Brain-computer interface becomes reality

The brain-computer interface development is in a full swing. DARPA is already experimenting with a person controlling up to three military jet airplanes (simulators) using brain-computer interface. So far, they could only experiment with paralyzed people who had already an implant placed in their brains.  But there is a $4 million grant to build a non-invasive interface that picks up brain signals over the skin, without implanting the sensor inside the brain. I am really looking forward to seeing such a device working and to test it. The area of application is limitless.

In the recent issue of The Atlantic, an article was published about DARPA,“The Pentagon’s Push to Program Soldiers’ Brains” which describes their Controlled Biological Systems program. Apparently, there were successful experiments with transferring learning skills from the brains of one lab rat to another. The first rat was trained for two weeks to perform a certain task. The second rat was able to perform the same task immediately after the knowledge transfer over the wire. 

The reading of brain patterns and transferring them is done via implanted electrodes. The most intractable problem is blood leakage these electrodes inside the brain. Doug Weber is a neural engineer at the University of Pittsburgh who recently finished a four-year term as a DARPA program manager. He said, “you undergo this process of wounding, bleeding, healing, wounding, bleeding, healing, and whenever blood leaks into the brain compartment, the activity in the cells goes way down, so they become sick, essentially.”

So, my friends, “the most intractable problem” is just technicalities. Which means we are there already. And, I strongly suspect, there are secret parts of the same DARPA program which does similar experiments with humans. Everything goes under the guise of helping the wounded soldiers to restore the lost skills after a trauma. But it also helps to make any soldier battle-ready in a few… hours? …minutes? seconds?

Annie Jacobsen in her 2015 book, The Pentagon’s Brain, describes the Continuous Assisted Performance project attempted to create a “24/7 soldier” who could go without sleep for up to a week. (“My measure of success,” one DARPA official said of these programs, “is that the International Olympic Committee bans everything we do.”)

To be fair, everybody benefits from DARPA’s research. It changes not only the nature of battle (stealth aircraft, drones) but also provides all of us with amazing technologies: voice-recognition technology, GPS devices, and its best-known creation—the internet.

I was impressed to learn how compact the agency is. It has only 220 employees and about 1,000 contractors. Some 100 of these employees are program managers—scientists and engineers, part of whose job is to oversee about 2,000 projects outsourced to corporations, universities, and government labs. The effective workforce of DARPA actually runs into the range of tens of thousands. The budget is officially said to be about $3 billion and has been at roughly that level for the past 14 years. Well, there is always a possibility of some secret research with “invisible” funding.

So, like almost anything powerful, it can be used as a weapon or to the benefit of humanity. I hope over time there will be more of the latter.

I wish I could transfer my thoughts to you without writing them down and you would send me your ideas too. We could cooperate all the time as one huge human brain. We would do things we even cannot imagine now.