Tory Shepherd
Sat, 16 March 2024
Australian neuroscience advances are hugely promising for people who otherwise cannot communicate or interact with the world, but there are concerns over regulation and access.
Illustration: Victoria Hart/Guardian Design
Brain-computer interface technology is at the core of movies such as Ready Player One, The Matrix and Avatar. But outside the realm of science fiction, BCI is being used on Earth to help paralysed people communicate, to study dreams and to control robots.
Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk announced in January – to much fanfare – that his neurotechnology company Neuralink had implanted a computer chip into a human for the first time. In February, he announced that the patient was able to control a computer mouse with their thoughts.
Neuralink’s aim is noble: to help people who otherwise can’t communicate and interact with the environment. But details are scant. The project immediately sounded alarm bells about brain privacy, the risk of hacking and other things that could go wrong.
Brain-computer interface technology is at the core of movies such as Ready Player One, The Matrix and Avatar. But outside the realm of science fiction, BCI is being used on Earth to help paralysed people communicate, to study dreams and to control robots.
Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk announced in January – to much fanfare – that his neurotechnology company Neuralink had implanted a computer chip into a human for the first time. In February, he announced that the patient was able to control a computer mouse with their thoughts.
Neuralink’s aim is noble: to help people who otherwise can’t communicate and interact with the environment. But details are scant. The project immediately sounded alarm bells about brain privacy, the risk of hacking and other things that could go wrong.
Dr Steve Kassem, a senior research fellow at Neuroscience Research Australia, says “tonnes of grains of salt” should be taken with the Neuralink news. It is not the first company to do a neural implant, he says. In fact, Australia is a “hotspot” for related neurological research.
Do patients dream of electric sheep?
A University of Technology Sydney project that has received millions in funding from the defence department is currently in the third phase of demonstrating how soldiers can use their brain signals to control a robot dog.
“We were successful [demonstrating] that a solder can use their brain to issue a command to assign the dog to reach a destination totally hands-free … so they can use their hands for other purposes,” Prof Lin, the director of the UTS Computational Intelligence and BCI Centre, says.
The soldier uses assisted reality glasses with a special graphene interface to issue brain signal commands to send the robotic dog to different places. Lin says they are working on making the technology multi-user, faster and able to control other vehicles such as drones.
Meanwhile, Sydney company Neurode has created a headset to help people with ADHD by monitoring their brain and delivering electronic pulses to address changes. Another UTS team is working on the DreamMachine, which aims to reconstruct dreams from brain signals. It uses artificial intelligence and electroencephalogram data to generate images from the subconscious.
And then there are the implants.
Good signal
Synchron started at the University of Melbourne and is now also based in New York. It uses a mesh inserted into the brain’s blood vessels that allows patients to use the internet, sending a signal that operates a bit like Bluetooth. People can shop online, email and communicate using the technology to control a computer.
Synchron has implanted the mesh in a number of patients and is monitoring them, including one in Australia. Patient P4, who has motor neurone disease, has the mesh implanted a few years ago.
“I believe he’s had over 200 sessions,” Gil Rind, Sychron’s senior director of advanced technology, says. “He is still going strong with the implants and has been working very closely with us.
“He’s been able to use his computer through the system … As the disease has progressed it’s really challenging to use physical buttons.
“This has provided him with an alternative method of being able to interact with his computer – for online banking, communication with his carer, [with] loved ones.”
Dr Christina Maher at Sydney University’s Brain and Mind Centre says Synchron’s technology is “miles ahead” of Elon Musk’s and is more sophisticated and safer because it does not require open brain surgery. The researchers have also published more than 25 articles, she says.
“With Neuralink, we don’t know much about it.
“My understanding is that a big priority for them is to test the efficacy and safety of their surgical robots … so they’re a lot more about the robotic side of things, which makes sense from a commercial perspective.”
The need for regulation
Amid the hype and promise of neurotechnology, though, are concerns about who will be able to access the helpful technologies and how they will be protected.
Maher says it is a matter of balancing the need for innovation with proper regulation, while allowing access for those people who really need it. She says the “disparity between the haves and have-nots” is being discussed in Australia and globally.
Amid the hype and promise of neurotechnology, though, are concerns about who will be able to access the helpful technologies and how they will be protected.
Maher says it is a matter of balancing the need for innovation with proper regulation, while allowing access for those people who really need it. She says the “disparity between the haves and have-nots” is being discussed in Australia and globally.
“When brain-computer interfaces become more common, it’s going to really segregate people into those who can afford it and those who can’t,” she says.
Rind says Synchron is focused on those who have the most to gain, such as people with quadriplegia. “We would like to expand that out as far as we can – we hope we can reach larger markets and help more people in need,” he says.
A personal, pivotal moment for him was seeing the faces of the clinicians, team and family of the first patient to successfully receive the implant, he says.
On Neuralink, Kassem warns there will always be dangers when technology is developed by a company that exists to make profit. “A mobile phone plan for your brain is not what we want,” he says.
“And what about if this is hacked? There is always a risk if it’s not a closed system.”
More likely than that, though, is that Neuralink will use people’s data.
“Just like every single app on your phone and on your computer, Neuralink will monitor as much as it can. Everything it possibly could,” Kassem says.
“It will be stored somewhere.”
Protecting brain data
Maher says hacking will remain a risk if devices are linked to the internet, and agrees that data is a big problem. She says much of our social media, biometric and other data is already out there, but that brain data is different.
“While [BCI companies] are subject to the same data privacy laws … the difference is in a lot of people’s minds is that brain data is quite private, it’s your private thoughts.
“The big picture here is that once we start recording a lot of brain data, there’ll be an absolute megaton of data out there,” she says.
Kassem says despite concerns over privacy, interacting with the brain holds exciting possibilities.
“We need to remember how powerful and significant the brain is … everything you are now, everything you have been, and everything you will be is just your brain, nothing else,” he says.
There are trillions of neural connections in the brain, leading to “boundless opportunities”, he says, quoting the US physicist Emerson Pugh. “If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t.”
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