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Key points
- Increasingly, new technology shows that electrical information in our nervous system can communicate with digital devices.
- In one demonstration, Neuralink used implanted devices to enable a monkey to play a video game by controlling a computer with its brain.
- The fact that brain activity is electrical has allowed for several medical interventions, such transcranial magnetic stimulation.
- Techniques that alter brain activity using electrical devices also raise concerns about their abuse.
The divide between our brains and the external world was once thought to be unbridgeable. Yet, advances in prosthetic limbs demonstrated that these could be controlled directly by the brain. Other devices have demonstrated that electrical stimulation from outside can alter brain function.
Crossing the Barrier from Brains to Digital Networks
The entire concept of privacy may be increasingly passé as our inmost thoughts become an open book with advances in artificial intelligence processing of brain activity. Already, there are some medical advances where brain neurons are externally stimulated by electrodes.
Intelligent prosthetic limbs allow users to control actions merely by thinking about movement, as though they were natural limbs (1). Such devices prove that the electrical information in our nervous system can communicate with digitally operated devices.
The demonstration that a monkey can play video games using mind control offers additional startling evidence that this line of research is close to having many more practical applications.
Monkeys Playing Video Games with Their Minds?
In this remarkable demonstration by brain interface company Neuralink, a monkey was trained to move a cursor using a manual joystick. While this was happening, a pair of devices implanted in its brain was sending information to a computer. The computer used artificial intelligence to predict the monkey's arm movements.
Eventually, the joystick was unplugged so that the only information controlling the cursor came from the computer that had learned to predict the monkey's movements with a high degree of accuracy based on activity in its brain.
The end result was that the monkey, known as Pager, played Pong — a game in which the player blocks a ball — with his mind. This demonstration of mind control speaks volumes about the mental continuity between humans and other animals (2). In particular, we observe a clear demonstration of the monkey's inner mental life and the role of intentions in dictating movement.
Although the monkey was reinforced for participating, it clearly relished playing video games and manifested a preference for Pong over other games. While such projects offer a glimpse into animal cognition, the main intent is to explore applications by which physically disabled people can control machines, including communication devices like cell phones.
Therapeutic Interventions
The fact that brain activity is electrical has permitted several well-known therapeutic interventions.
Some medical advances involve brain neurons being externally stimulated by electrodes.
Transdermal nerve stimulation is used to manage pain and control movement. Spinal electrodes stimulate nerves to generate leg movement in patients with spinal injury.
Transcranial magnetic stimulation uses magnetic fields to alter electrical activity within the brain. It is being used to treat depression and schizophrenia.
While the Neuralink demonstration has many fascinating implications for central issues in psychology having to do with the mind-body problem and the continuity of mental experiences among mammals and vertebrates, the intention is largely therapeutic. Neuralink hopes to demonstrate new ways of tackling brain disorders associated with psychiatric symptoms.
If this is possible, it raises the specter of such techniques being abused by autocratic political regimes.
Mind Control and Politics
Such fears are already well-developed in relation to the abuse of psychiatric drugs and electroconvulsive therapy – themes that were developed in the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and enter the digital age in the Black Mirror series.
Imagine what it would be like for Xinjiang's Uighurs if instead of merely implementing the mind-control techniques perfected on American prisoners captured during the Korean War, the Chinese Communist Party could master a brain interface for this purpose. This might enable them to effectively scrub ethnic affiliation from the Uighurs and other ethnic groups who do not conform to their totalitarian world view. (China's social credit system already blocks low scorers from using public transit and taking flights.)
This Orwellian horror story has yet to play out. Meanwhile, the commercial interest in brain interfaces is focused largely on beneficial applications having to do with improving the quality of life for disabled people.
Of course, the Neuralink demonstration is not a scientific project in the academic sense but more of a commercial promotion that lacks the usual scientific scrutiny and controls. We are entitled to be skeptical until the results have been vetted by the scientific community.
Even so, the possibility that a monkey can play video games with its mind is stunning. What might be accomplished with humans using the same technology?
References
1 Lundborg, G. (2014). The Mind-controlled robotic hand. In The Hand and the Brain (pp. 173-190). Springer London.
2 Barber, N. (2020). Evolution in the here and now: How adaptation and social learning explain humanity. Guilford, CT.:Prometheus/Rowman and Littlefield, (p. 81).
https://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Here-Now-Adaptation-Learning/dp/163388… .
