Can We Network (and Augment) the Human Brain?

How realistic is it to directly send data in and out of the brain? That is the core scientific innovation underlying my novels. From a longer piece in which I discuss neurotechnology. (The Ultimate Interface: Your Brain):

Neural implants could accomplish things no external interface could: Virtual and augmented reality with all 5 senses (or more); augmentation of human memory, attention, and learning speed; even multi-sense telepathy — sharing what we see, hear, touch, and even perhaps what we think and feel with others.

What’s actually been done in humans?

In clinical trials today there are brain implants that have given men and women control of robot hands and fingers. [..] More radical technologies have sent vision straight into the brain. And recently, brain scanners have succeeded in deciphering what we’re looking at.

In animals, we’ve boosted cognitive performance:

In rats, we’ve restored damaged memories via a ‘hippocampus chip’ implanted in the brain. Human trials are starting this year. [..] This chip can actually improve memory. And researchers can capture the neural trace of an experience, record it, and play it back any time they want later on.

In monkeys, we’ve done better, using a brain implant to “boost monkey IQ” in pattern matching tests.

The real challenges remain hardware and brain surgery:

getting even 256 channels in generally requires invasive brain surgery, with its costs, healing time, and the very real risk that something will go wrong. That’s a huge impediment, making neural interfaces only viable for people who have a huge amount to gain, such as those who’ve been paralyzed or suffered brain damage.

Quite a bit of R&D is going into solving those hardware and surgery problems:

Researchers across the world, many funded by DARPA, are working to radically improve the interface hardware, boosting the number of neurons it can connect to (and thus making it smoother, higher resolution, and more precise), and making it far easier to implant. They’ve shown recently that carbon nanotubes, a thousand times thinner than current electrodes, have huge advantages for brain interfaces. They’re working on silk-substrate interfaces that melt into the brain. Researchers at Berkeley have a proposal for neural dust that would be sprinkled across your brain.

You can read the whole thing here:The Ultimate Interface: Your Brain.