t address all of themgetting them to store in their connections the correct kind of information. So, I would say based on current knowledge, it’s not possible”

Therefore we can take it for granted we are light years behind what they showed in “The Matrix” when Trinity downloaded the manual for flying a helicopter into her mind through her cell phone. But what if that were possible? What if it were possible to download information directly into our brains? That would change everything from the way we learn to the way we look at the world.

The optimist in me imagines a world where less time is wasted in learning things and the time saved is utilized in gaining practical experience by applying what is learnt in the real world. People could just download the required information into their brains.  Scientist working together can collaborate even more by sharing their thoughts and intuitions with each other. This would also give rise to new forms of art.

The purpose of art is to convey one’s feelings, sensations and emotions through a medium. Now an artist would be able to do just that. A painter could encode in his painting certain devices that would convey to the observer exactly what he was feeling while painting that. An author or poet could encode his feelings and emotions into the words that (s)he writes to convey them to the reader. And then maybe an entirely new form of art could be born out of this. Eventually, instead of writing on a medium, an author or a poet could directly record his feelings and emotions as a package combined with his imagined imagery. Anyone who downloads that package could feel what the author or poet felt.

Cyber-sex would also become a wholly new and greatly enhanced experience. And telepathy would become the basis for a new form of global communications network.

On the darker side, hackers would now be able to induce a variety of disorders in people through downloads. A hacker could induce Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s or any other disorder. One could induce dementia, depression, insanity or other psychological disorders in people by hacking into their brains.

Even without wrongdoers, the proliferation of telepathy could render physical contact obsolete. We would become a race of beings who seldom come into physical contact with each other.

But, all this is at best in the distant future, we have more important things to worry about. For example there is this quandary of whether or not to be able to jack into the human brain it is required to implant the device surgically into the human skull.

Once this is done, the next step I guess would be to modify the human genome such that we are born with these devices in us.

**All Scientific Data and direct quotes courtesy Scientific American Magazine**