The Possibility Space of Brain Computer Interfaces

Welcome to Synaptic Spice Engine, your one stop for all things brain. My name is Eashan and by the end of this post, you’ll have some insight into how we’ve historically imagined brain integrated tech and get a snapshot of where we are in the development of these ideas. It’s a breezy read so enjoy!

Possibility space refers to the conceivable ideas for which a technology or product can occupy. Typically, this space expands in response to improvements in hardware and software which unlock new form factors and modes of engagement. Before the technology, however, comes the imagination. For this, inventors and innovators turn to fantasy, self-derived or depicted in their media of choice. A familiar story in this vein is Apple’s adoption of the GUI after Steve Jobs’s 1979 visit to Xerox PARC. It was that visit which exposed him to the working concepts of a mouse, and windows on a graphic interface. It was that visit which sparked an expansion for the possibility space of the personal computing industry.

This type of pattern is historically recurrent. For instance, phones were constrained in features before multitouch. Paradigm shifts in interactivity and recording capabilities expanded what was possible. Today, we can instantly communicate with someone on the other side of the globe, disseminate our ideas and our writings via the internet, and make a living off our knowledge. Similarly, brain-computer interfaces are on trend to become much more ubiquitous in the future and their introduction to average consumers will result in completely novel interactions and use cases. The mind-machine connection has been a fixture of cultural memory ever since the 1900s. Pop culture and media created salient imagery like that of the Matrix, mind reading devices, and bionic eyes to spark our imagination.

At first, these neurotech devices seemed fitting for a far off future. Slowly though, the current possibility space has expanded to nudge these fascinations into grounded reality and our impossibilities into achievable things with shape and form. What do we imagine BCIs can do? What are our aims and goals in this field? This brief post aims to cover these questions. Naturally, the first place I turned to for inspiration was film and media.

Memory and Recall

Many movies have imagined building a brain-integrated future. We can look at 1983's Brainstorm for one. In it, researchers create a system that is capable of recording and playing back memories. Yet, that’s not all. The device, dubbed “The Hat,” is not only capable of recording and replaying events but recording the wearer’s emotions too. This naturally raises a ton of concerns regarding ethics and safety. The device used to titillate the senses via recorded erotic memories in moments of intimacy, and even inadvertently records the experience of a heart attack, which when played back, gives another character a near death experience. Thus, we see the the encoding and retrieval of objective and subjective experiences.

There’s a 2011 episode of Black Mirror titled: “The Entire History of You.” It depicts a world where people have memory implants which seamlessly record everything they see, hear and do. This becomes a source of conflict in one couple’s lives as they grapple with and overanalyze frames of their interactions. Frame by frame, they comb through heated moments, percolating in the negativity of past experiences, fixating on them.

Ted Chiang’s acclaimed collection of stories, “Exhalation,” contains another example of tech that augments human memory. The story, “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling” describes lifelogging and the impact artificially-induced eidetic memory and recall has on a father’s memories of his daughter. His nostalgia blinded him from understanding how he really acted in the past and it becomes a wake-up call for him to reckon with how harsh and unsupportive he had actually been. This inspires him to change for the better.

So where is the field now on this type of tech?

Well, the concept of lifelogging has been around for several decades. Yet, breakthroughs in technology have contributed to our ability to produce devices that capture higher fidelity sequences of an individual’s life. For instance, YouTuber-programmer-artist, Lucas Rizzotto used Snap’s Spectacle 3 glasses to record a year of his life and revisit his memories in a virtual time machine. However, that project took a lot of hard drives and the glasses themselves had other limitations such as overheating, and could only record 60 seconds at a time. In other words, it didn’t scale.

As of this post, there aren’t yet models advanced enough or devices that are capable of storing and replaying user’s physical experiences, much less their emotions and thoughts. That type of tech is quite far away.* Yet, I suspect we will see more in the way of hardware form factors from startups trying to advance how users interact with AI and expand the scope of IoT devices to become even more ubiquitous with our daily interactions.

Sensory Augmentation, Replacement or Recovery

Avatar (2009) has a memorable example of sensory enhancement. Neural connectivity is established between a human body and an Avatar body via a pod (that vaguely resembles an MRI machine). The film’s protagonist, Jake Sully, is a paraplegic marine and one of the first things he notices after entering his Avatar body is that he can wriggle his toes and stretch out his legs. He’s acquired sensation in his feet again! He savors the feeling, running out of the facility with exuberance. Implants that restore function to existing muscles for movement.

When it comes to human-machine interactions, The Matrix is probably one of the more culturally salient films. This 1999 film introduces viewers to a world where machines have created a simulated reality for humans. The humans are plugged into the Matrix through pod devices, which keep their minds occupied while their bodies are used as batteries to power the machine world. While grim, the future reality depicted is pure fiction. However, it does warn of the dangers with easy access to comforts via technological intervention. The Matrix spawned many adaptations and stories that centered on the ideas of humans becoming complacent, getting cheap dopamine hits artificially and thus, letting their external world fall into decay.

Today, the primary motivator for building BCIs is to restore lost sensory and motor function. That’s where most of the field is. For example, prosthetic limbs are available, albeit expensive. Devices now exist that serve to restore the ability to hear and/or distinguish sounds. We’re even making progress on visual restoration. It is still the early days but across the globe, researchers are working to advance our understandings of how our nervous system works and how we can craft solutions that improve quality of life.

What does the future of BCIs look like?

This is the part where things get a little woo. If we are to follow existing trends, it is likely that the electrodes will get smaller, advances in material sciences will enable greater signal quality, and brain computer interfaces become functionally invisible additions to our cognitive structures.

The ability to harness and use this tool will likely be disproportionately higher in younger people. It’s hard to grok how different things would become if everyone had instant access to all of humanity’s knowledge within their heads. For one, I could imagine it’d make finding things in reality and in our memories a lot less of a headache. Perhaps we could enable something like dream-sharing, or figure out how to get the restorative effects of sleep without requiring a block of “offline” hours. Maybe the creativity and ingenuity of our species would dramatically increase. In the meantime, I’m interested to see how we use artifice to recreate the beautiful intricacy of our biology. I really don’t think it’s a matter of if, but when. And when these advances arrive, in waves, or in a steady-stream, the real problem would reveal itself to us more clearly. That is to say, that people do not lack knowledge per se, but courage.

*Note: The author of the post would love to be proven wrong on this.

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