The Future of the Mind (13 page)

The reason why MRI machines have to be so huge right now is that one
needs a uniform magnetic field to get good resolution. The larger the magnet, the more uniform one can make the field, and the better accuracy one finds in the final pictures. However, physicists know the exact mathematical properties of magnetic fields (they were worked out by physicist James Clerk Maxwell back in the 1860S).
In 1993 in Germany, Dr. Bernhard Blümich and his colleagues created the world’s smallest MRI machine, which is the size of a briefcase. It uses a weak and distorted magnetic field, but supercomputers can analyze the magnetic field and correct for this so that the device produces realistic 3-D pictures. Since computer power doubles roughly every two years, they are now powerful enough to analyze the magnetic field created by the briefcase-sized device and compensate for its distortion.

As a demonstration of their machine, in 2006 Dr. Blümich and his colleagues were able to take MRI scans of Ötzi, the “Iceman,” who was frozen in ice about 5,300 years ago toward the end of the last ice age. Because Ötzi was frozen in an awkward position, with his arms spread apart, it was difficult to cram him inside the small cylinder of a conventional MRI machine, but Dr. Blümich’s portable machine easily took MRI photographs.

These physicists estimate that, with increasing computer power, an MRI machine of the future might be the size of a cell phone. The raw data from this cell phone would be sent wirelessly to a supercomputer, which would process the data from the weak magnetic field and then create a 3-D image. (The weakness of the magnetic field is compensated for by the increase in computer power.) This then could vastly accelerate research. “Perhaps something like the
Star Trek
tricorder is not so far off after all,” Dr. Blümich has said. (The tricorder is a small, handheld scanning device that gives an instant diagnosis of any illness.) In the future, you may have more computer power in your medicine cabinet than there is in a modern university hospital today. Instead of waiting to get permission from a hospital or university to use an expensive MRI machine, you could gather data in your own living room by simply waving the portable MRI over yourself and then e-mailing the results to a lab for analysis.

It could also mean that, at some point in the future, an MRI telepathy helmet might be possible, with vastly better resolution than an EEG scan. Here is how it may work in the coming decades. Inside the helmet, there would be electromagnetic coils to produce a weak magnetic field and radio pulses that probe the brain. The raw MRI signals would then be sent to a pocketsize
computer placed in your belt. The information would then be radioed to a server located far from the battlefield. The final processing of the data would be done by a supercomputer in a distant city. Then the message would be radioed back to your troops on the battlefield. The troops would hear the message either through speakers or through electrodes placed in the auditory cortex of their brains.

DARPA AND HUMAN ENHANCEMENT

Given the costs of all this research, it is legitimate to ask: Who is paying for it? Private companies have only recently shown interest in this cutting-edge technology, but it’s still a big gamble for many of them to fund research that may never pay off. Instead, one of the main backers is DARPA, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which has spearheaded some of the most important technologies of the twentieth century.

DARPA was originally set up by President Dwight Eisenhower after the Russians sent Sputnik into orbit in 1957 and shocked the world. Realizing that the United States might quickly be outpaced by the Soviets in high technology, Eisenhower hastily established this agency to keep the country competitive with the Russians. Over the years, the numerous projects it started grew so large that they became independent entities by themselves. One of its first spinoffs was NASA.

DARPA’s strategic plan reads like something from science fiction: its “
only
charter is radical innovation.”
The only justification for its existence is “to accelerate the future into being.” DARPA scientists are constantly pushing the boundaries of what is physically possible. As former DARPA official Michael Goldblatt says, they try not to violate the laws of physics, “or at least not knowingly. Or at least not more than one per program.”

But what separates DARPA from science fiction is its track record, which is truly astounding. One of its early projects in the 1960s was Arpanet, which was a war-fighting telecommunications network that would electronically connect scientists and officials during and after World War III. In 1989, the National Science Foundation decided that, in light of the breakup of the Soviet bloc, it was unnecessary to keep it a secret, so it declassified this hush-hush military technology and essentially gave codes and blueprints away for free. Arpanet would eventually become the Internet.

When the U.S. Air Force needed a way to guide its ballistic missiles in
space, DARPA helped create Project 57, a top-secret project that was designed to place H-bombs on hardened Soviet missile silos in a thermonuclear exchange. It would later become the foundation for the Global Positioning System (GPS). Instead of guiding missiles, today it guides lost motorists.

DARPA has been a key player in a series of inventions that have altered the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including cell phones, night-vision goggles, telecommunications advances, and weather satellites. I have had a chance to interact with DARPA scientists and officials on several occasions.
I once had lunch with one of the agency’s former directors at a reception filled with many scientists and futurists. I asked him a question that had always bothered me: Why do we have to rely on dogs to sniff our luggage for the presence of high explosives? Surely our sensors are sensitive enough to pick up the telltale signature of explosive chemicals. He replied that DARPA had actively looked into this same question but had come up against some severe technical problems. The olfactory sensors of dogs, he said, had evolved over millions of years to be able to detect a handful of molecules, and that kind of sensitivity is extremely difficult to match, even with our most finely tuned sensors. It’s likely that we will continue to rely on dogs at airports for the foreseeable future.

On another occasion, a group of DARPA physicists and engineers came to a talk I gave about the future of technology. Later I asked them if they had any concerns of their own. One concern, they said, was their public image. Most people have never heard of DARPA, but some link it to dark, nefarious government conspiracies, everything from UFO cover-ups, Area 51, and Roswell to weather control, etc. They sighed. If only these rumors were true, they could certainly use help from alien technology to jump-start their research!

With a budget of $3 billion, DARPA has now set its sights on the brain-machine interface. When discussing the potential applications, former DARPA official Michael Goldblatt pushes the boundary of the imagination. He says, “
Imagine if soldiers could communicate by thought alone.… Imagine the threat of biological attack being inconsequential. And contemplate, for a moment, a world in which learning is as easy as eating, and the replacement of damaged body parts as convenient as a fast-food drive-through. As impossible as these visions sound or as difficult as you might think the task would be, these visions are the everyday work of the Defense Sciences Office [a branch of DARPA].”

Goldblatt believes that historians will conclude that the long-term legacy of DARPA will be human enhancement, “our future historical strength.” He notes that the famous army slogan “Be All You Can Be” takes on a new meaning when contemplating the implications of human enhancement. Perhaps it is no accident that Michael Goldblatt is pushing human enhancement so vigorously at DARPA. His own daughter suffers from cerebral palsy and has been confined to a wheelchair all her life. Since she requires outside help, her illness has slowed her down, but she has always risen above adversity. She is going to college and dreaming of starting her own company. Goldblatt acknowledges that his daughter is his inspiration. As
Washington Post
editor Joel Garreau has noted, “
What he is doing is spending untold millions of dollars to create what might well be the next step in human evolution. And yet, it has occurred to him that the technology he is helping create might someday allow his daughter not just to walk, but to transcend.”

PRIVACY ISSUES

When hearing of mind-reading machines for the first time, the average person might be concerned about privacy. The idea that a machine concealed somewhere may be reading our intimate thoughts without our permission is unnerving. Human consciousness, as we have stressed, involves constantly running simulations of the future. In order for these simulations to be accurate, we sometimes imagine scenarios that wade into immoral or illegal territory, but whether or not we act on these plans, we prefer to keep them private.

For scientists, life would be easier if they could simply read people’s thoughts from a distance using portable devices (rather than by using clumsy helmets or surgically opening up the skull), but the laws of physics make this exceedingly difficult.

When I asked Dr. Nishimoto, who works in Dr. Gallant’s Berkeley lab, about the question of privacy, he smiled and replied that radio signals degrade quite rapidly outside the brain, so these signals would be too diffuse and weak to make any sense to anyone standing more than a few feet away. (In school, we learned about Newton’s laws and that gravity diminishes as the square of the distance, so that if you doubled your distance from a star, the gravity field diminishes by a factor of four. But magnetic fields diminish much faster than the square of the distance. Most signals decrease by the
cube or quartic of the distance, so if you double the distance from an MRI machine, the magnetic field goes down by a factor of eight or more.)

Furthermore, there would be interference from the outside world, which would mask the faint signals coming from the brain. This is one reason why scientists require strict laboratory conditions to do their work, and even then they are able to extract only a few letters, words, or images from the thinking brain at any given time. The technology is not adequate to record the avalanche of thoughts that often circulate in our brain as we simultaneously consider several letters, words, phrases, or sensory information, so using these devices for mind reading as seen in the movies is not possible today, and won’t be for decades to come.

For the foreseeable future, brain scans will continue to require direct access to the human brain in laboratory conditions. But in the highly unlikely event that someone in the future finds a way to read thoughts from a distance, there are still countermeasures you can take. To keep your most important thoughts private, you might use a shield to block brain waves from entering the wrong hands. This can be done with something called a Faraday cage, invented by the great British physicist Michael Faraday in 1836, although the effect was first observed by Benjamin Franklin. Basically, electricity will rapidly disperse around a metal cage, such that the electric field inside the cage is zero. To demonstrate this, physicists (like myself) have entered a metallic cage on which huge electrical bolts are fired. Miraculously, we are unscratched. This is why airplanes can be hit by lightning bolts and not suffer damage, and why cable wires are covered with metallic threads. Similarly, a telepathy shield would consist of thin metal foil placed around the brain.

TELEPATHY VIA NANOPROBES IN THE BRAIN

There is another way to partially solve the privacy issue, as well as the difficulty of placing ECOG sensors into the brain. In the future, it may be possible to exploit nanotechnology, the ability to manipulate individual atoms, to insert a web of nanoprobes into the brain that can tap into your thoughts. These nanoprobes might be made of carbon nanotubes, which conduct electricity and are as thin as the laws of atomic physics allow. These nanotubes are made of individual carbon atoms arrayed in a tube a few molecules thick.
(They are the subject of intense scientific interest, and are expected in the coming decades to revolutionize the way scientists probe the brain.)

The nanoprobes would be placed precisely in those areas of the brain devoted to certain activities. In order to convey speech and language, they would be placed in the left temporal lobes. In order to process visual images, they would be placed in the thalamus and visual cortex. Emotions would be sent via nanoprobes in the amygdala and limbic system. The signals from these nanoprobes would be sent to a small computer, which would process the signals and wirelessly send information to a server and then the Internet.

Privacy issues would be partially solved, since you would completely control when your thoughts are being sent over cables or the Internet. Radio signals can be detected by any bystander with a receiver, but electrical signals sent along a cable cannot. The problem of opening up the skull to use messy ECOG meshes is also solved, because the nanoprobes can be inserted via microsurgery.

Some science-fiction writers have conjectured that when babies are born in the future, these nanoprobes might be painlessly implanted, so that telepathy becomes a way of life for them. In
Star Trek
, for example, implants are routinely placed into the children of the Borg at birth so that they can telepathically communicate with others. These children cannot imagine a world where telepathy does not exist. They take it for granted that telepathy is the norm.

Because these nanoprobes are tiny, they would be invisible to the outside world, so there would be no social ostracism. Although society might be repulsed at the idea of inserting probes permanently into the brain, these science-fiction writers assume that people will get used to the idea because the nanoprobes would be so useful, just like test-tube babies have been accepted by society today after the initial controversy surrounding them.