How many time we have thought “it would be nice if I just think of calling my friend and ,voilà, my cell phone dials his number!”. May be not that but something equivalent: turning our thoughts into immediate action with no cumbersome interface.

Samsung is working on BCI to control a cell phone.

Well, progress in BCI, Brain Computer Interface, is now turning the question into “when will it be possible…”. Our wish, indeed, may be granted soon.

On the left a photo of a soft helmet being experimented by Samsung to pick up electrical signals generated by thoughts in our brain and decode them via a computer to generate commands to a cell phone.

Now, it is clear that I do not want to wear such a thing! But researchers are progressing in making such an helmet invisible, by replacing it with a chip that can be implanted under the scalp. That would solve the aesthetics issue but the whole thing is going to open up a can of worm!

Suppose we will come to a point that you can be implanted at very low cost and with no pain nor physical side effects a chip that can pick up your thoughts and send them to a computer (let’s assume the one in your cell phone) and therefore you, or may be not you but many people, will choose to have such an implant.

The possibility to connect at light speed thinking and acting may give a competitive advantage in many field and so one might suppose that over time a growing number of people will make BCI a mainstream reality.

What are the legal implication? This is what an article on Technology Review is wondering about.

Who is going to be accountable if something breaks down and you do not what you though but something different? Or, even more likely, you changed your mind a millisecond after having sent the command…? The delay between thinking and acting is saving our day many times over!

And, of course, this is just the beginning! What if we get hacked? Our thoughts gets stolen, made public?

The fact is we have been evolved through the eons within a very precise framework: the impossibility to know for sure what another person is thinking. And even if we might guess what is going on in another brain we do not know for sure what will be going on in the next second… This impossibility, or uncertainty, has shaped our behaviour and our social relations.

If this framework crumbles we find ourselves completely unprepared in a social sense. And this is the one that is most crucial to our life. Indeed it is ever more true that new solutions beget new problems!

As you have noticed I often post news related to advances in the “brain” area. This is in synch with the feeling of many scientists that the coming  years will be remembered as the years of the “brain”. The advances in technologies for observing and analysing brain structures are opening the way to a greater understanding of its working and to the possibility of mimicking that inside artificial structures.

Indeed, the European flagship project “The Human Brain” has among its goal the possibility to create new computation paradigms based on the understanding of the brain.

There are of course other goals, very important ones, like helping people with disabilities, congenital and acquired.
So far the communication with (and from) the brain has required bulky equipment and wires to connect the patient to a computer, such as Braingate.

Now, scientists, neuro-engineers, at Brown University have developed the first implantable wireless brain-computer interface.

As it is shown in the photo on the left the implant has a matchbox size (and it is going to shrink, as we all know, in the next few months), can be placed under the scalp becoming almost invisible and connects to the brain capturing signals from as many as a hundred neurones.

It does not seem than many, particularly if you think that there are billions of them, but it is all about getting the sensor in the right place of the cortex. In this sense its performances are equivalent to the ones provided by Braingate that required a wired connection to a computer and stuck out of the head of the patient, as shown in the figure below, where a paralised patient can instruct a robot to provide her a drink by thinking about it:

In the coming years we may expect progress in three directions:

1. miniaturisation and lower power requirement (and this we may take it for granted),

2. greater number of sensors to pick up signals from more neurones also locate in different parts of the brain cortex (more complex then No. 1 but still within reach in the next 5 years)

3. higher sophistication of software to decode the signals generated by the neurones (progress in the understanding of the brain is instrumental in this evolution).

I consider all this progress a fantastic progress in our capability of understanding ourselves getting very close to the thinking machine that is able to think in a scientific way, through experiment, about “itself” going beyond what philosophers have tried to do in the last 25 centuries.

I wish following up Roberto’s sentence in his post (Europe 2050: data based economics): “meaning is not an information nor a collection of information, rather a state of the brain, that in turns is influenced by previous state(s).”

This has recalled me a video where Henry Stapp (retired from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, but member of the scientific staff) is elaborating how the collapse of the wave function in quantum mechanics can explain mind-brain interactions (by the way this talk was part of a Nour Foundation panel discussion at the September 11, 2008 United Nations symposium, “Beyond the Mind-Body Problem: New Paradigms in the Science of Consciousness”).

H. Stapp: reality waves collapse when brains select one among the alternative possibilities for future actions

It is impressive noticing these similarities between the collapse of a state vector of a quantum system and a decision process in the field of mind: a peak in an electron wave function is closely correlated with the probability of observing an electron in the region of the peak; similarly the brain-mind activity involves the selection of one alternative state out of many.

So, indeed, any brain state appears as the consequence of its interactions of the environment (with all its data), being also influenced by the previous state(s). So I’d define information, in its generality, as what brings achieving a certain brain state.

This brings also to realize how measurements in the quantum domain appears to be similar to information processing in the brain, or in general, in the biological domain. In particular, we see that in the quantum domain the measurement theory shows that a measuring instrument acts as a filter whose setting are related to the state of the measuring instrument after the measurement; in the field of mind we can associate this with the registering, by an information processing system, of the decision process (and the states) which has been carried out (achieved).

But then, how registering brain states, so to feed a global mind ?

Will Connectomics pave the way ? Maybe, but much remains to be done: many studies actually marked the evidence of biological organisms exploiting quantum behaviors.

My two cents is that we need to reach a subtler level, which is the common substrate for quantum and biological information systems, and, based on that, to develop new concepts of brain-cloud interfaces.

One of the scenario addressed in the Europe 2050 group was the one of data playing a major role in the future of Europe.

Clearly there is no doubt that data volume will keep increasing as well as the digitalization of everything because of sensors, and because everything in everyday life creates data.

What may differ in thirty years time is the way data global architecture is seen. Rather than having data in a Cloud (or several clouds) the vision is to have a global data architecture encompassing the world resulting in massive distributed data bases with some sort of uniform access layer (like we have today a uniform resource locator for Internet). In principle, then, data are located where they are “generated” (not necessarily so but you get the gist, the architectural approach is not to move them somewhere to make them accessible). By being kept local, they can be better protected, also enforcing local policies. Notice that by 2050, most objects, devices, ambient will have an associated massive data base. The “sensors” box in the graphic has to be understood in very general terms as means to generate data.

The other important idea is that this huge world of data will be impossible to understand unless we can imagine that what is actually visible is a status resulting from the interaction of the global data and individual brain, similarly to what is happening within our brains: meaning is not an information nor a collection of information, rather a state of the brain, that in turns is influenced by previous state(s).