wiring your brain the painless and easy way

Over all the posts I’ve written about brain-machine interfaces and their promise for an everyday person, one the key takeaways was that while the idea was great, the implementation would be problematic because doctors would be loath to perform invasive and risky surgery on a patient who didn’t necessarily need said surgery. But what if when you want to link your brain to a new, complex, and powerful device, you could just get an injection of electrodes that unfurl into a thin mesh which surrounds your neurons and allows you to beam a potent signal out? Sounds like a premise for a science fiction novel, doesn’t it? Maybe something down the cyberpunk alley that was explored by Ghost In The Shell and The Matrix? Amazingly, no. It’s real, and it’s now being tested in rats with extremely positive results. Just 30 minutes after injection, the mesh unwound itself around the rats’ brains and retained some 80% of its ideal functionality. True, it’s not quite perfect yet, but this is a massive leap towards fusing our minds with machinery.

Honestly, I could write an entire book about all the things easy access this technology can do in the long run because the possibilities are almost truly endless. We could manipulate a machine miles away from ourselves as if we inhabited it, Avatar style, give locked in stroke victims a way to communicate and control their environment, extend our nervous systems into artificial limbs which can be fused with our existing bodies, and perhaps even challenge what it means to be a human and become a truly space faring species at some point down the line. Or we could use it to make video games really badass because that’s where the big money will be after medicine, after which we’ll quickly diversify into porn. But I digress. The very idea that we’re slowly but oh so surely coming closer and closer towards easy to implant brain-machine interfaces is enough to make me feel all warm and fuzzy from seeing science fiction turn into science fact, and twitch with anticipation of what could be done when it’s finally ready for human trials. Oh the software I could write and the things it could do with the power of the human brain and a cloud app…