Almost two years ago, Dennis Degray sent an unusual text message to his friend.
“You are holding in your hand the very first text message ever sent from the neurons of one mind to the mobile device of another,” he recalled it read. “U just made history.”
Degray, 66, has been paralyzed from the collarbones down since an unlucky fall more than a decade ago. He was able to send the message because in 2016 he had two tiny squares of silicon with protruding metal electrodes surgically implanted in his motor cortex, the part of the brain that controls movement.
Illustration: Mountain People
These record the activity in his neurons for translation into external action. By imagining moving a joystick with his hand, he is able to move a cursor to select letters on a screen. With the power of his mind, he has also bought products on Amazon and moved a robotic arm to stack blocks.
Degray has been implanted with these devices, known as Utah arrays, because he is a participant in the BrainGate program, a long-running multi-institution research effort in the US to develop and test novel neurotechnology aimed at restoring communication, mobility and independence in people whose minds are fine, but who have lost bodily connection due to paralysis, limb loss or neurodegenerative disease.
However, while the Utah array has proved that brain implants are feasible, the technology has a long way to go.
Degray had open brain surgery to place his. The system is not wireless — a socket protrudes from his skull through which wires take the signal to computers for decoding by machine-learning algorithms. The tasks that can be done and how well they can be executed are limited, because the system only records from a few dozen to a couple of hundred neurons out of an estimated 88 billion in the brain (each electrode typically records from between one and four neurons).
Moreover, it is unlikely to last for ever. Scar tissue, the brain’s response to the damage caused by inserting the device, gradually builds up on the electrodes, leading to a progressive decline in signal quality. And when the research sessions — which take place twice a week for Degray in his living facility in Palo Alto, California — come to an end, it will be disconnected and Degray’s telepathic powers will cease to be.
Barely a couple of dozen people have been implanted with Utah arrays worldwide.
Great progress has been made, said Leigh Hochberg, a neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and an engineering professor at Brown University who codirects the BrainGate program, but “a system that patients can use around the clock that reliably provides complete, rapid, intuitive brain control over a computer does not yet exist.”
Help may be at hand. An injection of Silicon Valley chutzpah has energized the field of brain-computer or brain-machine interfaces in recent years.
Buoyed by BrainGate and other demonstrations, big-name entrepreneurs and companies, and scrappy start-ups, are on a quest to develop a new generation of commercial hardware that could ultimately help not only Degray and others with disabilities, but be used by all of us. While some, including Facebook, are pursuing non-invasive versions, wireless neural implant systems are also being worked on.
Tesla chief executive Elon Musk in July presented details of an implantable wireless system that his company Neuralink is building.
It is already being studied in monkeys and it is hoped that human trials will start before the end of next year, Musk said.
To date, Neuralink has received US$158 million in funding — US$100 million of it from Musk.
While the implant being developed is still the same size as one of the Utah arrays in Degray’s brain, it has far more electrodes, meaning it can record from far more neurons. While a Utah array — of which up to four or five can be inserted — typically has 100 electrodes, Neuralink says its version will have about 1,000.
Moreover, the company thinks it is feasible to insert up to 10. Very thin threads of flexible biocompatible polymer material studded with electrodes would be “sewn in” by a robot to avoid piercing microvessels, which Neuralink hopes would ameliorate scarring, thereby increasing how long the device lasts.
“Our goal is to record from and stimulate spikes in neurons in a way that is orders of magnitude more than anything that has been done to date, and safe and good enough that it is not like a major operation,” Musk said in his presentation, adding that the procedure would be more like laser eye surgery than brain surgery.
Medical concerns are driving the device’s development, Musk said, but he is also worried about the threat posed by artificial intelligence and believes this could provide a way of keeping up with it.
There are smaller rival start-ups as well. Paradromics, like Neuralink, is focused on many more and smaller electrodes, but is aiming for an even higher density of probes over the face of its neural implant. In form, its device would look closer to the Utah array — a bed of needles with metal electrodes — and there would be no robotic surgery.
“We want to hit the market as soon as possible,” founder and chief executive Matt Angle said, adding that Paradromics hopes to begin clinical trials early next year.
The company has raised about US$25 million in funding to date, including significant amounts from the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which grew interested in brain-computer interface (BCI) after it realized the sophisticated robotic limbs it was building for injured soldiers returning from overseas needed brain control.
Synchron, based in Australia and Silicon Valley, has a different approach. The company, which has received US$21 million in funding to date, including some from DARPA, last week said that the first clinical trial of its Stentrode device had begun in Australia — ahead of Neuralink and Paradromics.
The device avoids open brain surgery and scarring, because it is inserted using a stent through a vein in the back of the neck. Once in position next to the motor cortex, the stent splays out to embed 16 metal electrodes into the blood vessel’s walls from which neuronal activity can be recorded.
So far in the trial, one patient — paralyzed with motor neuron disease — has been implanted, with four others set to follow. The device’s safety will be studied along with how well the system allows brain control of a computer for typing and texting.
While it can only read the aggregate activity of a population of neurons, of which it will take in about 1,000, there is enough data to make a system useful for patients — and less nuance in the signal actually makes it more stable and robust, Synchron founder and chief executive Tom Oxley said.
Meanwhile, challenges remain for Neuralink and Paradromics. Whether scarring can be mitigated by very small electrodes is yet to be seen. There is also the issue of the electrodes being dissolved and corroded by the body — a problem that gets worse the smaller they are. How long Neuralink’s new polymer probes will last is unknown.
“No one is going to be super-impressed with the start-up companies until they start recording their lifetimes in years. The Utah array has a lot of issues — but you do measure its lifetime in years,” said Cynthia Chestek, a neural interface researcher at the University of Michigan.
Then, even if we are able to record all these extra neuron signals, could we decode them?
“We have no idea how the brain works,” said Takashi Kozai, a biomedical engineer at the University of Pittsburgh who studies implantable technologies. “Trying to decode that information and actually produce something useful is a huge problem.”
Chestek agreed that more understanding of how neurons compute things would be helpful, but “every algorithm out there” would suddenly just start doing better with a few hundred extra neurons.
None of the three companies sees nonmedical applications in the short term, but believe that the implant technology could gradually branch out into the general population as people start seeing how transformational it can be.
The most obvious application may be brain-controlled typing.
Oxley imagines a scenario where people who have grown up texting and typing — and are wholly dependent on their fingers for that — lose functionality as they age. Frustrated that they cannot maintain their speed, they might seek other ways to preserve their technological capability. Eventually a tipping point will occur as people see BCIs working better than the human body.
“If the technology becomes safe, it’s easy to use and it provides you with superior technology control, there will be people who will want to pay for that,” Oxley said.
Of uses beyond that, no one can really be specific. Brain commands to smart speakers? Brain-controlled driving? Brain-to-brain communication? Enhanced memory and cognition?
If the technology were to make it outside the medical domain, the military is where we might see it first, said Hannah Maslen, deputy director of the University of Oxford’s Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics.
For example, it might provide silent communication between soldiers or allow activation of equipment by the thinking of certain commands. It is hard to see most people opting to undergo a surgical intervention for recreational or convenience uses, she added.
However, at a recent neurotechnology meetup in San Francisco of about two dozen tinkerers, Jonathan Toomim argued that it was a logical next step.
“We already use devices — our smartphones — that offload a lot of our cognition and augment our memory. This is just bringing the bandwidth between the human brain and those to a higher level,” said the self-described neuroscientist, engineer, entrepreneur and environmentalist, who makes his own neurofeedback gear.
The public should have a clear voice in shaping how neural interface technology is used and regulated over the coming years, a report this month on the topic from the UK Royal Society concluded.
One concern is data privacy, though Maslen said this should be tempered by the fact that while BCIs might be portrayed as being able to “mind read” and “decode thoughts” — stoking fears that they would unearth innermost secrets — they are recording from very small areas of the brain mostly related to movement and require the user’s mental effort to make them work.
“Ethical concerns around privacy don’t apply in such a full way,” she said.
Nonetheless, questions remain. Who owns the brain data and what is it being used for? And “brainjacking,” where a third party could gain control of the system and modify it in ways the brain’s owner has not consented to, is rooted in reality rather than science fiction, Maslen said, adding that pacemakers have been hacked before.
Angle wonders to what extent data from BCIs could be used as evidence in court — for example, to incriminate someone in the same way a diary or a computer might.
Further ethical issues arise around control and agency. If a brain implant does not get your intention right, to what extent are you as the user of the device responsible for what is “said” or done? And how do we ensure that if a technology confers significant benefits, it is not just the rich who get it?
Society still has a few years to ponder these questions. Neuralink’s aim of getting a human clinical trial up and running by the end of next year is widely considered too ambitious, given what remains unproved.
However, many experts anticipate that the technology will be available for people with impairments or disabilities within five or 10 years.
For nonmedical use, the time frame is greater — perhaps 20 years.
Hochberg thinks the focus has to be on helping those who need it most.
“I would have one implanted this afternoon if I could,” Degray said, referring to Neuralink’s device.
A worn, non-invasive brain computer interface which does not involve brain surgery and can always be taken off may seem attractive — but the skull muffles the reading of neuronal signals.
“The physics [of a non-invasive device] are just extremely challenging,” Chestek said.
Some companies are trying anyway. Facebook in 2017 announced that it wanted to create a wearable device that would allow typing from the brain at 100 words per minute. (As a comparison, Neuralink is striving for 40 words per minute — which is about the average typing speed — while Degray, with his Utah array implant, clocks about eight words per minute).
Researchers at the University of California funded by the social network in July showed decoding of a small set of full, spoken words and phrases from brain activity in real time for the first time — though it was done with so-called electrocorticography electrodes laid on the surface of the brain via surgery. Meanwhile, the company continues to work on how it might achieve the same thing non-invasively and is exploring measuring changing patterns in blood oxygenation — neurons use oxygen when they are active — with near-infrared light.
Also on the case is Los Angeles-based start-up Kernel, founded by entrepreneur Bryan Johnson, who made millions selling mobile payments company Braintree to PayPal. Kernel, into which Johnson has invested US$100 million, started as a neural implants company, but then pivoted to wearables because, Johnson said, the invasive road looked so long.
Plenty of non-invasive methods exist for sensing and stimulating brain activity, but none is equal to being bridged into a next-generation interface, Johnson said. New ways are needed and he believes Kernel has found one others have missed.
“We will be ready to share more in 2020,” he said.
However, assuming the technical challenges can be surmounted, social factors could still be a barrier, said Anna Wexler, who studies the ethical, legal and social implications of emerging neurotechnology at the University of Pennsylvania.
Google Glass failed not because it did not work, but because people did not want to wear a face computer.
Will anyone trust Facebook enough to use their device if it does develop one?
Zoe Corbyn is a San Franciso-based freelance journalist who specializes in writing about science, technology, research, higher education and ideas.
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