The Future of the Mind (14 page)

LEGAL ISSUES

For the foreseeable future, the question is not whether someone will be able to read our thoughts secretly from a remote, concealed device, but whether we will willingly allow our thoughts to be recorded. What happens, then, if some unscrupulous person gets unauthorized access to those files? This raises the issue of ethics, since we would not want our thoughts to be read
against our will. Dr. Brian Pasley says, “
There are ethical concerns, not with the current research, but with the possible extensions of it. There has to be a balance. If we are somehow able to decode someone’s thoughts instantaneously that might have great benefits for the thousands of severely disabled people who are unable to communicate right now. On the other hand, there are great concerns if this were applied to people who didn’t want that.”

Once it becomes possible to read people’s minds and make recordings, a host of other ethical and legal questions will arise. This happens whenever any new technology is introduced. Historically it often takes years before the law is fully able to address their implications.

For instance, copyright laws may have to be rewritten. What happens if someone steals your invention by reading your thoughts? Can you patent your thoughts? Who actually owns the idea?

Another problem occurs if the government is involved. As John Perry Barlow, poet and lyricist for the Grateful Dead, once said, “Relying on the government to protect your privacy is like asking a peeping tom to install your window blinds.” Would the police be allowed to read your thoughts when you are being interrogated? Already courts have been ruling on cases where an alleged criminal refused to submit his DNA as evidence. In the future, will the government be allowed to read your thoughts without your consent, and if so, will they be admissible in court? How reliable would they be? In the same way that MRI lie detectors measure only increased brain activity, it’s important to note that thinking about a crime and actually committing one are two different things. During cross-examination, a defense lawyer might argue that these thoughts were just random musings and nothing more.

Another gray area concerns the rights of people who are paralyzed. If they are drafting a will or legal document, can a brain scan be sufficient to create a legal document? Assume that a totally paralyzed person has a sharp, active mind and wants to sign a contract or manage his funds. Are these documents legal, given that the technology may not be perfect?

There is no law of physics that can resolve these ethical questions. Ultimately, as this technology matures, these issues will have to be settled in court by judges and juries.

Meanwhile, governments and corporations might have to invent new ways to prevent mental espionage. Industrial espionage is already a multimillion-dollar industry, with governments and corporations building expensive “safe
rooms” that have been scanned for bugs and listening devices. In the future (assuming that a method can be devised to listen to brain waves from a distance), safe rooms may have to be designed so that brain signals are not accidentally leaked to the outside world. These safe rooms would be surrounded by metallic walls, which would form a Faraday cage shielding the interior of the room from the outside world.

Every time a new form of radiation has been exploited, spies have tried to use it for espionage, and brain waves are probably no exception. The most famous case involved a tiny microwave device hidden in the Great Seal of the United States in the U.S. embassy in Moscow. From 1945 until 1952, it was transmitting top-secret messages from U.S. diplomats directly to the Soviets. Even during the Berlin Crisis of 1948 and the Korean War, the Soviets used this bug to decipher what the United States was planning. It might have continued to leak secrets even today, changing the course of the Cold War and world history, but it was accidentally discovered when a British engineer heard secret conversations on an open radio band. U.S. engineers were shocked when they picked apart the bug; they failed to detect it for years because it was passive, requiring no energy source. (The Soviets cleverly evaded detection because the bug was energized by microwave beams from a remote source.) It is possible that future espionage devices will be made to intercept brain waves as well.

Although much of this technology is still primitive, telepathy is slowly becoming a fact of life. In the future, we may interact with the world via the mind. But scientists want to go beyond just reading the mind, which is passive. They want to take an active role—to move objects with the mind. Telekinesis is a power usually ascribed to the gods. It is the divine power to shape reality to your wishes. It is the ultimate expression of our thoughts and desires.

We will soon have it.

It is the business of the future to be dangerous.… The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur.

—ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD

4
TELEKINESIS MIND CONTROLLING MATTER

Cathy Hutchinson is trapped inside her body.

She was paralyzed fourteen years ago by a massive stroke. A quadriplegic, she is like thousands of “locked-in” patients who have lost control over most of their muscles and bodily functions. Most of the day, she lies helpless, requiring continual nursing care, yet her mind is clear. She is a prisoner in her own body.

But in May 2012, her fortunes changed radically. Scientists at Brown University placed a tiny chip on top of her brain, called Braingate, which is connected by wires to a computer. Signals from her brain are relayed through the computer to a mechanical robotic arm. By simply thinking, she gradually learns to control the motion of the arm so that it can, for instance, grab a bottled drink and bring it to her mouth. For the first time, she is able to have some control of the world around her.

Because she is paralyzed and cannot talk, she had to communicate her excitement by making eye movements. A device tracks her eyes and then translates her movements into a typed message. When she was asked how she felt, after years of being imprisoned inside a shell called her body, she replied, “Ecstatic!” Looking forward to the day when her other limbs are connected
to her brain via computer, she added, “
I would love to have a robotic leg support.” Before her stroke, she loved to cook and tend her garden. “I know that someday this will happen again,” she added. At the rate at which the field of cyber prosthetics is moving, she might have her wish soon.

Professor John Donoghue and his colleagues at Brown University and also at the University of Utah have created a tiny sensor that acts like a bridge to the outside world for those who can no longer communicate. When I interviewed him, he told me, “
We have taken a tiny sensor, the size of a baby aspirin, or four millimeters, and implanted it onto the surface of the brain. Because of ninety-six little ‘hairs’ or electrodes that pick up brain impulses, it can pick up signals of your intention to move your arm. We target the arm because of its importance.” Because the motor cortex has been carefully mapped over the decades, it is possible to place the chip directly on top of the neurons that control specific limbs.

The key to Braingate lies in translating neural signals from the chip into meaningful commands that can move objects in the real world, starting with the cursor of a computer screen. Donoghue told me that he does this by asking the patient to imagine moving the cursor of a computer screen in a certain way, e.g., moving it to the right. It takes only a few minutes to record the brain signals corresponding to this task. In this way, the computer recognizes that whenever it detects a brain signal like that, it should move the cursor to the right.

Then, whenever that person thinks of moving the cursor to the right, the computer actually moves the cursor in that direction. In this way, there is a one-to-one map between certain actions that the patient imagines and the actual action itself. A patient can immediately start to control the movement of the cursor, practically on the first try.

Braingate opens the door to a new world of neuroprosthetics, allowing a paralyzed person to move artificial limbs with the mind. In addition, it lets the patient communicate directly with their loved ones. The first version of this chip, tested in 2004, was designed so that paralyzed patients could communicate with a laptop computer. Soon afterward, these patients were surfing the web, reading and writing e-mails, and controlling their wheelchairs.

More recently, the cosmologist Stephen Hawking had a neuroprosthetic device attached to his glasses. Like an EEG sensor, it can connect his thoughts to a computer so that he can maintain some contact with the outside world.
It is rather primitive, but eventually devices similar to it will become much more sophisticated, with more channels and greater sensitivity.

All this, Dr. Donoghue told me, could have a profound impact on the lives of these patients: “Another useful thing is that you can connect this computer to any device—a toaster, a coffee maker, an air conditioner, a light switch, a typewriter. It’s really quite easy to do these things these days, and it’s very inexpensive. For a quadriplegic who can’t get around, they will be able to change the TV channel, turn the lights on, and do all those things without anybody coming into the room and doing it for them.” Eventually, they will be able to do anything a normal person can do, via computers.

FIXING SPINAL CORD INJURIES

A number of other groups are entering the fray. Another breakthrough was made by scientists at Northwestern University who have connected a monkey’s brain directly to his own arm, bypassing an injured spinal cord. In 1995, there was the sad story of Christopher Reeve, who soared into outer space in the
Superman
movies but was completely paralyzed due to an injury to his spinal cord. Unfortunately, he was thrown off a horse and landed on his neck, so the spinal cord was damaged just beneath his head. If he had lived longer, he might have seen the work of scientists who want to use computers to replace broken spinal cords.
In the United States alone, more than two hundred thousand people have some form of spinal cord injury. In an earlier age, these individuals might have died soon after the accident, but because of advances in acute trauma care, the number of people who survive these sorts of injuries has actually grown in recent years. We are also haunted by the images of thousands of wounded warriors who were victims of roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan. And if you include the number of patients paralyzed by strokes and other illnesses, like amyotropic lateral sclerosis (ALS), the number of patients swells to two million.

The scientists at Northwestern used a one-hundred-electrode chip, which was placed directly on the brain of a monkey. The signals from the brain were carefully recorded as the monkey grasped a ball, lifted it, and released it into a tube. Since each task corresponds to a specific firing of neurons, the scientists could gradually decode these signals.

When the monkey wanted to move his arm, the signals were processed
by a computer using this code, and, instead of sending the messages to a mechanical arm, they sent the signals directly to the nerves of the monkey’s real arm. “
We are eavesdropping on the natural electrical signals from the brain that tell the arm and hand how to move, and sending those signals directly to the muscles,” says Dr. Lee Miller.

By trial and error, the monkey learned to coordinate the muscles in his arm. “There is a process of motor learning that is very similar to the process you go through when you learn to use a new computer, mouse, or a different tennis racquet,” adds Dr. Miller.

(It is remarkable that the monkey was able to master so many motions of his arm, given the fact that there are only one hundred electrodes on this brain chip. Dr. Miller points out that millions of neurons are involved in controlling the arm. The reason that one hundred electrodes can give a reasonable approximation to the output of millions of neurons is that the chip connects to the output neurons, after all the complex processing has already been done by the brain. With the sophisticated analysis out of the way, the one hundred electrodes are responsible simply for feeding that information to the arm.)

This device is one of several being devised at Northwestern that will allow patients to bypass their injured spinal cords. Another neural prosthesis uses the motion of the shoulders to control the arm. An upward shrug causes the hand to close. A downward shrug causes the hand to open. The patient also has the ability to curl his fingers around an object like a cup, or manipulate a key that is grasped between the thumb and index finger.

Dr. Miller concludes, “This connection from brain to muscles might someday be used to help patients paralyzed due to spinal cord injury perform activities of daily living and achieve greater independence.”

REVOLUTIONIZING PROSTHETICS

Much of the funding driving these remarkable developments comes from a DARPA project called Revolutionizing Prosthetics, a $150 million effort that has been bankrolling these efforts since 2006. One of the driving forces behind Revolutionizing Prosthetics is retired U.S. Army colonel Geoffrey Ling, who is a neurologist with several tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was appalled at the human carnage he witnessed on the battlefield
caused by roadside bombs. In previous wars, many of these brave service members would have died on the spot. But today, with helicopters and an extensive medical evacuation infrastructure, many of them survive but still suffer from serious bodily injuries.
More than 1,300 service members have lost limbs after coming back from the Middle East.

Dr. Ling asked himself whether there was a scientific way to replace these lost limbs. Backed by funding from the Pentagon, he asked his staff to come up with concrete solutions within five years. When he made that request, he was met with incredulity. He recalled, “
They thought we were crazy. But it’s in insanity that things happen.”