Mind-reading computers – Phil Wang, Anne Vanhoestenberghe and Luke Bashford

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Speaker 1 hello on my right is Robin Ince and on my left is Brian Cox.

Speaker 10 Though obviously it's the other way around for those of you listening on the radio.

Speaker 1 If you are looking directly at the radio.

Speaker 1 Anyway, so and for those of you who prefer to imagine we present the show from the bunk bed we live in in Broadcasting House, I'm on the bottom bunk and Brian is on the top bunk.

Speaker 1 I did actually once have the top bunk but due to the weight that I pushed down the mattress due to to the size of my backside, Brian was very worried that the universe was suddenly expanding towards him and was quite unable to sleep.

Speaker 10 Just to say because I was a little bit late arriving I didn't edit that bit of Robin's scripts.

Speaker 10 I would have taken it.

Speaker 5 It's true though isn't it?

Speaker 10 No, because then people think we're like the Morcombe and White Dows of the Admiralty.

Speaker 1 Bunk beds, not side by side, Brian. You were fine.
There's a ladder between us, both metaphorically and physical.

Speaker 10 Anyway, this is the infinite monkey cage.

Speaker 1 That's the longest period of time it's taken to get to that bit. So today we're discussing the new science of of Brian computer interfaces.
What is Brian computer interface?

Speaker 1 What new possibilities will these technologies create for human brians? Can Brian have a computer implanted into his brain? And if so, would we do it now and see what happens?

Speaker 1 Because I've got a chisel and I've got some detol and apparently that is all you need to do this experiment.

Speaker 10 There's obviously a bit of comedic license there in Robinson's introduction, but it is actually remarkably correct, up to a slight rearrangement of the letters and the words.

Speaker 1 It is actually genuinely written here, right? It was was written in the notes that I was sent that today we were looking at Brian computer interface.

Speaker 5 That's actually.

Speaker 5 That was in the notes.

Speaker 10 But it should say brain computer interface.

Speaker 1 Nevertheless, we can still use the detoll and chisel. So

Speaker 1 we are joined today by a professor of active implantable medical devices, a lecturer and researcher into brain-computer interfaces that investigate the neural mechanisms underlying human sensory, motor, and cognitive function, and a comedian.

Speaker 5 And they are.

Speaker 11 My name is Dr. Luke Bashford.
I am a lecturer in neuroscience and neurotechnology at Newcastle University.

Speaker 11 And the brain-computer interface that would have the biggest impact on my life is one that I could offer to anyone who had a neurological problem, who came into the clinic, who came into the lab, and who could walk out with the problem that they were having resolved.

Speaker 12 My name is Anne van Hostenberg. I'm a professor of active implantable medical device technology at King's College London.

Speaker 12 And the brain-computer interface that would the most influence my life would be one that would enable people who are not able to be part of the conversation, they can't communicate and we don't hear them, to become part of the conversation.

Speaker 13 I'm Phil Wang, I'm a comedian and slob.

Speaker 13 And the brain-computer interface that would most improve my life is a bionic arm that will throw a ball in the direction I want it to go.

Speaker 13 Because currently my actual arm is apparently a ball direction randomizer.

Speaker 1 And this is our panel.

Speaker 1 Phil, I've got to pick you up on that first of all.

Speaker 1 Are you someone who, when you walk through the park, decides to leave because you see people playing a ball game and go, if that comes anywhere near me, it's a disaster.

Speaker 1 And the social embarrassment is so great. And that is why you became a comedian.

Speaker 13 Yeah, to stay away from the balls. I've thrown balls literally perpendicular to the way I wanted them to go.

Speaker 13 I understand the science behind it. I can't make the magic happen.

Speaker 1 Anyway, welcome to today's episode of In the Psychiatrist Chair.

Speaker 10 Luke, could we start with the definition? So we've heard the term several times now, brain-computer interface. What is that?

Speaker 11 So it's a device that is comprised of three main components. There is a part of it which is actually sort of contacting the brain.
This part records the brain signal.

Speaker 11 Then that signal is taken to some sort of computer that processes that signal.

Speaker 11 And then that goes to the final part of this chain which is the effector which is whatever it is that someone is going to use or control be it a robotic arm be it a computer on a screen or some other device.

Speaker 10 And Anne, it sounds quite futuristic I suppose that doesn't it? It sounds rather science fiction. But historically, well it's a long history of such devices.

Speaker 12 There's a long history of trying to interact with the nervous system.

Speaker 12 I don't think we initially imagined them as being brain-computer interfaces, but the concept of trying to modify the way people move using electricity is not new.

Speaker 12 Research groups creating devices back in the 60s and even before, and really good examples are cochlear implants. Pacemakers as well, we've seen them develop.

Speaker 12 No, they are something that you are completely familiar with. You don't see them as sci-fi, but the technology that is used is similar to what we're talking about today in brain-computer interfaces.

Speaker 12 So we in the UK have a long history within research and industry of creating these devices.

Speaker 1 So what was that turning point that allowed this kind of new adventure in terms of the brain-computer interface to begin?

Speaker 12 For brain-computer interface, it's miniaturization, definitely. You usually have a sort of a moment when there is a technology that's created, like we've got electricity, how can we use it?

Speaker 12 And then people will find medical applications amongst a lot of other applications.

Speaker 12 And then the engineers run behind the idea of the medical visionaries trying to give them the engineering that they need, which is usually make everything smaller.

Speaker 12 And nothing's more true than brain-computer interface. Make it smaller and then make it last longer.

Speaker 12 You know, you don't want to drop your mobile phone in water and then just pick it up and just go, it's dead. And we're trying to put things in the brain, which is wet and aggressive.

Speaker 12 It tries to destroy everything you put in it.

Speaker 1 That's an incredible image, the idea that you've got a BCI in your head and then you accidentally put your head in the toilet and then go, oh, I better just put my head in a bucket of rice for a while.

Speaker 5 I've heard that works.

Speaker 1 I now merely have an image of rice-headed in humans.

Speaker 10 I suppose the science fiction image is literally implanting things through your skull into your brain.

Speaker 11 Which in certain cases is what happens, but there are a variety of devices, I mean to this point of miniaturization.

Speaker 11 When we were performing these studies ten, fifteen, twenty years ago, you would go into a room and you would look like the road crew for a touring band with just boxes and boxes and racks of everything, and you would need that in order to do now what we can do with a device the size of a ten P piece, and all of the computing that you need is actually embedded into it.

Speaker 11 So the fundamental signal that drives these devices is the individual firing of individual brain cells.

Speaker 11 So, implanted devices that go through into the brain and sit next to these cells physically, they record the activity of these individual units.

Speaker 11 From that most implanted version, you can sort of abstract out all the way through to a device that sits purely on the scalp of the head and records the electrical activity of whole populations of cells, but non-invasively from the surface of the brain.

Speaker 11 In between then, you have electrodes that rest on the brain's surface, but don't actually penetrate it. You have electrodes that sit under the scalp but above the skull.

Speaker 11 And this is just the devices that record the electrical activity. You can then have devices that interact, you know, via sound or light.

Speaker 10 See, Phil, which one would you choose just at the moment? If we said, well, you can have either the one where the things are...

Speaker 10 actually stuck into your brain or the one where it just kind of picks up.

Speaker 13 I've been perusing the options of the last five seconds and I don't know. I'm liking the ones that don't require a hole in my skull.
I think the one that I just put on the top may be. It depends.

Speaker 5 Is that too casual?

Speaker 11 It depends what performance you want from it. So at the moment, the most implanted, those that are closest to the cells, will give you the most performance.

Speaker 11 So the fine resolution control that you might have seen or that is achievable, that comes from the most implanted.

Speaker 13 What does performance mean? Like graphics quality?

Speaker 11 Not quite.

Speaker 11 It means, for example, if you're controlling a device, the precision with which you can control it So the amount of degrees of freedom the amount of manipulation that you have the speed that you can do it Sure this comes from the most implanted devices the least implanted devices you can maybe control One or two or three things so a left a right an up a down a click the amount of physical coordination I have at this point might as well just have it on the top of my skull to be honest I don't think I'm working on a pre-rote.

Speaker 11 You might need the implanted version for your throwing arm.

Speaker 5 Yeah, definitely.

Speaker 1 Is it because you're one of those people? Because I think I would, if I've got like a hole in my tooth, I can't stop fiddle-faddling around with it until I've broken the tooth.

Speaker 1 So if I had a hole in my head, I know that I shouldn't stick my finger in and kind of wobble it all around,

Speaker 13 but I would. Yeah, you'd start stroking it.

Speaker 5 Do people end up stroking it?

Speaker 5 Oh, that stops me.

Speaker 5 Yeah, no, that kind of thing. It'd be a great thing.

Speaker 13 People could go to sleep by just pressing a button in the top of your head at night.

Speaker 5 I find going to sleep with you.

Speaker 1 The only problem then is who turns the button back on again?

Speaker 13 And these flaws will cause a flaw in the plan, yeah.

Speaker 1 so and what is this because I remember once having that I think it was EEG but the the watching the way that my brain was reacting to different pieces of music I went to

Speaker 1 I forget where it was now in somewhere near Putney and and so once I went to somewhere near Play literally my next guy he said can I put some electrodes on your head and you know me I'm very much a yes person it wasn't so it wasn't at a university or a student

Speaker 1 you know what it was it was this incredible research institute which was you trying to work out different ways. It was a long, long time ago, and I'm 56.
I can't remember everything.

Speaker 10 It was just someone's house.

Speaker 5 I'm just imagining a guy in a van in potty saying, hey, come and look at me.

Speaker 1 I wish it was their house. It was a well.

Speaker 1 So, for instance, without actually any form of invasive, so without even, like, say, going under the skin, in what ways might we be able to change behavior?

Speaker 11 The skull, unfortunately, sort of disrupts almost all of the signals that you would use to record from the brain precisely.

Speaker 10 Which is probably the point of the skull, isn't it?

Speaker 5 Which is probably the point of the skull.

Speaker 1 Yes. To protect your brain

Speaker 11 from all kinds of things, but these devices too.

Speaker 11 So, there, I mean, you can influence activity, you can influence movements, you can influence sort of certain behaviours with these kinds of non-invasive stimulations, and that's quite well established, even in clinical standard.

Speaker 11 Okay.

Speaker 1 Can I ask you about the magnet thing? Because I've had that done. I've had it to the right side of the left side of my brain, isn't it, to the motor region there.

Speaker 1 And I had a magnetic thing to to stop me talking Brian used it and no it was Jack

Speaker 5 bloody working yes

Speaker 1 you arrived late and I cut the wires

Speaker 11 but I remember and then they did another little movement where it was another part of the motor region so it meant that I had what I would consider to be involuntary actions in my hand so moving that magnet around the top of the head you know what other things might occur as we move from say the the left hand side where the motor region is what other things can be manipulated with a magnetic force in principle you can manipulate any population that is the focus of that stimulation the thing is that there are certain populations for example of cells in the motor cortex that directly control the outputs of your muscles so in that case you would see exactly these involuntary movements that you saw some are sort of more subtle so for example if you move forwards into something like the prefrontal cortex this is more associated with cognitive function so actually if you were being stimulated in that region you may not necessarily notice anything unless you were engaged in a very particular cognitive task.

Speaker 11 Something would be happening, but it wouldn't be as obvious visibly as a twitch.

Speaker 13 So, these implants can allow you to control machines, but information can also go the other way around. It can be used to control your movements?

Speaker 11 Yes. The sort of technical term for that is an open-loop versus a closed-loop device.

Speaker 11 So, an open-loop device is one that records the brain activity, monitors it, models it, and then outputs it into something.

Speaker 11 The closed-loop version of a brain-computer interface is that then, whatever you're using, be it a computer or a robot arm, when you touch something, will trigger an impulse back to your brain that will allow you to feel or sense what you have just been doing.

Speaker 11 So, a stimulation in sensory cortex after you've made a movement, you will feel the consequences of that.

Speaker 10 And you build these devices, so could you give us a sense of what they are? What are they made out of? What do they look like?

Speaker 12 There is a range of them, depending on which one you're looking at. I mean, Luke brought one, so well, I'll try to describe it.

Speaker 12 But what you've got is long threads at the end of which you're going to have the electrode arrays.

Speaker 12 So each of these little squares, which for everybody else's interest is much smaller than the nail of my little finger, are containing several hundreds of electrodes.

Speaker 12 So these are what's being pushed into the region of your brain that you're trying to listen to. And then what nobody realizes is that on this type of device, there's this.

Speaker 12 This is the connector to connect to the cable. It's about the size of the top phalange of my little finger.
And this sticks out.

Speaker 13 The thing as a whole looks like C3PO's Bolo tie.

Speaker 12 And it's got a thread on it. And what you do is you thread a cable that's going to be outside, and that's what's connected to your computer.
And this is never removed.

Speaker 12 So for anybody who's participated in a study where they've had one of these implanted, of this type of device, they will have the electrode array, the thread, and then the interconnection.

Speaker 12 Now, more modern devices that aren't as able

Speaker 12 record as many electrodes, so they don't have the same precision of information.

Speaker 12 This one is really a neuroscience device, but some of the ones that are more targeting a clinical application, less precise, fewer electrodes, but instead of having a connector like that, they're implanted the electronics, so they then become completely hidden under the skin.

Speaker 10 So it is essentially some wires, what about five centimeters long or so, and then a data port.

Speaker 10 And so you connect the wires into the brain, the data port on the outside, you read the data out.

Speaker 11 Exactly. And the advantage of these types of wired devices, so connected by cable, as Anne was saying, is that here you have access to the full bandwidth of brain activity.

Speaker 11 We record at sort of 30 kilohertz, which is a sort of a sampling rate that's fast enough that you can capture the individual activity of individual brain cells.

Speaker 11 So with this kind of device, you can record all of that raw signal, and then you can record sort of the summed electrical activity from that population as well.

Speaker 11 This is called the local field potential.

Speaker 11 So if an individual cell is one cell that fires, the local field potential represents the summed activity of all of the tens, hundreds, thousands of cells in that population.

Speaker 11 And then that is fed out through this device. The problem is that it leaves this port that comes through the skin and that in principle could be a source of infection.

Speaker 11 When you implant though, all of the electronics, all of that processing, because you don't have the cabled connection, has to happen on the device, which there are limits to the amount of battery that that takes.

Speaker 11 There's the limits to the amount of heat that those computations generate.

Speaker 11 So you get out what you need for the application, but you don't get out the full brain activity that you might want for a scientific question.

Speaker 13 Could you not recharge yourself every night with a little USB port in the back of your head?

Speaker 12 I mean, you do. You have like devices like Oclear Implants don't have a battery implanted.
You only use them with an external battery, and then the power is transferred like your toothbrush charger.

Speaker 12 So you sort of have power transferred directly. But for brain-computer interfaces, if you think about something that has to work 24-7,

Speaker 12 at what point in your life or in your everyday activity would you say, oh, oh, it stopped working.

Speaker 12 Everything I was doing that I was enabled to do, I can't do anymore because I need to go recharge or my battery's no longer working.

Speaker 12 So they take different approaches, compromises on what they're doing.

Speaker 10 In terms of the engineering challenges, because this is a medical device that, as you said, it's implanted, they're at the infection control and so on.

Speaker 10 So how much of a constraint is that on the engineering that you're building something that goes inside the brain?

Speaker 12 I mean, it's terrible, but it's also my career, so I can't complain about it.

Speaker 5 But

Speaker 12 it's really challenging. As I was describing earlier, if you drop your phone in water, it will stop working.

Speaker 12 We're making devices that are more powerful than your phone or trying to, that are hopefully going to last a lot longer than your phone.

Speaker 12 We're talking decades long, and that are smaller, that have to resist shocks and bumps, and whatever you do to your head, can't stop working because somebody threw a ball at you and it landed on your head.

Speaker 12 And all of this, I mean, the body is not just wet, it's really, really apt at destroying anything that invades it. In fact, it's what it does best.

Speaker 12 And so, we're, as I said, yeah, it's a real challenge.

Speaker 1 In terms of the first versions of this, you know, we're talking about challenges.

Speaker 1 I mean, these tiny little things that you mentioned, smaller than your fingernails, I think to me, I would describe them as being the size I imagine a baby ladybird might be.

Speaker 1 And you've got these tiny, you know, when that is placed inside human tissue, what were the early failures? What are the things which we went, thought that would work? That doesn't work.

Speaker 1 The invasive nature of this, the body has a way of dealing with it.

Speaker 11 So, what happens when you implant a device into the brain tissue is that your brain responds, much like the rest of your body does, to this foreign object, by forming a scar.

Speaker 11 So, a glial scar around each of these electrodes that goes in.

Speaker 11 And this glial scar that sort of forms and kind of encapsulates the device prevents you from being able to record the neurons that you're there to record.

Speaker 11 So over time, what you find is the very first sort of moment that you implant this and you switch it on, you'll look at it and across all of these different channels, you'll see hundreds and hundreds of very well-defined neurons firing, and you can see the sort of the shape of each of these firings.

Speaker 11 Over time, you start to lose those. And so that is because of things like the glial scar forming around the device.
It's also to do with very small movements.

Speaker 11 So you're never really recording the same cells day to day because the brain moves a lot. So you get very subtle changes in which cells you record from.

Speaker 11 You can compensate for that from recording from the population. But you can also then kind of compensate for all of this with smarter materials.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 12 What you described as a baby ladybird, it's also got a hundred legs. I don't know if you've, in your vision of the ladybird, you see the hundred legs.
You can't see them with the naked eye.

Speaker 12 On these legs are tiny little hair, I guess, or points that are the area of recording. So it's really very small.

Speaker 12 And one of the things that was happening is the material at these areas was deteriorating. And there's been a huge amount of progress in improving the quality of this material so it stays stuck.

Speaker 12 on there, it doesn't get dissolved by the body, it doesn't get so affected that it would delaminate or see other deterioration.

Speaker 12 And it also has to keep conducting the electrical signal that it's recorded, has to stay connected with the back end where you have your interconnection to your cable.

Speaker 12 So, each of these interconnections, each of these interfaces are areas of fragility.

Speaker 12 In some way, we try to control the foreign body response, the scarring. In some other ways, we try to make sure that nothing decomposes into the body.

Speaker 1 So, what are they actually made of? What is the material that I'm holding here now?

Speaker 1 As you said, they look like tiny little legs or like a kind of tiny hairbrush, whatever it is.

Speaker 12 That's silicon. That's the same as all of the chips that are in your phone.
All electronics runs on integrated circuits on silicon.

Speaker 13 What's the brain using to deteriorate then?

Speaker 5 Like acid?

Speaker 12 Just too juicy?

Speaker 12 It's water with salt, mostly. It's water with salt and some reactive oxygen species.
So the top layer of the silicon, you have a few nanometers of a metal.

Speaker 12 And so the first thing it will do, it will corrode the metal. And then it will start attacking the silicon itself.

Speaker 1 Right. I love this brain acid image of yours.

Speaker 13 Does brain have acid? I don't know. I feel like I know nothing about the brain.

Speaker 1 What can these devices? Where Brian's just driving straight over that line.

Speaker 1 He's had that moment of going, I'm sorry, even I know more about biology than that.

Speaker 5 We're moving on.

Speaker 10 What can these devices do today?

Speaker 11 They can restore movement, they can restore speech, they can be used to restore sensation.

Speaker 10 So you get the signal from the brain and then you re-inject it into the body.

Speaker 11 If you have, for example, a high-level spinal cord injury, the brain activity that underlies all the behavior that you attempt to do isn't affected by that injury. It's preserved.

Speaker 11 This is different, for example, if you have a stroke because that brain area is physically damaged and it might not function as it should.

Speaker 11 But in, for example, a spinal cord injury, the brain activity is doing everything that it normally would.

Speaker 11 It's just that those signals can't pass the injury and they can't make their way to the muscles and you don't make any movements or behaviors. So what these devices do is they're implanted.

Speaker 11 We start to record the brain activity, and we ask people who are involved in these studies to say, Okay, attempt to do this certain thing, imagine doing that.

Speaker 11 And attempting or imagining to do something produces a very stereotyped brain activity that is very similar to actually doing it if you were really doing it.

Speaker 11 And so, what we do is to start to pair up all of the kind of stereotypical brain responses to their behaviors.

Speaker 11 And once you've done this over thousands and thousands of different repetitions and trials, you can build a very good model of, okay, a certain brain activity means that I'm attempting to move to the right.

Speaker 11 And this particular pattern means I'm attempting to move to the left. This might be because if I'm moving to the right, a certain cell increases its firing rate, you know, compared to baseline.

Speaker 11 And if I was moving to the left, that same cell or even a different cell decreases its activity. So once you've built this model, you can track the brain activity in real time.

Speaker 11 And as someone imagines doing something, when you see that pattern, you say, ah, with a certain confidence, they're probably trying to move to the right.

Speaker 11 And so the device would see that and then move to the right. And then the individual knows that, oh, that's what I was trying to do.

Speaker 10 So you're not

Speaker 10 reinserting the signal into the muscles in the arm, for example?

Speaker 11 Not in that type of brain-computer interface. So once you have a good, stable recording device, and then you have a good model, what you restore is a control signal.

Speaker 11 So, if you control, you know, up, down, left, right, backwards, and forwards, however many degrees of freedom that you have, you can then, in principle, plug that into whatever.

Speaker 11 So, if you plug it into a computer, it looks like you're moving the computer around. If you plug it into a powered wheelchair or a car, you know, you'll drive the car around.

Speaker 11 If you were to attach it to electrodes that stimulate the muscle, you can then stimulate muscle.

Speaker 11 The problem is, those electrodes are still quite a kind of a coarse thing and you lose that fine precision that you could get with a device.

Speaker 12 One example of a team, French-Swiss team, that have done just what you're describing, Brian, where they have one implant in the brain that records the activity as Lucas explained, has the dictionary, the mapping, and then another implant on the level of the spinal cord below the level of the injury that can then activate or attempt to activate a person.

Speaker 12 And with this combination of two devices, each of which are relatively sizable but remarkable in the fact that they can talk to one another that's been demonstrated to provide some degree of control over movement of a person who's otherwise not able to do it

Speaker 10 if you want to contribute this so i'm looking at phil here so see let's say phil just said i believe in this sign so much i would like to

Speaker 5 provide my brain my head

Speaker 5 as a as an experimental society as your new lawyer so i would like to say anything you say will need to you being taken back to new new businesses.

Speaker 10 That's what his expression is saying.

Speaker 10 But it seems because it's an invasive, or at least the electrode implanting is invasive, is that always done on people who need it from a medical point of view? Or are there could feel volunteer?

Speaker 13 Can Brian say volunteer me?

Speaker 11 No, I mean, you couldn't volunteer for an invasive procedure because it's not done on people so much on your brain.

Speaker 11 Everyone that has contributed to these studies so far, or the implanted BCI studies so far, have volunteered because they have had this sort of situation where they've had a paralysis.

Speaker 11 So that's been the sort of the fundamental kind of inclusion criteria into these types of studies. And actually, I mean, their contribution cannot be sort of, you know, understated.

Speaker 11 It's been an enormous effort from them. When we work with participants in the lab, actually, they join these studies for multiple years and they will do multiple hours every day with us.

Speaker 11 You know, they sort of become a part of the lab in a way that their contribution is so much of a commitment.

Speaker 11 And they do all of this signing an informed consent, which essentially says, you know, you probably shouldn't or you can't expect any benefit from this because we're developing the science.

Speaker 11 But they have done it with the view that if not us, you know, we won't progress these technologies to a point where the generations behind us with these same injuries would have something.

Speaker 11 And I think for that, you know, they really sort of earned all of our

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Speaker 5 Respect.

Speaker 1 So, Phil, I mean, now that you know that it's probably highly likely that Lukanan will come into your room tonight, press the button that switches you off for a while, and probably invade and steal some of your patterns of your brain.

Speaker 1 What are the ones you'd like them to avoid most in terms of the thieving of your electronic?

Speaker 13 Any folder that's titled private, please stay out of that.

Speaker 13 It's got a very high megabyte number, it's got very high file sizes. Ignore that.
I think you'll have a wonderful time in my brain. It's fanciful, but stayed.

Speaker 13 It's very reasonable in there.

Speaker 13 You won't have any accidents.

Speaker 10 So, we spoke about movement, which is probably the obvious one that springs to mind. But vision, for example, or hearing.
Is that an example of where the two-way interaction has to work?

Speaker 12 I think that's really interesting.

Speaker 12 So, it wouldn't fall under a category of what we might call brain-computer interface, because you don't record for vision and hearing from the brain. You record from the environment.

Speaker 12 So it's the one direction that provides the interaction with the neural system is a stimulation direction. So it's environmental input, stimulation output.

Speaker 10 And in terms of vision,

Speaker 10 so that essentially, I suppose, the picture we don't have is of some cameras and then there would be implements in your brain that would allow you to see. what the cameras were doing.
Is that

Speaker 10 the goal, presumably? Is that where we are?

Speaker 11 So where we are with the visual prosthesis is that if you implant or place electrodes over visual cortex and stimulate them, you generate these what are known as phosphines.

Speaker 11 So if you sort of close your eyes and you imagine you're not looking at anything, you would see these sort of bright flashes in various different sort of parts of your visual field, and that sort of correlates to which part of visual cortex you're stimulating.

Speaker 11 At the moment, you can maybe sort of perform an edge detection or try and get something on the right side of the field or the left side of the field.

Speaker 11 The hope with that field, not the visual field, the actual scientific field,

Speaker 11 but the hope with these visual prosthetics is that if you can engineer a sort of a stimulation array that's fine enough that you can access enough discrete parts of the visual cortex, you would build up a pattern of these phosphines that would give you a sense of what the image was around you.

Speaker 11 I think that's sort of quite a long way off because, with all of these stimulation inputs to the brain, it's very difficult to really target precisely a certain neuron or groups of neurons or population.

Speaker 11 Really, when you're stimulating the brain, it's orders and orders of magnitude above the electrical activity of the brain. So when you do it, you stimulate sort of everything.

Speaker 11 And it's up to your brain to sort of interpret in a way what this blast of activity just meant. And in certain regions, your brain can kind of do that quite well.

Speaker 11 It might take something in the sensory area as a feeling. In the visual cortex, it would take it as a phosphine.

Speaker 11 But there's a lot of research research still to be done and being done to try and understand that mapping between the stimulation and actually what it's evoking in the brain.

Speaker 5 Right. Oh go on, Phil.

Speaker 13 I was just wondering, is there any way of how far are we from actually reading each other's minds? I was trying to think of a more grown-up way to say that, but

Speaker 13 as in the actual content of the thoughts, because currently what is being recorded is the fact of activity in the brain, and then trying to guess what the activity means.

Speaker 13 But the content of the activity,

Speaker 13 there's no way of qualifying, quantifying.

Speaker 1 I'm really worried about that private folder, aren't you?

Speaker 5 I suppose the question is, in a way,

Speaker 10 what is the difference between a thought, which you're thinking of it in the abstract, aren't you? and your brain activating something like a muscle. Is there a fundamental difference?

Speaker 11 There are fundamental differences in the way that activity is represented. One interesting example of this is in these speech prosthetics.

Speaker 11 If you are imagining speaking, and one of of the ways these devices work is they sort of implant electrodes over the areas of the brain that control the muscles of the face and the throat.

Speaker 11 So, that's when you think about producing a sound, you're really just changing the activity of these muscles, and that produces the speech.

Speaker 11 So, if you imagine saying something, you can decode that activity, you can put it through one of these large language models, and you can reconstruct very accurately and very quickly sentences that people are trying to say.

Speaker 11 The problem is, how do you know the bits that you want to say out loud and the bits that you want to sort of keep in your head?

Speaker 10 We should ask Robin initially because Robin has that problem anyway.

Speaker 5 I don't see it as a problem.

Speaker 1 I see it as a wonderful freedom.

Speaker 11 What we're finding, and this is sort of an interesting issue in the privacy of these brain-computer interfaces more broadly, is what signals can we use to actually sort of differentiate between the activity that we want to express and the activity that we want to sort of keep internally.

Speaker 11 And here we're finding that there are features in the brain signal that we we can identify that tell you which mode you're switching between, and we can use those in the devices.

Speaker 10 And have you measured that? Would it be different in comedians?

Speaker 1 I did do an experiment where we went into

Speaker 1 the brain measuring place.

Speaker 5 In a well-informed

Speaker 1 fMRI, and they were trying to see if anything was different in a comedian's brain, or anyone who improvises a lot, to see what was going on.

Speaker 1 And all they generally found, well, one, it didn't work very well because a a lot of the comedians got really competitive and stopped worrying about the experiment, just worried about their individual performance.

Speaker 1 So it said a lot about ego, but very little about neuroscience.

Speaker 1 But then the only thing that they seemed to actually come up with was the fact that because we yap away so much, we don't have to concentrate so much on how to yap.

Speaker 13 So yapping starts becoming a conscious decision.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, it's just a necessary technique to survive in late night clubs.

Speaker 10 In terms of the technology, so Robin described actually, so you imagine measuring brain waves would be some kind of huge machine and you'd stick your head in it.

Speaker 10 So where are we now, the state of the art, in terms of the non-invasive measurements?

Speaker 12 I'm going to be really pedantic here on the idea of invasive and non-invasive, because...

Speaker 12 to my mind something that's external and imagine an EEG cap so some 20 or even five electrodes however many you want that you have to apply with some sticky gel and we're going to ask you to shave your hair as well by the way to to put it on uh is that

Speaker 1 I'm

Speaker 12 every time you want to use it, you have to have somebody that helps you place them, and then you wear the cap and you have the thing.

Speaker 12 Is that really less invasive than something that's taken you one through a surgical procedure, and then no one knows that you have it, no one can see it?

Speaker 12 It's there when you wake up in the middle of the night, having had a nightmare. You know, it's there wherever you want to go.

Speaker 12 It's this idea of external, internal, implanted, non-implanted. But I'm not sure the idea of the word invasive is still a valid term.

Speaker 5 Sorry for that.

Speaker 10 No, no, it's a good point to make, isn't it? What I was trying to talk about in terms of the thing that doesn't go through your skull, actually, these are still quite big devices.

Speaker 12 You cannot make smaller something that's trying to study. If you want to reach different areas of the brain, you're going to have to be over different areas of the brain.

Speaker 12 So if your focus is on one point only, then you need one external thing

Speaker 12 and you have to find a way of sticking it there. So that's fine.

Speaker 12 If you try to do something that's bilateral, you have two, and you still have to find a way of sticking them there, and hope they don't move, especially if you're moving your head.

Speaker 12 And then you start increasing the number of electrodes.

Speaker 12 We can miniaturize what we put inside the brain, but if you're trying to, even internally, if you try to map a lot of different areas of the cortex, you're going to have to place them in a lot of different areas.

Speaker 13 What's the most implants you've put in one head?

Speaker 13 Is this the kind of question you get at the university?

Speaker 5 Sounds like you're not really. No, absolutely.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I'll tell you why you've got really,

Speaker 1 how many have you done? And secondly, how many would you like to, Celeste?

Speaker 11 So, these types of devices that we implant in clinical trials, we would typically implant up to six different brain locations.

Speaker 11 So, on this particular device that I brought, there's sort of two ends, and we'd implant three of these so we could cover six different brain regions.

Speaker 11 Each of those arrays covers a fraction of one percent of the brain, and it would would be unreasonable to just start adding and adding and adding and adding.

Speaker 11 You know, you'll turn the skull into Swiss cheese for all the different holes that you made to put these devices in.

Speaker 10 We're looking to the future now. So, at the moment, as you've described it, remarkable technology.

Speaker 10 Can you see a point somewhere where this becomes so easy for the person that rather than being something that's necessary for them, it becomes an option as you know, playing VR games or something like that, which is, I suppose, where people think about these technologies going.

Speaker 11 Probably the most widely adopted versions of these devices are going to be non-implanted. We're probably sort of 10 or 15 years away from having a good

Speaker 11 plug-and-play, non-invasive type of device that anyone would go out and get. But the

Speaker 10 VR headset, something

Speaker 11 type of thing. And something that really actually works for people.

Speaker 11 So I think these devices currently are very good at what they do, but they're nowhere near close to some of these sort of more kind of sci-fi examples. And it's

Speaker 11 appetite for these devices will sort of change.

Speaker 11 You know, there is a moment with all technologies where people are potentially hesitant about them, you know, but then there's a moment in the future where actually, if you don't have it, you're almost at a disadvantage because everything relies on the fact that everyone now uses this device to interact with the world and communicate.

Speaker 10 And Anne, do you see the engineering progressing at that rate? So you gave a time scale there, 10 or 20 years or something like that, before they become commonplace?

Speaker 12 I think there are already a few externally worn devices that are available as wellness devices.

Speaker 12 And there will be engineering challenges to make devices that have the complexity that is required to do something that's really useful.

Speaker 12 At the moment, whatever you want to do, you do it through your phone because you have your fingers, your voice, your activation.

Speaker 12 You're so much more dexterous with the part of your body that you're used to using. And especially with the AI assistance, you're going to be able to do so much more through that.

Speaker 12 It will take longer than 10 years for us to have a new way of interfacing with whatever means of communication and social interactions we have.

Speaker 12 I think that's longer, but in terms of the timeline that Lou gave us for having externally worn devices that can perform some type of activity, well, we already have some know-as-wellness, so we're just going to see them grow but not quite reach a universal or not universal status because there will always be people who don't benefit from them, who can't access them, but a sort of widespread use in a certain kind of the population.

Speaker 1 So that brings us in, I suppose, to the ethics.

Speaker 1 Where do we draw the line in terms of, again, the neoliberal advantages that come with going, well, I can afford to do those that have that BCI in my brain. Therefore, now I am going to be

Speaker 1 the best at chess or whatever it might be.

Speaker 11 I think it depends on what these devices are sort of ultimately capable of.

Speaker 11 I mean, what we are working on sort of as a community at the moment is specific clinical cases where you have a neurological deficit because of some injury or because of some disease.

Speaker 11 We're trying to improve performance back to sort of a baseline kind of healthy activity.

Speaker 11 So the real ethical questions start to come when you start to maybe think about improving above a baseline someone's performance.

Speaker 11 There aren't to date really medical devices that can give you a performance above a baseline.

Speaker 11 And in the case that these do, then of course, you know, access to them and how equitable these things are, and sort of, you know, who should benefit from them.

Speaker 11 And, you know, that becomes sort of a very, very difficult question because it should be either, you know, all or no one in a certain sense.

Speaker 12 It's not because we're not there yet that we shouldn't think about the consequences of what we're working towards. And we can engineer ways of making more accessible technologies.

Speaker 12 Having said that, we've been aware of lack of accessibility to medical care across the world for centuries. So here, me being telling you, oh, we have to engineer solutions to this,

Speaker 12 it's probably very naive, but not trying is also not an option.

Speaker 10 And in terms of the interaction with research into the brain itself, because we've talked about how useful these devices are, but in terms of just understanding what the brain is,

Speaker 10 how do those fields cross over?

Speaker 11 This is a sort of a watershed moment for understanding and advancing sort of human neuroscience because for the first time we're actually across a number of different devices at a very high resolution in an ever-increasing number of individuals collecting human brain data.

Speaker 11 And it's out in the real world. It's not just in these kind of lab-based settings, which gives us for the first time a data set that hasn't existed before.

Speaker 11 And the potential of that to help understand the brain in health and in disease, you know, for clinical applications, for purely just basic science, is enormous.

Speaker 11 And that's probably the most exciting exciting part of this field evolving.

Speaker 10 And Phil, just a final question for you.

Speaker 1 Do you think when we are able to actually analyze and translate the thoughts in our head, we will have discovered the secret of human consciousness?

Speaker 13 As in, like,

Speaker 13 you think there's an answer in every head that tells us what human consciousness is. Yeah.
Like the little glowy golden bit in the middle.

Speaker 13 Yes, to answer your question, yes, I think

Speaker 1 that's what I was hoping you're going to say. And then a follow-up question: Have you you changed your opinions now on BCI? I mean, in terms of you already have volunteered and signed the forms

Speaker 1 that you are now going to be donating your brain, body, mind, and private folders to Newcastle.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 how do you feel now at the end of this in terms of thinking about

Speaker 1 BCI and thinking about the possibilities?

Speaker 13 Well, I mean, it's interesting, Luke's saying that we're 10-15 years away from having a BCI helmet. That's not very long.

Speaker 13 I'm going to be in my mid-40s, just in time for my midlife crisis. I'm going to be able to.

Speaker 5 I'm going to go to the bathroom as well then, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 So, we asked our audience a question as well, and we asked them: if there was one thing they could do to enhance their brain, what would it be?

Speaker 1 I've got one which is grow and shrink in size, so I fit any hat that I choose. Not sure that's actually,

Speaker 1 I think we've moved on to an extra level there in terms of the inflation and deflation.

Speaker 10 This is a physics. I combine my brain with all my other selves across the multiverse,

Speaker 10 which is kind of interesting.

Speaker 5 Uh, what I got there, Phil?

Speaker 13 Sally and Steve say an autosave function in my thalamus to help me recall my D reams.

Speaker 5 There's always one I don't get that.

Speaker 13 Is that a band?

Speaker 1 It was a novelty band in the early 90s. Anyway, so the

Speaker 5 Thank you to our panel.

Speaker 10 Professor Anne van Holstenberger, Dr. Luke Bashford, and Phil Wank.

Speaker 1 So that brings this episode to an end. Next week, we hope that we won't be back at the normal time because we are discovering that time has been measured very shoddly over the last few centuries.

Speaker 1 So whatever time we will be on will be far more specific than this week's time. So set your atomic clock.

Speaker 10 Yeah, because next week we'll be exploring timekeeping. And what better place to discuss clocks, watches and prime meridians than the Royal Observatory, Greenwich.
Thank you very much. Good night.

Speaker 5 Without your trousers, in the infinite monkey cage.

Speaker 11 Till now, nice again.

Speaker 5 Nature Bang. Nature Bang.

Speaker 18 Right, thanks. Hello.
Hello.

Speaker 7 And welcome to Nature Bang. I'm Becky Ripley.

Speaker 18 I'm Emily Knight.

Speaker 20 And in this series from BBC Radio 4, we look to the natural world to answer some of life's big questions.

Speaker 7 Like, how can a brainless slime mold help us solve complex mapping problems?

Speaker 20 And what can an octopus teach us about the relationship between mind and body?

Speaker 19 It really stretches your understanding of consciousness.

Speaker 17 With the help of evolutionary biologists. I'm actually always very comfortable comparing us to other species.

Speaker 17 Philosophers.

Speaker 1 You never really know what it could be like to be another creature.

Speaker 17 And spongologists.

Speaker 7 Is that your job title?

Speaker 17 Are you a spongologist?

Speaker 12 Well, I am in certain spheres.

Speaker 20 It's science meets storytelling.

Speaker 17 With a philosophical twist.

Speaker 4 It really gets to the heart of free will and what it means to be you.

Speaker 20 So if you want to find out more about yourself via cockatoos that dance, frogs that freeze and single-cell amoebas that design border policies, subscribe to Nature Bang from BBC Radio 4 available on BBC Sounds.

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