An illustration of a brain-machine interface hangs in an auditorium, towering above
participants in the 2023 GESDA Summit at CERN’s Science Gateway (Photo by J. Heilprin)
Diving into Neuro Augmentation, the New Frontier Between Mind and Machine
From brain-machine interfaces to brain-monitoring devices, and from genetically engineered brains that can augment primates to engineered clusters of cultured human brain cells connected to robots, there are a growing number of ways to read and write with the electrical signals of nervous systems that are being developed into new technology meant to enhance our lives.
By John Heilprin
December 5, 2023
New forms of neuro augmentation that build on nervous systems through technology – along with breakthrough advances in brain organoids, interspecies chimeras and genetically modified primates – represent a new frontier between minds and machines ushering in change and pushing established ethical boundaries. Better understanding of how the brain works and novel uses for computing devices and robotics also could lead to new forms of consciousness.
“We are in many ways co-evolving with technology,” Nita Farahany, a Professor of Law at Duke University, told a panel discussion entitled “Neuro Augmentation: Hype or Hope?” during the 2023 GESDA Summit in October. Farahany also is the author of a new book, The Battle for Your Brain, which argues a public debate is long overdue on neurotechnology intrusive to our brains – and new legal guarantees of thought are needed. “Breaching what I think of as the final frontier of privacy, that space, the inner sanctum, the place for private reprieve, fundamentally changes our relationship to others in ways that we have to include within any ethical framework.”
Neuro augmentation is featured as one of the six scientific deep dives into specific aspects of the GESDA 2023 Science Breakthrough Radar® and is accompanied by insights from GESDA Vice Chairman Patrick Aebischer, President Emeritus of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), and GESDA Board Member and Academic Forum Chairman Michael Hengartner, Board President of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETHZ).
Each deep dive was developed through workshops and symposia where global experts and practitioners discussed the most pressing issues facing science and society. Aebischer and Hengartner noted the technology for reading and writing signals of the brain likely will become wireless within five years; enhancing the depth and quality of sleep with a closed loop implant or wearable EEG device is an especially promising area. Within 10 to 25 years, brain-computer interfaces are likely to provide better readouts of brain states and, combined with closed loop neurostimulation, may help patients coping with issues of dementia, sensation and bowel control.
“Their ubiquity could change everything from workplace rights to what it means to be human,” the 2023 Radar said.
It’s clear that some of the recent advances in neuroscience and machine learning are bringing new innovations for cognitive enhancement, for example, improving human memory, cognition and other aspects of consciousness, according to the 2023 Radar, and that in the near term such technologies will be used to treat neurodegenerative disorders and psychiatric conditions that involve significant memory impairments and for which currently no therapies exist.
Though humans have used technology as a force-multiplier since ancient times, advances in fundamental neurosciences, brain-inspired computing and neurotechnologies are opening the door to these new ways of curing neurodegenerative diseases or augmenting cognitive capacities. Neurotechnology is expected to become a major industry soon with growth in the surging neurotech devices market likely to reach as much as US$24.2 billion in annual revenue by 2027, up from US$11.3 billion in 2021, according to UNESCO estimates based on BCC Research.
Robotic appendages with different, non-human degrees of freedom are already at work in factories and in surgical suites. Grégoire Courtine, a neuroscientist at EPFL, and Jocelyne Bloch, a neurosurgeon at the University of Lausanne, re-established communication between the brain and spinal cord through a wireless “digital bridge” implant that allowed 40-year-old Gert-Jan Oskam, a paralyzed man in the Netherlands, to walk again fluidly and naturally by wirelessly transmitting thoughts to his legs. This groundbreaking work by Courtine and Bloch, who met through Aebischer and EPFL’s Center for Neuroprosthetics, was published in Nature in May 2023, and their presentation about it was a highlight of the 2023 GESDA Summit.
At the summit, Courtine acknowledged that the notion of being able to translate someone’s “intention” into action through a digital bridge may at first sound crazy, but he said that learning how to decode the “beautiful symphony that’s called walking” stands as perhaps “the most emotional moment of my career. It was so complicated to make this work technologically.”
Electrical therapies also are featured in the GESDA 2023 Science Breakthrough Radar® which noted that new designs of brain implants – such as neurograins and neuropixels that do less damage when being implanted – are expected to be tested in more clinical trials in the coming decade. The devices can lead to better understanding of neural pathways.
The case for international standards and regulations
Organizations such as GESDA, UNESCO, OECD, and the Council of Europe have responded to this new frontier between mind and machines by holding discussions and, in some cases, developing standards. GESDA’s high-level Anticipation Workshop at Villars, Switzerland in March 2023 convened experts to provide informed insight about neuro augmentation’s direction and speed over the next 25 years. UNESCO held a first international conference at Paris in July 2023 to develop an ethical framework for what it called “the growing and largely unregulated neurotechnology sector, which may threaten human rights and fundamental freedoms.”
At the level of soft law, OECD has been on the frontlines. It developed the first international standard, the OECD Recommendation on Responsible Innovation in Neurotechnology, for its 37 member democracies in 2019. Professor Marcello Ienca, a Professor of Ethics and AI and Neuroscience at the Technical University of Munich, told the 2023 GESDA Summit that she wrote a report for the Council of Europe about the applications of technology to biology and medicine that could be used to revise the Vienna Convention’s rules for human rights in biomedicine. The IEEE Standards Association has been developing standards for brain-computer interfaces; some businesses have been developing ethical codes for neurotechnology.
“If the OECD is focusing more on responsible innovation, other organizations like the Council of Europe and the United Nations are focusing more on human rights protection and promotion for neurotechnology,” said Ienca, who described three categories of the governance landscape: 1) self-regulation by the scientific community; 2) soft law instruments by organizations; and 3) legally binding frameworks. “We see some kind of synchronicity, some kind of chronological alignment between the progress in technology and the progress in policy and governance.”
Chile became the first nation to constitutionally protect brain rights in 2021 through a law that applies to mental integrity, free will and neurotechnology access. It essentially treats brain data as an organ that is illegal to buy, sell, traffic or manipulate. The move was made possible by the Chilean Senate’s decade-old Committee on Challenges of Future, Science, Technology, and Innovation, which provided an important opportunity for anticipatory science and diplomacy.
“It was precisely the very close and tied work together between scientists, politicians and diplomats that made possible this law in order to protect neural rights. We need to be working more closely together instead of breaching the existing gap,” said Claudia Fuentes Julio, Chile’s Permanent Representative to the U.N. Office and other international organizations in Geneva. But at the 47-nation U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva, she said, “the minimum protection for the dignity of human beings is something that is questioned today in an international realm.”
Fuentes Julio also said the differing levels of access that nations have to new neurotechnology and the inequities that flow from it “are issues that are a great concern for countries like mine.”
A forum for discussions among all stakeholders
Brain-machine interfaces, cognitive-enhancing drugs and neuromodulations that directly manipulate sensory and cognitive functions may pose dangers if people gradually lose the ability to distinguish facts from fiction, according to Mu-ming Poo, Scientific Director of the Institute of Neuroscience at the Chinese Academy of Sciences Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology, and Paul Licht Distinguished Professor in Biology Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He told the 2023 GESDA Summit “this new disorder would be the peril of the future new modulation technology.”
The Chinese Society of Psychiatry and Chinese Medical Association recently issued ethical guidelines for research on neurotechnology, including for the safe use of brain-machine interfaces, he noted, but neuromodulation techniques must first be tried on animals. “GESDA would be very useful in pioneering these international conversations on the future technology. I think this is really an area that needs more discussion among scientists and all sectors of the society, all the stakeholders, not just the policymakers,” he said. “There are discussions within the United Nations and a high level of discussion, but the participation of scientists and especially people who are working on the frontier, who know the technology, how it’s developing, to be really actively engaged in discussion – that would be great.”
Embodied neuromorphic intelligence
Beyond augmenting humans, neuromorphic computers that simulate how our brains process information could enable robots to solve problems, recognize patterns and make decisions. Using robotic platforms, researchers compare digital computation, which does things sequentially, with neural computation, which can have a high degree of parallelism. Neuromorphic sensory devices are essential in robotics because they convert external optical or mechanical signals into electrical pulses for neurorobotic brains. Researchers envision making things like robotic health care companions or environmental and agricultural monitors. “Now we are going towards something that is not completely autonomous but can share and collaborate with humans,” Chiara Bartolozzi, a Senior Researcher Tenured – Principal Investigator at the Italian Institute of Technology, told the 2023 GESDA Summit.
Jaimie Henderson, a Professor of Neurosurgery at the Stanford University School of Medicine and Director of the Stanford program in Stereotactic and Functional Neurosurgery, told the GESDA 2023 Summit, that soon there will be wireless, fully implantable systems with more channels to accurately read and decode brain cells and better biocompatibility. But scientists also are working to better understand thought and communication. “If you listen, for example, to Elon Musk, who predicts a future where we’ll be able to communicate telepathically by transmitting our thoughts to others’ brains, it makes one wonder, well, what is a thought? How do we actually communicate things between people?” Henderson said. “We have to understand how that’s represented. How does the brain do that? Can we ever really understand it?”
Where the science and diplomacy can take us
Neuro augmentation has been a priority at GESDA for several years and has informed discussions at all three annual GESDA Summits, based on the insights of hundreds of scientists globally contributing to the forward-looking GESDA 2023 Science Breakthrough Radar®.
The neuro augmentation findings in the 2023 Science Breakthrough Radar®:
Based on the latest Radar, here’s where we stand in several important areas:
Trends 2. Human Augmentation
To develop better electrical implants, the materials used will have to become more biocompatible in order to listen in on more brain data. Wireless data transfer methods must be developed, but there’s a fundamental limit to how fast data can be processed in situ, or transferred out of the brain onto external processors. That is due to thermal issues: beyond a certain rate of data transfer, the heat generated begins to cook brain tissue, a major hindrance for wireless brain implants as both wireless transmission and on-chip processing require power that generates enough heat to burn the surrounding tissues. Yet these devices must be wireless for electrical implants to go outside the lab. Radar, page 70
Trends 2.1 Cognitive Enhancement
The ability to monitor and change cognitive capacity is something many people want, suggesting it will be widely adopted once the technology gets to a particular inflection point, and will yield unexpected applications across society. New privacy schemes must be developed and ethical guidance formalized ahead of these technologies to ensure this data is protected, including neurorights and cognitive liberty. Governance around ways to alter and improve cognition is needed even more urgently. Radar, page 86
Anticipation in a nutshell
5-year horizon: Biomarkers of cognitive decline are understood
10-year horizon: Research provides effective brain-boosting techniques
25-year horizon: Digital twins improve enhancement outcome
2.1.3 Neuromodulation systems
A wide variety of interventions, ranging from behavioral to drugs and nutritional supplements, can change cognitive function. The most widely discussed strategies, however involve brain stimulation via electromagnetic fields: transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) and Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS). Radar, page 90
Anticipation in a nutshell
5-year horizon: Brain stimulation devices proliferate
10-year horizon: Miniaturization drives wider adoption of cognitive modulation
25-year horizon: The era of high-precision genetic brain enhancement arrives