American sci-fi author Michael Crichton often explored human attempts to dominate nature through technological advancement, usually with catastrophic results. Several were turned into movies you may have heard of (Jurassic Park, Westworld). Hopefully, his prognostications in those two will not come to pass.
One of his early efforts, The Terminal Man went celluloid in 1974, not long after he’d graduated from Harvard Medical School. In it, we meet “Harry” Benson, who commits violent acts during seizures after a car accident. In an attempt to control his seizures, doctors implant an experimental “brain pacemaker”. What could possibly go wrong?
Terminal Man is one of the earliest sci-fi stories I can find that speculates about brain implants, and in this case, Crichton may have been on the money. Our favourite Western oligarch, Elon Musk, has invested heavily in brain implant R&D, and last year introduced us to Noland Arbaugh – a quadriplegic who received an implant that allows him to control a computer with the power of his mind alone. Two other people have since received the implants owned by Musk’s company Neuralink.
So far, nothing has gone wrong. Unlike Harry Benson, nobody has misused their implants to give them jolts of pleasure. Or gone on a killing spree. Apparently no brain scarring from the procedure, either.
But if I was a recipient, I’d be watching Neuralink’s financial success. You don’t want to get a chip put in your head and then have the folk who did it go bankrupt. Who fixes it if it goes wrong or you do start zapping yourself for giggles ? How easy will it be to get health insurance?
Extraordinary good news stories aside, what else might we do to help people with spinal injuries or who have experienced strokes and can’t control their limbs? What about people with treatment-resistant depression, for that matter?
Enter Surjo Soekadar, who leads the Clinical Neurotechnology Lab at the University of Tübingen in Germany. That’s Einstein Foundation Professor Soekadar to you and me. Soekadar is a physician with a doctorate in clinical neuropsychology, a track record in establishing health centres in poor nations, and something of a star in the area of neural technology.
I recently had the pleasure of seeing Soekadar present some of his work and I have never been in a room with so many eminent scientists muttering “Wow!” under their breath.
Rather than putting chips and wires in people’s brains, how about developing wearable technology that allows people to control their limbs? In case you’re wondering, this isn’t as easy as it sounds.
The prototypes involve what looks like a swimming cap with sensors that measure brain activity connected to kit that can interpret the “pick up a chip and put it in my mouth” signals in the motor cortex, then move a motorised exoskeleton mounted on the person’s arm and hand to do exactly that.
The challenge is jamming all of the processing kit and battery into something that doesn’t require a Volkswagen to carry it round. There’s a similar portability challenge in developing practical wearables that can dynamically modulate the magnetic field in our brains.
Why would we want to do this? There’s reason to think we can reduce symptoms of psychiatric and neurological conditions this way, but it’s not easy – the kit needs to time electromagnetic stimulation so it happens at the optimal moment. Soekadar can do this now, but he’s working on making the equipment that dynamically manages this mind reading and stimulation smaller, and less reliant on things like liquid helium to make it run.
If you want to see what this means to someone who hasn’t been able to eat a chip themselves, head over to Soekadar’s lab website. I defy you not to go “wow” too.
