Your brain is the next tech frontier

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0:44And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR, I'm Manoush Zomorodi. In 2017, Nita Farahani and her family went through a devastating experience. And it's something she's okay talking about now. Yeah, so we suffered the loss of our second daughter, Kalista. She fell ill with RSV. And ultimately, after a prolonged hospital stay, she died from complications of it on Mother's Day in 2017. The day-to-day became almost unbearable for Anita. From the first moment that I took her into the emergency room and the weeks and months in the hospital, there were just so many vivid images that really left me with so much trauma.

1:53And I ended up with PTSD because some of the, you know, kind of harrowing cries and moments just seared themselves on my brain. And so it got to the point where I couldn't sleep and I was pretty dysfunctional. Nita tried traditional therapy, but it didn't do much. And then eventually a psychologist helped me through it and was able to help me using exposure therapy, which was also really traumatic. Basically, I would clench up every time I tried to go through the exposure therapy and not allow myself to kind of re-experience the memories. But that's a really painful process to go through. At the time, Nita thought, if only there was a way to reprogram her brain so she could stop having these intrusive thoughts and feelings.

2:45And now, there is. Today, there are more innovative neurotechnology procedures that are available that had they been available to me, I would have opted for in a heartbeat. Neurotechnology, devices that let us peer into the brain, monitoring, even guiding its activity. In Nita's case, she believes a treatment called decoded neurofeedback might have helped her. Basically, you know, you can go into a fMRI machine, a functional magnetic resonance imaging, where, you know, when you recall the memory, it's mapped in your brain. Once doctors know which path your brain is using to recall that memory, they can start using it to do something else, take it over.

3:31That mapping allows for the development of something like a game, like playing basketball, to implicitly reactivate those same pathways. Where by playing that game, which is a much more pleasant experience than remembering the trauma, you can essentially overwrite those memories with more positive associations instead. So when that path in her brain was activated, instead of feeling total panic, Nita would have felt more relaxed. And so it's a different and, you know, in many ways, less traumatic way of working through PTSD or working through any kind of traumatic memory or experience. So that's just one of the different techniques that people have been working on to, you know, have innovative uses of neurotechnology to enable people to work through trauma or to work through different neurological diseases and disorders.

4:29So the memory is still there, but the visceralness of that thought is lessened? That's right. Yeah. So it's like any other memory. It's faded more now. It's not literally reliving it and re-experiencing it. And PTSD, for me at least, and I think for a lot of people who experience it, you're back there. You're feeling it all again. And all of the overwhelming, you know, fear and trauma that you're experiencing in the moment, you're re-experiencing as the memory kind of takes over again versus how we usually remember, which is, you know, kind of at a distance with reflection. It may hurt still, but it doesn't grip us and take us over and put us back there in that same kind of way.

5:12So that does sound amazing. And if there was technology that could help with that more easily than the years of therapy that you went through, that would be great. But also, it makes me think there are some things that people would like to forget. And are we going to get to the point where, you know, like in that movie, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, there will be technology that could maybe help us do that? I mean, it could be. So Nita Farhani knows a lot about neurotechnology and its pros and cons because she's a law professor at Duke University studying the ethics of how we should and shouldn't use this technology in the future.

5:56Which she says is coming faster than we might think. neurotechnology in headbands, smartwatches, earbuds, we'll be able to track our health, including, eventually, our thoughts and emotions. Yeah. So, I mean, there are brain sensors that pick up electrical activity in the brain. Major tech companies are really racing to embed these brain sensors to be like the heart rate sensors and other sensors we have in everyday objects, but tracking something very different, which is being able to tell if a person is happy or sad or if they're paying attention or their mind is wandering or if they're bored or engaged, tired or falling asleep at the wheel, for example.

6:37There are companies like SmartCap that have been selling these EEG headcaps that allow a driver or a pilot or somebody who's in mining, for example, to track their fatigue levels and give more accurate data about whether they're starting to get to dangerous levels of sleep. I mean, this sounds cool, easier, but where do we start to cross the line between technology understanding our intention based on tiny movements or brain activity to understanding our thoughts and ideas and our feelings? Yeah, it's a great question. So, you know, there was this amazing study that came out in, I think, April of last year, where using more sophisticated neurotechnology, which is like these giant, you know, MRI machines that a person goes into, they, you know, had people listen to podcasts, and then trained a generative AI classifier using GPT-1 to say, like, this is what the person's listening to, this is what their brain activity looks like, this is what they're listening to, this is what they're listening to, this is what they're listening to, this is what they're listening to.

7:44brain activity looks like. And then had them listen to something and have the classifier try to decode what that was. And it was, with a really high degree of accuracy, able to decode a lot of what the person was hearing or what they were imagining, just based on brain activity. And that, again, is more sophisticated technology than EEG. And, you know, it's peering more deeply into the brain, but other researchers are applying that same concept to try to decode EEG activity. And so the question of where does it cross the line, as you're starting to wear everyday devices, you know, earbuds that are tracking your fatigue levels or picking up your intention to type or to swipe, but it's recording that brain activity at all times.

8:31And these models are getting more and more sophisticated at being able to decode what that means, it's not that hard to see that we're quickly moving into a world where what you're thinking and feeling is just as transparent and can be just as easily decoded using AI and neurotechnology. Over the past decade, there have been incredible advances in understanding how the brain works. Now we are on the cusp of a new era of brain monitoring and enhancement. And the exciting potential and pitfalls of merging our minds with machines and manipulating the brain, well, they're mind-boggling. And so today on the show, brain hacks.

9:19Neurotechnology that could treat devastating cognitive diseases, mental illness, and brain injuries. But as legal scholar Nita Farahani warns, also put our most private thoughts and emotions in jeopardy. And that's the part that I fear that when, you know, we get to this world of brain transparency, if we don't have the right kind of safeguards in place, that that which I think is so fundamental to what it means to be human, what it means to flourish as a human, may suddenly not be our own. Here's Nita Farahani on the TED stage. This new category of technology presents unprecedented possibility, both good and bad.

10:04Consider how our physical health and well-being are increasing while neurological disease and suffering continue to rise. 55 million people around the world are struggling with dementia, with more than 60 to 70 percent of them suffering from Alzheimer's disease. Nearly a billion people struggle with mental health and drug use disorders. Depression affects more than 300 million. Consumer neurotech devices can finally enable us to treat our brain health and wellness as seriously as we treat the rest of our physical well-being. Regular use of brain sensors could even enable us to detect the earliest stages of the most aggressive forms of brain tumors like glioblastoma, where early detection is crucial to saving lives.

10:53The same could hold true for Parkinson's disease, to Alzheimer's, traumatic brain injury, ADHD, and even depression. But all of this will only be possible if people can confidently share their brain data without fear that it will be misused against them. You see, the brain data that will be collected and generated by these devices won't be collected in traditional laboratory environments or in clinical research studies run by physicians and scientists. Instead, it'll be the sellers of these new devices, the very companies who've been commodifying our personal data for years, which is why we can't go into this new era naive about the risks or complacent about the challenges that the collection and sharing our brain data will pose.

11:44Brain sensors provide direct access to the part of ourselves that we hold back, that we don't express through our words and our actions. Brain data, in many instances, will be more sensitive than the personal data of the past because it reflects our feelings, our mental states, our emotions, our preferences, our desires, even our very thoughts. I would never have wanted the data that was collected as I worked through the trauma of my personal loss to have been commodified, shared, and analyzed by others. These aren't just hypothetical risks. Take Entertech, a Hangzhou-based company who has collected millions of instances of brain activity data as people have engaged in mind-controlled car racing, sleeping, working, even using neurofeedback with their devices.

12:35they've already entered into partnerships with other companies to share and analyze that data. I mean, what's your biggest fear here, Nita? What is the worst case scenario if we don't start to put some legal safeguards around this tech? I think, honestly, that human flourishing is at risk here. Like, fundamentally, what it means to be human is at risk. In a minute, Nita Farahani explains how our ideas of civil liberty need to change in this new era of neurotechnology to protect our most private ideas and thoughts. On the show today, Brain Hacks. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.

13:20We'll be right back.

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15:06So pick up that Irish flute or those calligraphy pens or the daunting Beef Wellington recipe card and leave the laundry to rinse. Rinse. It's time to be great. On the show today, brain hacks and the future of neurotechnology. We were just talking to Duke law professor Nita Farahani. She's the author of the book The Battle for Your Brain. She says we need to rethink what our right to privacy even means in this new era. So for me, you know, what I've been talking about is our right to cognitive liberty, our right to self-determination over our brain and our mental experiences. And what I mean by that is, like, fundamentally, your right to develop your own identity, your own thoughts, like to have a space where you're able to reflect, to think, to, you know, think about being a child and trying to sort through who you are.

16:03I have a third grader, so an almost nine-year-old, and watching her, you know, more and more come into her own and trying to figure out who she is, all of that happens in this safe space, this safe space of mental reprieve. You know, in one of the most jarring things, I think, in researching my book I came across was, you know, the classrooms in China where children were being required to wear headsets that track their brain activity to track their attention levels throughout the workday. And the thought of a child kind of no matter what that headset can or can't pick up, but the chilling effect that that has on the ability to think freely, to be able to develop your own internal sense of self, to, you know, to dare to think differently at a age where it's so hard already to go against the norm.

17:00that's the space that I worry about us eroding getting to a place where people you know are afraid to even think and if we are afraid to even think freely the capacity to be able to figure out who you are and to you know dare to dream big or to dare to you know help us change the path in the course of humanity or your own path in life is compromised when I hear you say that, it makes me particularly worried because I think we're talking about technology that will be very subtle, right? Like, you know, when I tap something or I swipe something, but if I think something or if someone is collecting a brainwave, that seems very discreet.

17:47It's very discreet and hidden and invisible. So one of the risks I worry about is a lot of times with an emerging technology, especially a whole new class of technology, it becomes normalized and hidden in ways that we can't see. So just to give you an example of that, some of the places in which these EEG headsets have been introduced already are places like you go into an Ikea store to look at a series of rugs, and you're given a headset and told, like only if your brain can prove that you love the rug are you going to be able to take it home. This actually happened. Yeah, they had this marketing gimmick in Brussels where they had these limited edition rugs.

18:32They were worried that the kind of idea of these limited edition rugs was to bring art to people at a reasonable price and people were buying them and reselling them on places like eBay. And so they ran this marketing campaign where you had to wear an EEG headset that while looking at the rugs to prove you loved the rug, and if you did, you could take one home, and if you didn't, you couldn't. We can laugh at that in so many different ways. It was clearly a marketing gimmick, but it normalizes it, right? You encounter technology in situations, novel technology in situations that are non-threatening, that are invisible.

19:11You don't realize what's being collected, and suddenly we've breached this category of giving away our most intimate selves without even realizing that we're doing so. And I don't think people realize what that world might look like. It's not just that you've given up your mental privacy, you've given up the keys to who you are to be able to mentally shape and change you. That's happening already with algorithms, but the ways in which this can happen so much more precisely and so much more in a customized way, I worry about a world of more almost brainwashing of people in ways that really limit our ability to think freely.

19:51Unless people have individual control over their brain data, it will be used for micro-targeting or worse, like the employees worldwide who've already been subject to brain surveillance in the workplace to track their attention and fatigue, to governments developing brain biometrics to authenticate people at borders to interrogate criminal suspects' brains, and even weapons that are being crafted to disable and disorient the human brain. Brain wearables will have not only read, but write capabilities, creating risks that our brains can be hacked, manipulated, and even subject to targeted attacks.

20:32We must act quickly to safeguard against the very real and terrifying risks to our innermost selves. So somebody listening is like, okay I don't want that future tell me what to do right now what would you say? Well I'd say the first place that I've been advocating that we address is like a system of of laws and that's not just because I'm a law professor I think it's because we're starting in a world in which the balance is not in favor of individuals right we've gotten to this place where like the collection of data is the norm and so the balance is in favor of the tech companies, and we have to reclaim some of that power for individuals.

21:13And in the past year, a lot has happened. So UNESCO has launched a new project around trying to develop ethical guidelines around neurotechnology. The UN has a committee that's putting together a report on neurotechnologies and its impact on human rights. And a lot of the AI legislation that's been happening and the conversations that have been happening. Some of those have started to recognize the convergence of these fields and include some specifics around the processing of biometric and personal data. But there needs to be a lot more convergence between the AI conversations and the neurotechnology conversations.

21:53And so I've been advocating for a global right to cognitive liberty, a right to self-determination over our brain and mental experiences. And that really just, that's a framework to update three existing human rights, which is our right to privacy, to explicitly include a right to mental privacy, the right to freedom of thought, to more explicitly cover a right against interference and manipulation and punishment for our thoughts, and the right to self-determination, which has been recognized as a collective and political right to also be an individual right. It feels like we are hurtling towards an era and this sounds so dramatic, but where man and machine are merging in many ways.

22:38I agree with you. How do you think about it? So, you know, I think of it as kind of co-evolution. Huh. The way I see that is human thinking is relational. And so, you know, our technology and our dependence and interdependence on technology is increasing, which means our relational thinking with respect to technology is being shaped and changed with that technology. I want us to be more in the driver's seat of that. Actually knowing what's happening with that co-evolution and to be able to drive that co-evolution rather than the technology in the hands of a few powerful people deciding how our brains are relationally going to change with respect to that technology.

23:26And I think this is a whole category where it has such a huge implication for how it could reshape what it means to be human that it's so important that we get it right. That's Nita Farahani. She's a law professor at Duke University and the author of The Battle for Your Brain, Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology. You can see her full talk at TED.com.

23:56So to get to a future where all this neurotechnology is even possible, a lot of technical work is being done in labs all over the world. Like one that I visited in Brooklyn at a company called OpenBCI. Wait, what am I going to put on my head? Yeah, so the new Galia headset, this crazy beast. I was there to try out a brain-sensing virtual reality headset called the Galia. I'm just going to adjust this island back here. It's a helmet-like contraption that is at the bleeding edge of neurotechnology and costs about$25 ,000. And the one in the back also has three active EEG electrodes. So what are they collecting then?

24:36They're collecting brain activity. So it's mostly academics, medical researchers, and other tech developers who are using the hardware as a starting point for their own projects. Founder Connor Russomano walked me through what was happening as I looked at a screen. I'm just going to calibrate my eyes. And all the sensors attached to my scalp and earlobes began processing lots of data and building a very rough profile of how my mind works. It kind of records your EEG, your eye tracking, your heart rate, your heart rate variability, all these things against these stimuli. The result is a display of all my brain waves.

25:15Delta, theta, alpha, beta, and gamma. It's like a rainbow of brain activity that I'm looking at. I feel like naked because I feel like you can look at these brainwaves and be like, wow, she's a nervous wreck inside, but she presents as like a normal human being. Connor could not read my mind. But he and the computer could quickly make sense of the electrical pulses my brain sent out to move tiny muscles. Let's try flexing or like kind of winking your left eye. And then an incredible thing happened. With barely a wink of an eye, I was able to save a virtual cat from evil rats. All right, here I go.

25:57All right, so there's left. Try out right. There it is. Wow, nice. Try right again. You want to collect those bones, but you've got to avoid those pesky rats. Yeah, all this incredibly impressive, complicated... Complicated. Starting a UDP stream now. And expensive technology to play a video game. I know. But it's early days. And the goal is to get to the point where we can just think something and have it happen on a screen. You know, at OMBCI, we're really focused on the path of least resistance to solving the problem, which is decoding the mind, intention, emotions, what makes us who we are, and then how do we augment that?

26:39How do we improve that? To do that, Connor and his team are piecing together how the mind works with the data that's easiest to collect, like the brainwaves that show up when I twitch my eye. The computer begins to understand that an eye twitch shows a specific wave pattern, and that means move the cat. Eventually, with a lot of repetition, I could just think about moving the cat, and it would know to move it. So this is maybe the beginning of mind-reading technology. If we figure it out the right way, it becomes the greatest tool that humanity has ever created. When you say the greatest tool, give me an example.

27:21To somebody listening, what do you mean the greatest tool? How is that going to help me? Okay, so if you knew your computer was keeping track of your emotions, your deepest, deepest, darkest secrets, but also just like, are you focused? Do you need a nap? Do you need to go for a walk? Are there these kind of like basic things that you don't even know about yourself, but I do because I now understand your subconscious better than you do. We're already there in a lot of ways, but it's, you know, we have the power, the potential with modern neurotechnology and computers to make it even more powerful.

27:59the understanding of our subconscious. And so when I think about in a real world context, like I do want the ability to walk down the street and not have to bend my neck down to look at my emails and not have to be like, man, I got to like open up Google Maps and copy and paste that address from my text thing and then like make sure that it's Northeast, not Northwest. You know, like it could be turning down the brightness of the display in your sunglasses because it's noticing that you are getting too much light or you're being stimulated too much and it knows that. So instead of giving you more of what it thinks you want, it knows that it should be prioritizing what you need and not what you want.

28:46But that's not what Connor thought the purpose of this technology was when he first started the company in 2013. He learned a lot just watching how people in other fields used his hardware. In the beginning, our goal was to build an inward-pointing telescope and to share the blueprints with the world so that anybody with a computer could begin peering into their own brain. Connor Russomano continues from the TED stage. At first, we were an EEG-only company. We sold brain sensors to measure brain activity. But over time, we discovered people doing very strange things with our technology. Some people were connecting the equipment to the stomach to measure the neurons in the gut and study gut-brain connection in the microbiome.

29:30Others were using the tools to build new muscle sensors and controllers for prosthetics and robotics. What we learned from all of this is that the brain by itself is actually quite boring. Turns out brain data alone lacks context. And what we ultimately care about is not the brain, but the mind. consciousness, human cognition. When we have things like EMG sensors to measure muscle activity, or ECG sensors to measure heart activity, eye trackers, and even environmental sensors to measure the world around us, all of this makes the brain data much more useful. But the organs around our body, our sensory receptors, are actually much easier to collect data from than the brain, and also arguably much more important for determining the things that we actually care about emotions, intentions, and the mind overall.