There are various studies going on at the moment that involves the human mind. Many of these studies are looking into ways the human mind can be enhanced somehow artificially, and usually, involves a chip of some kind. This is exactly what Elon Musk, Tesla, and SpaceX CEO have in mind. He announced just recently that he’s taken over a new startup called Neuralink, a company dedicated to merging the human mind with computers in an attempt to make us more intelligent.
“Under any rate of advancement in AI, we will be left behind by a lot,” stated Musk. “The benign situation with ultra-intelligent AI is that we would be so far below in intelligence we’d be like a pet or a house cat.” As always, Musk’s plans are ambitious and he wants to see brain implants available for healthy people within the next 8 to 10 years. The way in which it would work is by improving the connection between our brains and computers.
There’s already some technology out there that works in a similar fashion to this already and is used in patients with severe paralysis. These devices allow the user to interact through the use of brain-computer interfaces, move robotic limbs, or even fly planes. The technology can also be used to deliver messages to the brain via electric current to restore a person’s sense of touch or hearing. It’s also been used to treat tremors caused by Parkinson’s disease.
The next for researchers is to figure out if these technologies can also enhance one’s cognitive skills too. Transcranial direct current stimulation is one such way that’s being tested by scientists and DIY brain hackers at the moment and involves sending electrical currents through the scalp in hopes that it will improve learning skills and memory. But whether or not this treatment is effective, no one knows for sure yet.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is also looking into this kind of technology but via a less direct approach that involves sending electrical pulses through the body. Specifically targeted is the vagus nerve, which passes through the neck. Because this is a peripheral nerve it may help people learn skills quicker. Doug Weber is a program manager for DARPA’s Targeted Neuroplasticity Training program and he says, “If we can enhance that training process… then perhaps foreign language experts can be trained more quickly to recognize very unfamiliar sounds.”
Musk and others are hoping that someday it’s possible these procedures could be made available as outpatient treatments and as common as laser eye surgery. Whatever is used in the end needs to be highly sophisticated and far better than anything that’s available today. Implants are the most obvious choice for this kind of technology, but we could also see things like nano-sensors being injected into patients and deployed in the brain. “Right now we’re really limited by the ways we’re recording and stimulating cells in the brain,” said Paul Zehr, a neuroscientist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. An implant may help by pulsing electricity to the neurons that govern a particular skill, but quite how it will boost performance is unclear. And while a chip may give the brain some form of extra memory, actually giving the brain extra memories is a long way off.
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