The brain is a machine, whether you like it or not. Scientists have come to this conclusion not because they are all mechanistic nerds, but because they have ample evidence that any aspect of consciousness can be directly connected to the brain. - Stephen Pinker.
According to some historians, Harry Houdini was the greatest magician in human history. His breathtaking escapes from locked and sealed rooms, his mind-bending stunts made the audience open their mouths in amazement. He could make a person disappear and then reappear in the most unexpected place. He also knew how to read other people's thoughts.
At least that's how it looked from the outside.
Houdini himself never forgot to explain that everything he does is just an illusion, sleight of hand and a series of skillful tricks. Real mind reading, he told the audience, was impossible.
He did not tolerate fraud and believed that it was necessary to fight unprincipled "magicians" who were trying to get into the trust of a wealthy patron and pump money out of him, arranging cheap tricks and séances.
He himself traveled around the country and exposed such charlatans; he announced beforehand that he could repeat any of their mind-reading tricks. He even joined a committee set up by Scientific American magazine that promised a generous reward to anyone who could prove they had real psychic power (no one ever won the prize).
Houdini was convinced that telepathy was impossible. But today science proves otherwise.
Telepathy today has become the object of intensive research in universities around the world, and scientists have already managed to read individual words, images and thoughts in the human brain using the latest sensors.
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In the future, this can help us find a common language with people who, after a stroke or an accident, can communicate with others only through eye movements. But this is just the beginning. Telepathy can radically change the way a person communicates with a computer and the outside world.
Indeed, in a recent 5-in-5 forecast, which traditionally cites five groundbreaking discoveries over the next five years, IBM said that we will be able to mentally communicate with computers, and such communication may replace both the mouse and the voice teams.
This means that with the help of the power of thought, you can make phone calls, pay bills, drive a car, make appointments, create beautiful symphonies, paint pictures and the like. The possibilities are truly endless, and everyone - from computer giants, educators, music studios and video game companies to the Pentagon - is going to take advantage of them.
True telepathy, so common in science and non-science fiction, is impossible without outside help. But we know that the work of the brain is electrical signals. It is known, again, that the motion of an electron generates electromagnetic radiation.
The same can be said about the electrons that vibrate inside the brain: they also emit signals. But these signals are too weak to be picked up by other people; even if we succeeded, we would hardly be able to understand them. Evolution has not given us the ability to understand the cacophony of random radio signals, but computers are quite capable of this.
Scientists already know how to approximately decode human thoughts using EEG. During the experiment, the subject had to put on a helmet with sensors on his head and focus on a certain picture - say, a picture of a car.
Then, electromagnetic signals from the brain associated with various images were recorded and processed; after a while, we managed to collect a rudimentary dictionary of thoughts, where each EEG signal corresponds to a certain image. Now, when someone is shown a picture of a completely different car, the computer is able to recognize the EEG signal associated with the car.
The advantages of EEG are ease of use and speed of operation. It is enough to put on a helmet with many electrodes, and the device will be able to record signals that change every millisecond.
But we have already seen that the EEG method has a serious problem: electromagnetic waves are distorted as they pass through the skull, so it is very difficult to pinpoint their source. With this method, you can tell whether you are thinking about a car or a building, but the image of the car cannot be restored. But this is where the work of Dr. Jack Gallant helps.
Mind Videos
Much of this research is centered around the University of California, Berkeley, where I received my Ph. D. in theoretical physics many years ago. I was lucky to visit the laboratory of Dr. Gallant, whose group achieved the seemingly impossible: they managed to record people's thoughts on video.
“This is a serious step towards complete recognition of internal images. We open the window to the cinema of our mind,”says Gallant.
When I got to the laboratory, I was immediately struck by the team of enthusiasts - graduate students and young scientists. They did not look up from the computer screens and carefully peered at the video images recovered from the results of a scan of someone's brain. In general, talking with Gallant's staff, you feel like a witness to a scientific history.
Gallant explained that first, the test subject on a gurney is slowly transported into a huge modern MRI machine, which costs more than $ 3 million. Then he is shown several video clips (such as trailers for films that are not hard to find on YouTube).
To collect enough data, the subject has to sit still for hours and watching these clips is a rather difficult task. I asked one of the researchers, Dr. Shinji Nishimoto, how they managed to find volunteers willing to lie still for several hours and watch video clips. He said the group members themselves volunteered to be guinea pigs in their own research.
While the subject is watching a movie, the MRI machine creates a three-dimensional image of the blood flow in his brain. It is a collection of 30,000 points, or voxels. Each voxel represents energy at a specific point, and its color corresponds to the signal intensity and thus the blood flow.
Red dots reflect high nervous activity, white dots - less. (The final image looks a lot like a garland of thousands of New Year's lights in the shape of a brain. Obviously, when watching videos, most of the brain's mental energy is concentrated in the visual cortex, located at the back of the brain.)
Gallant's MRI machine is so powerful that it is able to distinguish two to three hundred separate areas of the brain; on average, there are one hundred points on the images for each area. (One of the goals of further advances in MRI technology is to achieve even higher resolution and more dots per brain region.)
At first, a 3D collection of colored dots looks like complete nonsense, but several years of research have allowed Dr. Gallant and his colleagues to develop a mathematical formula that looks for connections between certain image characteristics (lines, textures, brightness, and the like) and the voxels of an MRI image.
For example, if we consider the border separating the lighter and darker areas, it becomes clear that the edge forms a certain pattern in the location of voxels.
By forcing each subject to view the huge collection of video clips in sequence, the researchers refined and rebuilt the mathematical formula; the computer itself analyzed how certain images are converted into MRI voxels. Over time, scientists were able to establish a direct correlation between certain patterns of MRI voxels and the features of the viewed image.
At the end, the subjects are shown another video clip. The computer analyzes the voxels obtained from viewing it and recreates the original image in a rough approximation. (The computer selects images from the hundreds of videos that are closest to the one you just watched, and then mixes the images to get the most similarity.)
Thus, the computer is able to construct a fuzzy video of those visual images that pass in sequence before the mind's eye. Dr. Gallant's mathematical formula is so universal that you can take a set of MRI voxels and turn it into a picture, or you can do the opposite - take a picture and convert it into MRI voxels.
I had the opportunity to watch the video produced by Dr. Gallant's team and it made a very strong impression on me. Faces, animals, street scenes - like watching a video through dark glasses. It is impossible to see the details on the faces or facades of buildings, but the nature of the object is easy to guess.
But this program is able to decipher not only what you actually see, but also what you visualize. For example, you were asked to introduce the Mona Lisa. We know from MRI scans that although there is no picture in front of your eyes at this moment, your brain's visual cortex turns on.
As you think about the Mona Lisa, Dr. Gallant's software scans your brain and searches its database to find the closest match. In one of the experiments I witnessed, the computer selected a photograph of the actress Salma Hayek as the closest match to the Mona Lisa.
Of course, the average person can easily recognize hundreds of different faces, but the fact that a computer analyzed an image in a person's head and selected a photo from the millions of random images at its disposal is impressive.
The goal of this work is to create an accurate dictionary that would make it possible to quickly find a correspondence between objects in the surrounding world and an MRI pattern read from the human brain. Obviously, it is extremely difficult to establish a detailed and accurate match, and this work will most likely take many years.
However, some categories of images are recognized quite easily; for this, it is enough just to search through a ready-made database of images. For example, when Dr. Stanislas Dehen of the College de France in Paris was working with MRI scans of the parietal lobe of the brain, where the number recognition takes place, one of his assistants casually remarked that he could tell from the look of the MRI scan which number the subject was looking at.
Indeed, it turned out that certain numbers generate quite recognizable patterns on MRI scans. Dr. Dehen notes, "If you take 200 voxels in this area and see which ones are active and which are not, you can build a self-learning device that can read the numbers that are currently held in memory."
The question remains as to when we will be able to get a high-quality video of our thoughts (and whether we can at all).
Alas, when visualizing an image, some information is lost, and brain research confirms this. If we compare an MRI image of the brain taken when a person is looking at a flower with an MRI image taken when he is just thinking about a flower, the difference will be obvious: the second image will have fewer informative points than the first.
So this technology, although it will improve dramatically in the coming years, will never be perfect.
I once read a story in which the spirit invites a person to fulfill his three desires - to create everything that this person can imagine. The hero of the story asks for a luxury car, a plane and a million dollars. For a while after that he is happy.
But as soon as he takes a closer look at magical things, it turns out that there are no engines in the car and in the plane, and the image on dollar bills is indistinct and blurry. Everything is not real, because our memories of things only approximately reflect reality.
However, given the speed with which scientists began deciphering MRI images of the brain, one might wonder: will we not get a real opportunity to read words and thoughts directly from a person's head in the very near future?
Mind reading
I must say that in the building next to the Gallant laboratory, another doctor - Brian Parsley - with his colleagues literally reads human thoughts, at least in principle. One of his assistants, Dr. Sarah Szczepanski, explained to me how they manage to recognize words in a person's mind.
The researchers used electrocorticography (ECoG) technology, which produces an order of magnitude clearer and stronger signal than a traditional ECG. ECoG provides unprecedented data in terms of accuracy and resolution because signals are read directly from the surface of the brain and do not travel through the skull.
An unpleasant feature of this method is that for its application it is necessary to remove a part of the skull and place a fine mesh with 64 electrodes at the nodes of the 8 × 8 mm lattice directly on the naked brain.
Fortunately, they were able to obtain permission to experiment with ECoG scans of epileptic patients suffering from debilitating seizures. The mesh was placed on the patient's brain during open-brain surgery performed by doctors at the University of California, San Francisco.
The patient hears words, and signals from his brain are recorded by electrodes, entered into the device and recorded. Over time, a dictionary is formed, where each word is assigned a signal received from the electrodes. Later, when this word is pronounced again, a familiar electrical signal appears on the device. This means that if a person pronounces the word mentally, the computer picks up a characteristic signal and can recognize it.
This technology allows a conversation to be carried on completely telepathically. In addition, it is possible that completely paralyzed stroke victims will be able to "speak" using a speech synthesizer that will recognize the electrical patterns of individual words.
Unsurprisingly, MMI (brain-machine interface) has emerged as one of the hottest areas of research, with scientific teams across America announcing major discoveries. Similar results were obtained by scientists at the University of Utah in 2011. They placed a grid with 16 electrodes on the area of the cerebral cortex responsible for the movement of the facial muscles (it controls the movements of the mouth, lips, tongue and face), and the area of Wernicke, which processes information related to speech.
Then the person was asked to say ten most common words, such as "yes" and "no", "hot" and "cold", "eat" and "drink", "hello" and "goodbye", "more" and "less" …
By recording the signals emitted by the brain when pronouncing these words, scientists have compiled an approximate dictionary of the correspondence between the spoken words and the brain signals. Later, when the patient uttered any of these words, they could identify them from the notes with an accuracy of 76 to 90%. As a next step, it is planned to use a grid with 121 electrodes for better resolution.
In the future, such a procedure may be useful for those who have suffered from a stroke or other paralyzing disease, such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis; such patients will be able to learn to speak using the MMI technology.
Print with the power of thought
At the Mayo Clinic, Minnesota, Dr. Jerry Shea equipped epileptic patients with ECoG sensors so that they could learn to type with their minds. All that is needed for such a device to work is a simple calibration.
First, the patient is shown a series of letters and asked to focus mentally on each of them. While the subject examines the next letter, the computer records the signals emitted by the brain. As in other similar experiments, if it is possible to compose a dictionary, then after that the subject just needs to think about the letter so that it appears on the screen. Thus, a person gets the opportunity to print with the power of thought.
The leader of this project, Dr. Shi, claims that the accuracy of his apparatus reaches almost 100%. He hopes that in the future he will be able to create a machine for recording not only words, but also images that are born in the patient's brain. Such a device could be useful for artists and architects, but, as we have already said, the ECoG technology has a significant drawback: the electrodes must be in direct contact with the brain.
In the meantime, EEG typewriters - they are non-invasive - are slowly entering the market. Although they do not print as accurately as ECoG-based machines, they can be sold to the first person they meet and you do not need to open your own skull to use them.
The Austrian company Guger Technologies recently demonstrated such a machine at a trade show. According to company representatives, anyone can learn how to use it in about ten minutes; then you can print at a speed of 30-50 characters per minute.
Telepathic dictation and music composing
The next step could be the transmission of entire conversations, which would dramatically accelerate the development of telepathic communications. The problem, however, is that this would require compiling an accurate dictionary of several thousand words and their corresponding EEG, MRI, or ECoG signals.
But if several hundred specially selected words can be recognized by electrical signals, it is probably possible to quickly transmit the words of ordinary conversation. This means that a person will think in whole sentences and paragraphs, and the computer will print them out.
Such technology could be useful for journalists, writers and poets, who would just have to think, and the computer would accept their mental dictation. In addition, the computer could serve as a mental secretary. You would give such a robot secretary instructions about lunch, directions and dates of travel, vacation plans, and he himself would book and organize everything.
But not only speech, but also music can be recorded in this way. It would be enough for musicians to just mentally hum a few melodies, and the computer would print them out in musical notation. To do this, you first need to mentally hum a series of notes and write down the corresponding electrical signals into the computer. The result is a dictionary, and the next time you think of a musical note, the computer is ready to write it down in musical notation.
In science fiction, telepaths often communicate with each other regardless of language barriers, since thoughts are believed to be universal. However, it is quite possible that this is not the case.
Feelings and emotions can indeed be non-verbal and universal, so they can probably be telepathically sent to anyone, but rational thoughts are very closely related to language. Difficult thoughts are unlikely to overcome the language barrier. Words will even telepathically be transmitted in the same language we speak.
Telepathic helmets
Telepathic helmets are also common in science fiction. You put it on and you're done! - you can read other people's thoughts. The US Army, I must say, is showing great interest in this technology. In real combat, when explosions are thundering around and bullets are whistling overhead, a telepathic helmet can be a salvation, since in combat conditions it is difficult to ensure the transmission of commands and messages.
(I can confirm this personally. Many years ago, during the Vietnam War, I served in the infantry at Fort Benning, near Atlanta, Georgia. During the shooting, the explosions of hand grenades and machine gun fire sounded deafening; the noise was so loud, that it was simply impossible to hear anything over it.”Three days after that my ears were ringing.) With a telepathic helmet, a soldier could, despite the noise and rumble, mentally communicate with other soldiers of his platoon.
The Army recently awarded a $ 6.3 million grant to Dr. Gervin Schalk of Albany College of Medicine, New York, but everyone understands that the development of a true telepathic helmet takes more than one year.
So far, Dr. Schalk is experimenting with ECoG technology, which requires placing a grid with electrodes directly on the surface of the brain. In this case, the computer is already able to recognize vowels and 36 individual words in the working brain.
In some experiments, the scientist manages to achieve almost 100% accuracy. So far, however, this technology is not suitable for the US Army, as it requires the removal of a portion of the skull in a clean, sterile operating theater. In addition, recognizing vowels and 36 words is far from the same as sending urgent messages to headquarters in the heat of battle. But experiments with ECoG demonstrate that mental communication on the battlefield is possible.
Another method is currently being studied by Dr. David Peppel of New York University. Instead of opening the skulls of subjects, he uses the technology of magnetoencephalography (MEG), that is, creates electrical charges in the brain using tiny pulses of magnetic energy, rather than electrodes.
The advantage of this technology, in addition to non-invasiveness, is that the MEG machine, unlike the slower MRI machines, is able to accurately measure instantaneous changes in neurons. Peppel, in the course of experiments, was able to record the electrical activity of the auditory center of the cortex at the moment when a person mentally pronounces a certain word.
But his method also has drawbacks: this kind of recording is done using large, desk-sized devices for generating magnetic pulses.
Obviously, many people want to create a mind reading and transmitting device that is non-invasive, portable and accurate. Dr. Peppel hopes that his work with MEG technology will complement the research done with EEG sensors. But we will probably have to wait many more years for the appearance of real telepathic helmets, because MEG and EEG devices are not very accurate.
MRI in a cell phone
Currently, we are also constrained by the relative primitiveness of existing tools. But over time, more and more sophisticated instruments will appear with which we can probe the brain better and better. The next major breakthrough could be a portable MRI machine.
The reason an MRI machine now has to be so huge is that it needs to create a uniform magnetic field, because the more uniform the field, the higher the resolution of the device.
The larger the magnet, the more uniform the field will be and the more accurate the images will be. However, physicists know the exact mathematical characteristics of magnetic fields (they were established by James Clerk Maxwell back in the 1860s).
In 1993, in Germany, Dr. Bernhard Blumich and his colleagues designed the world's smallest MRI machine, which was no larger than a diplomat. Such a device uses a weak and not very uniform magnetic field, but the supercomputer is quite capable of analyzing the magnetic field and adjusting the resulting images accordingly, so that the result is a realistic three-dimensional image.
And since the power of computers doubles about every two years, today's computers already have enough processing power to analyze the magnetic field created by a case-sized apparatus and compensate for its distortion.
In 2006, Dr. Blumich and his colleagues demonstrated the capabilities of their machine by taking MRI scans of the mummy of the ancient man Ötzi, frozen in ice some 5,300 years ago, at the end of the last ice age. Since Ötzi froze to death in an awkward position with his arms spread out to the sides, stuffing his body into a traditional MRI machine was quite problematic, but Dr. Blumich's portable machine easily coped with the task and received images.
Physicists believe that as computers grow in power, the MRI machine of the future may not be larger than a cell phone. Data from such a device can be immediately forwarded to a supercomputer, which will process the information and build a three-dimensional image. (In this case, the weakness of the magnetic field is compensated for by the increase in computing power.)
Then research will be accelerated many times over. “Perhaps the creation of a device similar to the fantastic tricorder from the movie Star Trek is just around the corner,” says Dr. Blumich.
(The tricorder is a small hand-held scanning device that can instantly diagnose any disease.) In the future, you may have a more powerful computer in your home medicine cabinet than the one that a major university hospital can boast today.
And you don't have to wait for permission from a clinic or university to use an expensive MRI device; you can collect all the necessary information yourself, without leaving the living room (for this, it will be enough to hold a portable MRI machine over the body) and send it by e-mail to the laboratory for analysis.
This, by the way, may mean that someday it will be possible to make a telepathic helmet based on MRI, because the resolution using this method is much better than with EEG scanning. This is what is likely to happen in the future.
An electromagnetic coil will be located inside the helmet to generate a weak magnetic field and radio pulses that probe the brain. During combat, raw MRI signals will be sent to the pocket computer on the soldier's belt.
After that, the information will be transmitted by radio to a server located far from the battlefield. The final data processing will be carried out on a supercomputer in a distant city. Once processed, the message will be broadcast back to the soldiers on the battlefield by radio. The fighters will either hear the message through headphones or receive it through electrodes placed on the auditory cortex.
DARPA and the human factor
Given the cost of research, we have a right to ask: who pays for it? Private companies have only recently shown interest in this advanced technology, but even now many of them are in no hurry to invest in research, which is still unknown when it will pay off, and whether it will pay off.
So far, the main sponsor of this research is the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), owned by the Pentagon, which at one time initiated research on some of the most important technologies of the 20th century.
DARPA was formed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower after the Russians launched the first satellite into Earth's orbit in 1957, shocking the Western world.
Realizing that the United States could easily lose the race to the Soviets for new technologies, Eisenhower founded the Agency so that the country could continue to compete with the Russians. Over the years, some projects initiated by the Agency have grown so much that they became independent. One of the first offspring of DARPA was NASA.
The Agency's strategy reads like science fiction: its "only reference point is radical innovation." The only reason for its existence is "accelerating the advance of the future."
DARPA scientists are constantly pushing the boundaries of the physically possible. As one of the Agency's former executives, Michael Goldblatt, said, they try not to violate the laws of physics, “or at least not knowingly. Or at least not more than one in each program."
What distinguishes the Agency from science fiction, however, is an impressive list of very real achievements. One of the earliest DARPA projects of the 1960s was the ARPANET, a military telecommunications network that, according to the developers, was supposed to provide electronic communication between scientists and officials during and after World War III.
In 1989, the National Science Foundation decided that in light of the collapse of the Soviet bloc, there was no point in keeping this development a secret. This technology has been declassified; blueprints and codes were published, and as a result, ARPANET became the Internet.
When the US Air Force needed a ballistic missile control tool in space, DARPA launched Project 57, a top secret project that aimed to send hydrogen bombs to secure storage facilities for Soviet missiles in the event of a nuclear war. Later this project formed the basis for the GPS system. Today it points the way not to nuclear missiles, but to lost motorists.
DARPA has been a key player in a series of inventions that have changed the face of the 20th and 21st centuries, including cell phones, night vision goggles, advanced communications and weather satellites.
I was fortunate enough to communicate several times with scientists and administrators of this organization. Once, having met one of the former directors of the Agency at a reception attended by many scientists and futurists, I asked him a question that had long interested me: why are dogs still sniffing luggage for the presence of explosives at airports?
Don't we have enough sensitive sensors that could pick up traces of explosive chemicals in the air? He replied that DARPA was actively involved in this issue, but faced serious technical problems.
The dog's olfactory receptors, he said, have evolved over millions of years and can sense even a few molecules of a substance in the air. It is extremely difficult to achieve the same sensitivity from technical devices, even the most advanced and fine-tuned ones.
Most likely, we will have to continue to rely on four-legged helpers, and the situation will not change in the foreseeable future.
Another time, a group of DARPA physicists and engineers attended my seminar on the future of technology. After the meeting, I asked what worried them the most. The only cause for concern, they replied, is the public image of their organization.
Most have never heard of DARPA, and some even associate the Agency with the dark villainous machinations of the government - from the lies about UFOs, Area 51 (a remote unit of Edwards Air Force Base, where, according to official data, experimental aircraft and weapons systems are being developed) and Roswell (near the city of Roswell in New Mexico in July 1947, it is believed that a UFO crash occurred. According to the official version, the discovered object was a meteorological balloon) to meteorological weapons and the like. They sighed and spoke about it with sadness. If all these rumors were true, they, of course, would gladly take advantage of alien technology. That would be great! That would be an impetus for real projects!
Today, DARPA, which has a budget of $ 3 billion, is aiming to create a brain-machine interface. In discussing its potential applications, Michael Goldblatt suggests pushing the boundaries of imagination.
Imagine what it would be like if soldiers could communicate with each other through just one thought … Imagine that the danger of a biological attack would disappear. And imagine for a moment a world in which learning is no more difficult than it is, and the replacement of damaged body parts is organized no less conveniently than a cafe serving customers right in the car. As incredible as these pictures and challenges may seem, it is all part of the day-to-day work of the Defense Science Division [of DARPA]. - Michael Goldblatt, former DARPA executive.
Goldblatt believes that historians in the future will conclude that in the long term, the results of DARPA's work have served to improve human nature (he speaks of "our future historical strength"). And he notes that the well-known army slogan "Be all that you can" takes on a new meaning when applied to the improvement of human nature.
Perhaps it is no coincidence that Michael Goldblatt is promoting the idea of improving human nature at the Agency with such fervor. His daughter suffers from cerebral palsy and is confined to a wheelchair all her life. The disease, of course, very much interferes with her life (after all, she needs outside help every day and hour), but the girl does not give up and overcomes adversity.
She is in college and dreams of starting her own company. Goldblatt does not hide that he is inspired by his daughter's willpower. Washington Post editor Joel Garro said: “He is busy spending many millions of dollars to create what may well be the next step in human evolution. And yet he does not forget that the technology, in the creation of which he is involved, one day, perhaps, will allow his daughter not only to go, but also to overcome the disease."
Privacy issues
When people first hear about mind-reading machines, people tend to express concerns about maintaining a person's privacy. The idea that a car might be hidden somewhere, reading our deepest thoughts without permission, makes anyone nervous.
Human consciousness, as we emphasized, is impossible without constant modeling of the future. For this simulation to be accurate, we sometimes have to wander in our imagination into the territory of immorality or lawlessness, but in any case - it does not matter whether we realize such scenarios in reality or not - we prefer to keep these thoughts to ourselves.
Life would be much easier for scientists if they could read minds from a distance using handheld devices (rather than clumsy helmets or surgical opening of the skull), but the laws of physics make the process extremely difficult.
When I asked Dr. Nishimoto, an employee of Dr. Gallant's laboratory in Berkeley, a question about privacy, he smiled and replied that outside the brain, radio signals are rapidly weakening, and already at a distance of two meters from a person they are too weak to contain anything in them. disassemble.
(Everyone studied Newton's laws in school, so you probably remember that the force of attraction weakens in proportion to the square of the distance between objects, and when you double the distance to a star, its force of attraction acting on you will weaken four times. But magnetic fields weaken much faster. Most signals are inversely proportional to the cube or the fourth power of the distance, so if the distance is doubled, the magnetic field will weaken eight times or more.)
Moreover, there are always external interferences on the air that mask the already weak signals emanating from the brain. This is one of the reasons why scientists cannot conduct their experiments outside the laboratory walls. Moreover, even under these conditions, they manage to extract only individual letters, words or images from the working human brain.
So far, technology is not able to record the entire avalanche of thoughts that fills our brain when we simultaneously consider several letters, words, phrases or process other information, so the use of these devices for reading minds "like in a movie" today is impossible and will remain so. more than a dozen years.
For the foreseeable future, brain scans will continue to require direct access to the human brain in a laboratory setting. But even in the unlikely event that someone does find a way to read minds from a distance, you can always counteract it.
To hide the most cherished thoughts from outsiders, you can use the screen and block the radiation from the brain so that it does not fall into the wrong hands.
This can be easily done using the so-called Faraday cage, which the great British physicist Michael Faraday invented in 1836, although Benjamin Franklin was the first to observe a similar effect.
The principle of this shielding is that electricity very quickly dissipates around the metal cage, so that the electric field inside the cage is zero. To demonstrate the effect, physicists (including me) suggest entering a metal cage, into which powerful electrical discharges are then directed.
At the same time, the person remains whole and unharmed. That is why airplanes withstand lightning strikes, and cables are covered with metal braids. Likewise, telepathic signals can be shielded by thin metal foil over the brain.
Telepathy with nanoprobes
There is another way to partially solve the issue of privacy, as well as placing ECoG sensors in the brain. In the future, we may learn to actually use nanotechnology, that is, we will be able to manipulate individual atoms. It is possible that this will allow us to introduce a grid of nanoprobes into the brain and thus connect to your thoughts.
Perhaps such nanoprobes will be built from carbon nanotubes that conduct electricity and are as thin as natural laws allow.
Nanotubes are composed of individual carbon atoms combined into a tube with a wall thickness of several molecules. (These tubes are currently receiving very serious attention from scientists. They are expected to completely change the way we probe the brain in the coming decades.)
Nanoprobes can be precisely placed in areas of the brain responsible for certain activities. So, for the transmission of speech and language, they will need to be placed in the left temporal lobe, for processing visual images - in the thalamus and the visual center of the cortex.
Emotions can be sent through nanoprobes in the amygdala and limbic system. The signals from the nanoprobes will be transmitted to a small computer, which will process them and send them to the server, and then send them to the Internet.
Privacy issues will be partially resolved as you will have complete control over the process and determine when to send thoughts. Any casual passer-by with a receiver can receive radio signals, but electrical signals sent through wires are practically inaccessible.
In addition, the problem of opening the skull and placing an ECoG mesh inside it will be solved, since nanoprobes can be inserted using microsurgery methods.
Some science fiction writers suggest that in the future, when a child is born, he will be painlessly injected with nanoelectrodes, and telepathy will become a way of life. For example, in the series "Star Trek" children of the Borg race are injected with special implants at birth, so that they can telepathically communicate with each other. These children cannot imagine the world without telepathy and perceive it as the norm.
It is clear that nanoprobes are very small in size, so outwardly they will be completely invisible, therefore, social ostracism will not arise. Society may not like the idea of implanting electrical conductors in the brain, but science fiction writers believe that eventually people will get used to this idea: after all, nanoprobes are incredibly convenient and useful. We got used to children "from a test tube", although at first in vitro fertilization caused many questions and protests.
Legality issues
For the foreseeable future, the question will not be whether someone can secretly read our thoughts from a distance using a hidden device, but whether we will allow us to register and record our thoughts. What happens if, for example, we allow, and then someone illegally gains access to these records?
This raises a serious question about ethics - after all, we do not want our thoughts to be read against our will.
There are ethical problems not with current research, but with its possible continuation. There must be a balance. If we somehow learn to instantly decode someone's thoughts, it can be of immense benefit to thousands of seriously ill people who are now unable to communicate with others. On the other hand, there are big fears that the method can be applied to those people who do not want it. - Dr. Brian Pasley.
As soon as it becomes technically possible to read and write down a person's thoughts, many ethical and legal questions will arise. This always happens with the advent of new technologies. It is clear from history that it often takes years to develop legislation that fully covers all scenarios.
For example, copyright laws may need to be rewritten. What happens if someone reads your mind and steals your invention? Will it be possible to patent thoughts? To whom does the idea belong by law?
Another problem arises when the government intervenes.
Relying on the government to protect your privacy is like entrusting the installation of blinds on windows to the person who loves to look through these windows more than anything else. - John Perry Barlow, poet and songwriter for the Grateful Dead
Will the police have the right to read your thoughts during interrogation? Already today, courts are considering claims in cases where a suspect refuses to provide his biological material for DNA analysis. Will the authorities in the future have the right to read your mind without your consent, and if so, will such evidence be accepted in court? How reliable would such evidence be?
Don't forget that MRI-based lie detectors only register an increase in brain activity, and it's important to note that thinking about a crime and real crime are not the same thing. The defense attorney, during cross-examination, will be able to state that these thoughts are just random fantasies and nothing more.
Another area of concern relates to the rights of the paralyzed. Is the brain scan data sufficient to draw up a will or other legal document? Imagine that a completely paralyzed person nevertheless has a sharp and lively mind and wants to sign a contract or manage his own money on his own. Are such documents legal, if the technology may not yet be fully developed?
No natural law can help resolve such ethical issues. Ultimately, as technology improves, such issues will have to be resolved in court.
At the same time, governments and corporations may have to invent new ways to counter mental espionage. Industrial espionage is already a multimillion-dollar industry today, and governments and corporations are building costly "safe rooms" that have to be constantly checked for eavesdropping devices.
In the future (assuming that a method of eavesdropping brain signals will be created at a distance), safe rooms will have to be designed so that brain signals from there, even accidentally, could not leak into the outside world. These rooms will have to be surrounded by metal walls that will shield them from the outside world.
Every time physicists start working with a new type of radiation, spies try to use it for their own purposes, and the electrical radiation from the brain is probably no exception. The most famous story of this kind involves a tiny microwave device hidden in the coat of arms of the United States that hung in the US Embassy in Moscow.
From 1945 to 1952, this device transmitted the secrets of American diplomats to the Soviets. Even during the Berlin Crisis of 1948 and the Korean War, the Soviets used this bug to gain access to US plans. Maybe this bug would have continued to give out state secrets and the Cold War to this day, and at the same time world history would have changed course if it had not been accidentally discovered by a British engineer who heard secret negotiations on an open radio wave.
The American engineers who disassembled the bug were amazed: it turned out that for many years they could not find it because the bug was passive and did not require any source of energy. (It was almost impossible to detect, because it received power from the outside through a microwave beam.) It is possible that future spy devices will also intercept brain radiation.
Although at the moment this technology is in its embryonic state, telepathy is slowly entering our lives. In the future, perhaps we will begin to interact with the world around us by the power of reason. But scientists do not want to limit themselves to reading minds, that is, a passive process.
They want to play an active role - to move objects with the power of thought. The ability to telekinesis is usually attributed to the gods. Only divine power is given at will to shape reality. It is the highest expression of thoughts and desires.
Soon we will get this opportunity.