- Hey, guys.
I'm Louise.
I'm a staff writer at WIRED
where I usually cover security, surveillance, Amazon,
those kinds of things.
But today I'm actually gonna go off my typical beat,
and I'm gonna be covering a scientific paper
about a brain interface which is a way for people
to communicate with each other only using their minds.
- Our brains are going to interact with the physical world
in ways that we can hardly imagine today.
We're on the cusp of a cognitive revolution.
- [Louise] Brain interfaces have been used
to control prosthetics, synthesize speech,
and even fly planes.
- Right.
That is crazy.
- But now researchers are using them to allow
multiple users to collaborate with each other.
So we're gonna do three things.
First, we're gonna read the paper and break it down.
Then, we're gonna figure out what kinds of question
we have and try and find some answers for them.
And lastly, we're gonna reach out to the authors
of the paper and other researchers in the same field.
All right, so let's get started with the paper.
[playful string music] [keyboard clicking]
So it's called "BrainNet: A Multi-Person Brain-to-Brain
Interface for Direct Collaboration Between Brains."
Let's see what we got here.
I read a lot of papers for my job,
and there's always usually kind of an introduction here
that backups a little bit and talks about the topic
more broadly because that allows them to then explain
how their contribution is relevant.
Here's a good example here.
We have the first brain-to-brain interface
demonstrated by Rao and colleagues in 2013.
So we could look up those researchers.
We're gonna just pull the bibliography out.
You always wanna kind of shout out other researchers
in the field so they can evaluate the research for us.
In this paragraph, they're kind of explaining
what's different about their research.
Those are good things to mention
because you wanna contextualize this research
like why are you writing about this paper.
Okay, so now I've kind of gone over the basic parts
of the paper, and this is how their experiment works.
There's three people and two of them are sending signals
to a third person about a game of Tetris.
The first two people kind of decide how they want the blocks
to move, and then the third person receives that signal
and moves the blocks so they can not let the blocks
stack on top of each other.
With something really out there like this,
we definitely wanna make sure that we have a paragraph
really early on in our story that talks about some
of the kinds of technologies that they used.
They used transcranial magnetic stimulation
and EEG technology.
That's something that we're gonna wanna look up
and try to understand more about.
So here are the results.
They used five groups, three human subjects in each group.
And accuracy was pretty good, 81.25%.
One thing that's interesting here is that they keep making
an analogy to social networks.
I think that's something we might wanna ask them about.
[type writer clangs] So this good.
You can see some of the ethics stuff in here.
Those kinds of ethics things are definitely good to look for
in a paper like this because you're helping the reader
to understand better the ethic's considerations
behind this technology.
So that's almost it.
Normally if I read the paper, the first step I would take
is getting some basic terminology down.
[keyboard clicks]
Okay, so let's start by learning a little bit more
about transcranial magnetic stimulation.
All right, here's an article from Johns Hopkins.
Okay, so it uses magnetic pulses which pass easily
and painlessly through the skull and into the brain.
Okay, so next we're gonna learn a little bit about EEG tech.
Oh, interesting.
So I looks like Facebook is also working
on something like this.
That might be good.
So this is a test that detects electrical activity.
So we're just gonna make some notes about TMS and EEG.
Okay, so now we're gonna see kind of like
what our readers might already know about this,
what's already out there about this topic.
So we're just gonna type brain-to-brain interface.
What I'm always looking for at this point in my reporting
is references to other things people might've seen.
'Cause you never wanna write a story that feels contextless.
So they'll really come away not only understanding
how that one paper works but what they should think
about this field of research.
Yeah, a lot of this about the Elon Musk coverage.
That's good to keep in mind.
You can add that to kind of our question
to ask the researchers, like what do they think
of Elon Musk proposal.
That might be something we might wanna ask them.
A good thing to check here is I'm gonna look up
Google Scholar and I'm gonna type in brain-to-brain
interfaces to see if maybe someone's written about this.
Google Scholar is just like Google except all of the results
here are published in academic journals.
Okay, so interesting.
Brain-to-brain interfaces, military, neurosurgical,
and an ethical perspective.
Here we learn that DARPA which is the research arm
of the U.S. military is also working
on technology like this.
So that's a good thing to note.
Okay, so now we have a little bit of background
to contextualize this research.
[keyboard clicks]
A good place to start is just the lead researcher
on the papers.
I'm just gonna look them up.
Okay, great.
So we're gonna send him message.
And now that we've got a little bit more context,
we're gonna look up some of the papers
that we looked at here to see if we can find
some other outside sources to comment
on this paper for us.
The monkey brainet, that's a very good band name [chuckles].
These researchers might be good sources for us.
I also saw here an article about like the ethics
of this kind of thing.
So another source would be a bioethicist.
An ethicist who studies brain-computer interfaces, perfect.
Okay I see maybe there was at least one other one.
So we can see at Duke the majority of the research
is on brain-machine interfaces.
So that's perfect.
We're gonna actually look up the main researcher
of this lab.
Journalist rely heavily on academics.
So it's really important to ask them very clearly
for what you want from them.
Sometimes I read my emails a lot of times [laughs].
[bell dings]
Now I'm gonna call the senior editor here at WIRED
named Sandra Upson.
I'm gonna see if she has any tips or advice
as I'm reporting on this topic.
[phone rings]
- [Sandra] Hi, this is Sandra.
- Hey, Sandra, it's Louise.
How are you?
- [Sandra] Hi.
- So what are you think of this paper?
- [Sandra] A couple of things that came to mind
as I was looking at it, one thing that's always helpful
is to see how this paper advances what these researchers
had been doing before to sort of see where the interesting
research is happening.
Like what else can you do?
How can you get closer to the types of information
that we think of when we think about
you know being in stocks.
- So kind of ask them how could you make this information
like have more depth.
- [Sandra] Yeah.
And my understanding is that a lot of other setups
use technologies that are a bit more invasive
or only appropriate for animals subjects.
So this is one where anyone can participate.
- Yeah, that's one thing kind of liked about this work
is that they're not opening anyone like doing any
sort of surgery or anything.
- [Sandra] Right.
No implants or electrodes or anything like that.
You walk away and your life resumes as it was before.
- Which is great.
- [Sandra] Yeah.
- Well, thank you so much.
And I really appreciate your help.
- [Sandra] Yeah, anytime.
[curious string music]
- It's been a couple of days,
and some of the researchers that I reached out to
got back to me. [computer rings]
Hey, Doctor Rao, how are you?
Can you hear us?
- Ah, yes.
It that Louise?
- Yeah, this is Louise.
Thank you so much for making the time to talk to us today.
I really appreciate it.
- Yeah, no problem at all.
- Okay, great.
So can you kind of just walk us through the experiment?
And I'm really curious about why you designed it
the way that you did.
- Back in 2013, we demonstrated the very first
brain-to-brain communication system.
And this involved one sender and one receiver.
So that was the very first time that you know
we'd demonstrated that you could use noninvasive technology
in humans to convey information from one brain
to another human brain.
- Researchers didn't stop at connecting
one brain to another.
They introduced a third person and tested sending
conflicting messages through what researchers refer to as
a social network of brains.
And how would you define a social network of brains?
Like what does that mean?
- We were motivated by the fact that currently
a lot of interactions between humans is taking place
through social media.
And so there's reliable information.
There's information that's not so reliable.
And so the social network of brains here
corresponds in a very limited way to you know
solving the simple Tetris like problem.
But if you can generalize that, that would mean
brains that can take in what it needs to
and then ignore the other unreliable information.
- Ignoring fake news, tweets, and the fake brains
that are telling us the wrong information.
- Hopefully, yeah, that's the hope anyway.
- I think it would be great for you to explain
is just how the technology works.
Like why are you having the subjects stare at lights, right?
Like what is that doing to the brain,
and like how does that actually transmit the information
to the other person?
- There's several different ways in which you can extract
information from the brain noninvasively using EEG.
So the idea here is called
a steady state visually-evoked potential or SSVEP.
So if I wanna select a yes, I look at a light
that's flashing at a frequency of you know 17 hertz.
If I wanna say no, I look at light that's flashing
at a frequency of let's say 15 hertz.
And so when you are paying attention and looking
at a particular LED that is flashing
at a particular frequency, the visual cortex, it starts
to respond at that frequency to that flashing light.
And then we can recognize that frequency
from the EEG signals we're recording.
- Doctor Rao explained that once a subject
actually focuses on a frequency, researchers detect
it using EEG signals which are then sent to the receiver
via a magnetic stimulator attached to their head.
The pulses are translated in the brain as an image,
which effectively shows the receiver
something they aren't actually seeing.
And the binary part is like it's yes or no.
It's I see something or I don't.
And that's the binary.
- Yeah.
- The last question I wanted to ask is
what do you wanna do next?
- So there's several different you know
potential future directions
that we're looking at right there.
Right now we use this yes or no answer
based on some flashing lights,
but then if you use fMRI, you can start to extract
more abstract kinds of information,
including potentially emotional signals.
Also abstract kinds of thoughts and so on.
So we're hoping that we can start to get at
that kind of information which would then allows us
to potentially convey more complex forms
of information than just a simple yes or no answer.
And so we are addressing that also
at the center that I'm directing.
- Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us.
I really appreciate it.
- Sure, thank you so much.
Thanks for that. - Thanks a lot.
Now we're gonna talk to a researcher at Duke
whose been studying brain-to-brain interface
for around 30 years.
He wrote a book about it a decade ago about this technology.
[computer rings]
- [Miguel] Oh, hi, how are you doing?
- Good, how are you?
Can you hear us?
- [Miguel] Yes.
- I know that about a decade ago.
Well, I guess it was in 2011 you wrote a book
about this topic and about what you thought
the future of it would be.
And I'm curious about what you think has happened
since then and like where you think
this technology is going.
Like I know that Elon Musk wants for you to be able to type
without using your hands and just thinking.
- [Miguel] I actually find it very amusing
that Elon Musk is proposing things
that have already been done.
Everything that he propose in terms
of what is going to happen, we already done,
some things 10 years ago. [laughs]
But I'm very impressed to the fact that now
you have applications of brain-machine interface
for people that have lost the ability to speak,
control devices in remote environments
that are too dangerous or too difficult
for a human being to penetrate.
BMIs being used for robot control.
And there's a lot of confusion of whether you should
really use noninvasive technology
versus invasive technology.
Invasive technology meaning getting inside the brain
and putting electrodes inside the brain.
That in my opinion should be left
to very critical applications in people
who are completely disabled or cannot move at all.
- And obviously for ethical reasons
it seems a lot easier to be doing the noninvasive research.
I think that you've done some with monkeys too, right,
where you can do a little bit more invasive research
than you might be able to do on human subjects.
- [Miguel] Yes, and monkeys and rodents, for instance,
it's very useful to do the invasive approach
because you are trying to learn about the brain.
But I think the using clinical applications,
and of course other applications,
is going to be limited by the ethical considerations,
the risks, and the costs.
- You bring up a good point which is right now
it seems like with these brain-to-brain interfaces
you can really only communicate pretty binary information.
- Human brain attributes, they are primarily analog.
And they are encoded in a complete different way
than you do in a digital machine.
So translating your emotions or my emotions
or my intuition, my creativity to an algorithm
is not gonna happen.
We haven't really figured out a ways to produce
or to deliver messages that are more complicated.
But you never going to reach the level resolution
that you get when you inside the brain.
- Is there anything kind of about this paper in Washington
that you think is important to note
or some of the limitations?
How would you think about this research
as an expert in this area?
- [Miguel] Well, I think it's a proof of concept.
This is an attempt to show that it can be done
to some degree using a noninvasive method in humans.
The only major concern I have is that we should not
consider this as a possibility to weaponizing the brain,
of using this technology and neuroscience
to control weapons.
- Right.
It's so great to see these people who are paralyzed
being able to speak and communicate,
and then on the other hand to see like DARPA's interest
in all of this, it's definitely really the opposite.
- [Miguel] Yeah, that's the reason it's important
to speak up.
- Well, thank you so much, Miguel.
I really appreciate you making the time to talk to us.
- [Miguel] Thank you, I appreciate it.
- Now we're gonna talk to a bioethicist
about some of the moral concerns that might arise
with the use of this technology.
So I wanted to kind of talk to you about some
of the ethical considerations
with these brain-to-brain interfaces
and these brain-machine interfaces.
- We were trying to understand the phenomenology
of being implanted with a brain-computer interface.
So what we learned that actually being merged
with an implantable device which linked
with a artificially intelligent component
can lead actually to some radical symbiosis.
This means that the patient and the individual
become very dependent and over reliant on the device.
- [Louise] Right, right.
And just like more generally when you're thinking
about these brain interfaces
and these brain-to-brain interfaces,
I'm curious as an ethicist what are some of the things
that you're concerned or that you think about.
- One of first ethical agent that we're seeing
is when the technology is raiding the brain,
it's trying to select specific brain data,
but in reality it's not only looking for that specific data,
it's also downloading all the data it can find in the brain,
if you will.
So that's mean that when you have the technology
raiding your brain it also pumping out
some of the information that you might not want
the technology to take.
- In addition to privacy concerns,
Frederick discussed the problem of accountability.
What happens when brain interfaces assist
in illegal or endangering actions
either on purpose or because of a problem
with the technology?
- Well, thank you so much, Fredrick.
I really appreciate you making the time to talk with us.
- Thanks.
Thanks for having me.
Thank you very much.
- Yeah, he's done the brain-to-brain,
but he's also done a lot of brain-computer stuff.
But that's like a part of this.
So I feel like one of the big things we learned here
is that there's technology that can pick up on
electrical signals that you could actually send
to another brain.
I think some of the biggest things we really wanna hit
would definitely be the future applications
and the ethical concerns.
And also where is this going?
What are the things we need to think about
as this technology is developing?
That's always a really good way
to think about framing an article.
[keyboard clicking]
So I hoped you enjoyed seeing kind of
how a reporter at WIRED works.
It was really interesting for me to learn about this topic
that I really don't usually report on.