"You don't see people doing hypnotherapy on an iPod," says Ed Boyden, director of the MIT Media Lab's neuroengineering program. "That's what we want to do."
He's the of three speakers to discuss the brain. The goal of his lab, says Boyden, is to engineer the brain directly. Memory, happiness, creativity, and intelligence could someday be improved; before that, neurological and psychiatric disorders could be treated. His fundamental scientific question: "How do we apply engineering principles to such a complex system?"
Doug Smith, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for
Brain Injury and Repair, tries to answer this question. A few rules of thumb: "hard and sharp" interfaces between brain and machine are bad;
"wet and juicy" interfaces that "cater to the promiscuous nature of the nervous system" are bad.
Smith shows slides of sci-fi interfaces from The Matrix. Rather than following this wire-to-the-brain model, he says, devices should interface with us as far from the brain as possible.
A hundred years ago, says Smith, we were trying to figure out how to bring electricity into the house. Now we're trying to bring electrical signals to the mind.
John Donoghue, developer of the BrainGate neural prosthetic -- the one that allows a computer to be controlled by pure thought -- has his own historical parallel. He shows a picture of a 1950's-era pacemaker. It's a dresser-sized electrical contraption sporting wires that connect directly to the heart, several orders of practical magnitude removed from today's implants. The BrainGate, he says, are the 1950's pacemakers of today.
That may be, but watching video of a man using the BrainGate to draw a circle on-screen is truly mind-blowing. Then he shows video of the man controlling a robotic arm. As Arthur C. Clarke said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishible from magic."
