Scientific American 2019-04

22 Scientific American, April 2019

VENTURES

THE BUSINESS OF INNOVATION

Wade Roush is the host and producer of Soonish, a podcast

about technology, culture, curiosity and the future. He is

a co-founder of the podcast collective Hub & Spoke and a

freelance reporter for print, online and radio outlets, such as

MIT Technology Review, Xconomy, WBUR and WHYY.

Illustration by Wren McDonald

Machines That

Mine Your Mind

How to make sure noninvasive

neural interfaces stay that way

By Wade Roush

Sometimes a technology that’s been simmering in the labora­

tory or the clinic for decades makes the leap to mainstream con­

sump tion almost overnight.

Take the cavity magnetron. The precursor to this curious

form of vacuum tube was invented at General Electric around

1920. It wasn’t until 1940 that British scientists found a magne­
      tron design that could pump out microwave energy at unprece­
      dented power. That discovery fueled a crash program at the Mas­
      sachusetts Institute of Technology to build airborne radar units,
      an advance that helped the Allies turn back Nazi Germany in Eu­
      rope. The conflict had barely ended when a Raytheon engineer
      noticed that microwaves could also melt chocolate. The “Rada­
      range” debuted in 1947, and today there’s a magnetron in vir­
      tually every kitchen.
      The next old­but­new technology to pervade our
      lives may be so­called neural interfaces. Thanks to
      noninvasive tools that have been around for de­
      cades, such as electroencephalogra­
      phy (EEG) and functional mag­
      netic resonance imaging (fMRI),
      physicians and neuroscien­
      tists can measure changes
      in your brain without drill­
      ing a hole in your skull.
      And now some of the
      problems that made
      these tools finicky,
      expensive and hard
      to interpret are be­
      ing ironed out, mean­
      ing that neural inter­
      faces are suddenly show­
      ing up at Amazon and Target. Which presents a challenge because
      measuring brain activity isn’t like making microwave popcorn.
      There are enormous privacy and ethical issues at stake.
      The story of Toronto­based InteraXon, a brain­machine inter­
      face start­up founded in 2007, shows how fast things are chang­
      ing. Getting reliable brain­wave measurements via EEG used to
      mean pasting dozens of electrodes to a subject’s scalp. But Intera­
      Xon built a wearable EEG device with just a few electrodes that
      rest against the forehead and behind the ears, along with soft­
      ware to classify the brain waves they measure. Low­frequency
      “alpha” waves indicate a relaxed state; higher­frequency “beta”
      or “gamma” waves indicate a busy or concentrating mind.

The company’s first applications were on the whimsical side.

Visitors to the Ontario pavilion at the 2010 Winter Olympics in

Vancouver could don a headband and use their thoughts to con­

trol the lights shining on Niagara Falls and other distant Ontar­

io landmarks. Later the company built thought­controlled slot

cars and Star Wars games. “After all this thought controlling, we

hit upon this very important recognition,” InteraXon co­founder

Ariel Garten told me. “Although you could control technology with

your brain, the way that you did it was not very effective. Frankly,

you could just turn the thing with your hand much more readily.”

But in 2014 the company released its Muse head band, now in

its second iteration: it pairs with a smartphone app to help us­

ers practice mindfulness meditation. When the software detects

brain waves indicating a wandering mind, wearers hear feed­

back in the form of crashing waves or thunder. These sounds cue

them to return their attention to their breath. “It’s like doing a

rep at the gym,” Garten says. “That’s you saying, ‘Okay, I have

this muscle called my attention, and I’m going to strengthen it.’ ”

But it’s one thing to use EEG data to diagnose sleep disorders

or epilepsy; it’s quite another to start monitoring the brain states

of millions of healthy consumers. So Garten also founded the

Center for Responsible Brainwave Technologies, which aims to

prevent privacy breaches, excessive scientific claims or other

missteps that could derail the nascent neural­interfaces in­

dustry. “The goal is to create a set of standards to ensure

that everybody’s data is kept safe at all times and that

the technology is used appropriately,” Garten says.

Mary Lou Jepsen is onboard with that. She’s a Sil­

icon Valley hardware engineer who recently

founded Openwater, a start­up building a

ski­cap­shaped device that will use

skull­penetrating infrared light to

measure blood flow—a sign of

which brain areas are working

hardest. Jepsen conceived the

technology as a low­cost sub­

stitute for fMRI for diagnos­

ing brain injuries or neuro­

degenerative diseases. But

one day, she says, it might

also be used to read thoughts.

That could be a boon for

people with disabilities, but it is also a privacy nightmare in the

making. “I think the mind­reading scenarios are farther out, but

the reason I’m talking about them early is because they do have

profound ethical and legal implications,” Jepsen says. “The only

way we’re going to release something is if we have ways to define

what it means to be responsible.”

As with so many other technologies, consumer neural interfac­

es seem destined to reach consumers before they’re fully cooked.

For now they’ll be best served with a healthy side of caution.

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