Guest well, lets see, a bci is a brain computer interface. What that generally means, there are many ways of accessing the brain, but what that basically means is they take in electrodes, place it into the brain or atop the brain and then follows or pours neuro signals, action potential which is the small electric signals that cells produce when they are communicating with one another. That information is then ferried to a computer at an algorithm that takes that information and transforms it into some sort of an action command. Perhaps it is moving a cursing from left to right or a robotic arm. It is taking and using computer as algorithm and electrodes to read intention from the brain. Host how long have they been studied and where did they come from . Who discovered them . Guest that is controversial. But basically, people have been using electrodes in the brain for a very long time. It was about 15 years ago in 1999 the researchers realized they could take that intention, take those recordings, and they canned actually figure out baked on the neural rhythms or the firing pattern they could actually recreate that movement. That early work was done in the lab mainly in mice models and quickly moved on to monkeys and eventually humans. Host what is the practical effect of bci . Guest there are several honestly. On the one hand this is a technology that could be extraordinarily helpful. If you think about it, you know the way the body, the mind interact with the world is through musca muscular action whether it is using my mouth to speak or my hand to use a pen. When you lose that ability you lose the ability to communicate with the world in a profound way. What this technology could perhaps do is give a level of freedom and autonomy to people locked in. It would allow them to speak with people around them even use robotic limbs to do themselves and that would be a huge step forward for lots of people. This is something where there is really Exciting Research being done using this to rehabilitate victims of stroke determining using brain machine interface to train the brain to reroute its neural pathways, to help people that have lost neural function after the stroke. There are a lot of different medical applications. Host malcolm gay, this sounds like medical research. Is this being done by medical researchers . Guest absolutely. It is being done by neuroscientists. A lot of people i describe, some are neuro surgeons that are working with a patient group, most of it is being funded by, you know, much of it is being funded by the military. But the people doing the research are looking at this as a chance to eventually help people in a medical setting. Host how is it that the Defense Advance Research project agency, darpa, how did they get involved in this project . Guest sure. Well, darpa has been yrtinteres in bci for a very long time. Sometimes the interest is in building smart, more robust brain machine interface to create a more robust military force. But this program itself is basing the revolutionizing program and that was spear headed by a man named jeffrey lynn. It was trying to make whole the soldiers coming back from iraq and afghanistan who because of advances in body armor were fought being were suffering blows that previously would have been fatal but are now just coming back with amputations. Young men and women in their 20s and 30s who have their entire life before them and an lynn woo studied the brain before coming to darpa had a missionary that said this program will make them whole and we owe it to them for the service they gave our country. So a lot of funding is viewed at upper limb prosthetics. Host tell us about jeffrey wing. Guest i would say he is a bit of a bit of a rarity coming from the military and studying neurology and did two tours of duty and during those tours he recounts he starts seeing people come back with amputations. And he was mortified he was going to go home but he was saying listen, you are going back to be a hero and you will heal up and do everything you were able to do. And the soldier had this emotional response saying when i go back home i manage a Fast Food Restaurant but here i am working people in this process toward democracy. He realized he and the u. S. Owed to this people to make them whole. Host besides darpa who else is working on these brain computer interfaces . Guest most of the people i profile in the book have worked with darpa. Many people work with darpa or the department of defense or the National Science foundation. The department of defense is providing a lot of money but there is a lot of interest in the private sector. There are off the shelf eg headsets you can purchase to modulate your brain wave to better relax or hopefully to better concentrate. Things like that. There is some private investment going on as well. Some of the research is being funded by universities, some being funded by other branches of government, so it really does kind of have a broad funding source. But at this point, you know particularly with the people i profile in the book, a lot of the funding has come from darpa. Host what is the macro number . Guest i would say it is in excess of 75 million. And of course obama put out the 100 million for the Brain Initiative in 2013. Host so is there a market for this type of technology . Guest well there in lies the problem. One of the real difficulties people come up with and i recount one of the more dramatic episodes in the book the research for this is exciting and the demonstrations are exciting. When you see someone move a robotic limb or manipulate a computer or interact with the Digital World mentally it is an exciting demonstration. The Market Economics these people run into again and again is as wonderful idea as it is to provide upper limb orlanprosthe these are really small demographics. There are not that many people in the market. Quad quad quadraplegics have a short life and amputees lost a lower limb. So the problem people run into again and again is we can have this demonstration and work in a lab but taking the next step and dragging it over the hurdle in the commercial market or creati creating a product becomes a difficult proposition to get invested interested. They see how Much Research goes into the the project and see the return on investment is likely to be small. So that is a traditional problem that kept this from becoming a broader product. One area researchers are looking at and when they think about privatizing the market is the stroke market. Stroke is a very large pool of people. You can create the idea is you can create products that will actually give investors a good returnment there is a lot of purpose were using them for stroke victims. Host what kind of progress has been made in the last 15 years . Guest it started out with rats moving a lever up and down. So that is basically one degree of freedom; moving up and down. You know the latest and greatest, there are, i mean, andrew shorts at the university of pittsburgh, which i recount in the book, was able to endow this Research Patient with ten degrees of freedom and she was able to feed herself chocolate. At one point she beat me in a game of rock, paper scissors. So creating a first, fingers, all in real time. Other people are working with creating digital vision. So implants that would go into the retina. Some people are working with direct neural interfaces in the individual cortex. But you know, implants that would go in the retina that would allow previously blind people to approximate vision. People are working with memory and trying to craft a bci that would allow alzheimers patients or people suffering dementia to form new memories. So on the one hand there is, you know, we are a long way from a world when these sort of advance bcis are available to the public. On the other hand, we have it come light years. Host what is the role Jennifer Aniston played in the role of this development of technology . Guest Jennifer Aniston is an unlikely star generally. There was a research in the 90s that found that one of the neuro surgical techniques was recounted in a beautiful New York Times article magazine. One surgical technique is something called an awake craneotomy and that is where the patient is awake during the neuro surgeon. It is with a surgeon at ucla who found that when he showed his neuro surgery patients images of Jennifer Aniston there would be one neuron that would fire and it would fire incredibly rapidly in this moment of complete recognition of Jennifer Aniston. And then show a picture of holly barry or colby bryant or another celebrity and the neuron would be completely silent. And he would bring back Jennifer Aniston and there it would go. People have taken this in many different respects. One is is this neuron responsible for our understandings, and i should back up and say there were other neurons found that fired in similar manners to other people. So for holly barry specifically or colby bryant specifically. So parliament began to wonder is it this people one neuron that is available for my ability to recognize Jennifer Aniston . That has lots of problems because the minute you say the one neuron that is responsible if that goes away you would not be able to recognize Jennifer Aniston. A lot more researchers or many other researchers have come to believe it is more of a network, a series of beacons. As you are coming to understand an individual or information is coming into the neural scene, they are responding to specific shades of brown or blue and as each neuron creates this beacon of understanding and comprehension eventually along that neural chain if each one of those beacons lights up and it is Jennifer Aniston that final beacon lights up. It is more of an indicator all of these previous steps in this neural chain have been reached. When you get into more sophisticateded bci, particularly in terms of motion, researchers are starting to think about how the brain is thinking about the world symbolically and how the brain is seeing objects and how it is going to interaction with those objects specifically. That has more to do with the notion of the brain understanding object and the bodies relation to those objects. Host malcolm gay, what is some of the technology beegz being used to develop this bci concept . Guest some of it is off the shelf. There are computers, most of the labs are making their own computers. You know . But it starts with platinum l electrodes. They are planted in the brain. Many electrode grids, there will be a hundred or so micro electrodes that pierce the brain by about two millimeters and they are next to various neurons and those are carried along cables. When neuro signals come off the brain they are analog so they have to be digitized to get them into the computer and amplified. Once they are in the computers, and most of these computers are built in the lab so they have specific, not necessarily consumer models, they are bespoke algorithms the various labs make and those alleggorita will thep then send whatever the product of the algorithm is to an output device. Often times that is a simple video game of a center out technique. So there will be a target in the center and you are meant to mover a cursor to a second target. Those are fairly simple video games that are often times crafted in the lab. You know, when you get into the robotic arms, you know, that i recount in the book, those have been created denovo by this effort from darpa. Many of these technologies simply didnt exist before this effort and these are already, you know, tiny loaders, rare hazardous hydraulic systems to actually move the arm, abilities to cool the arm. The arm itself, the biggest arm. Darpa created two arms. One is built out of existing technology and the other, the one i am describing was built out of denova and allowed Sensitive Information to be brought back to the brain. On the hundred hand, there is really garden Variety Technology there. On the other, there is, you know, the bleeding of the cutting edge. Host what is the utah array . Guest that is the array i described earlier. It is about the size of a tick tack or a small pill. It looks like a bed of nails. It is a flat surface with hundred micro electrodes that stick out of it like a bed of nails and that is placed in the brain itself. What that gives researchers previously researchers used individually electrodes they would implant individually. This gave them a consistent pattern and importantly it was something that could actually move with the brain. The brain is a fairly it is almost like a consistency of a flan. It will move inside the brain case. And one of the beauties of the utah array is it will move with the brain. If the electrode is static and the brain starts to shift slightly whichever neuron you were listening to previously is gone. The utah array gives you a certain amount of consistency of the interface. There are lots of other arrays being developed in labs. Some researchers are working on cubes of electrodes. So electrodes on six separate plains that would scale up the amount of electrodes in those arrays. Host in your book you tell us jan shermans story. Tell us about her and also does she use, for lack of a better term, the thought process to make movements . Gues guest jan is quite extraordinary. In the late 90s she was living in california andren a company where she would host murder mystery parties. And during one of the parties see was, you know, crouching down and realized she simply could not stand up. Her legs were not obeying her. This was the beginning of a rapid decline of her motor function. Within three years, i believe, she was in a wheelchair. She had two children at the time and was living in california and would go to various doctors to try to diagnose the problem. Each doctor said it looks like multiple scrollsis but it isnt. It turned south she had spinal deteration that was characterized by massive motor death. She has now lost all movement below the neck. This for years placed jan in a tremendous depression. At one point she was suicidal. She was a person who was raised catholic and always had this very strong sense of charity and duty. Her cause had always been hunger. She lost her ability to help people in many respects when she lost her ability to move because you know, if she were to go volunteer she would have to have someone volunteer with her. She had tremendous amounts of guilt in terms of the burden she was on other people and her inability to help other people. When she learned about this research she was quick to undergo the treatment and sign up and get implanted and start working with the university of pittsburgh. What this has done for her. She is quite clear she is never going to benefit from this herself. The technology is simply too young but she nevertheless has received extraordinary spiritual comfort from this. It has given new meaning to her life in that she knows she is helping people in the future that may suffer similar diseases to herself and that has really given her a new sense of purpose and meaning in life. I think that is one of the really interesting things about jan and a lot of the people that participate in this research. It is not so much that they think they are going to benefit from this necessarily but it is something that they do, you know, in this very brave and courageous effort to help other people. Host but at the same time she is manipulated a mechanical arm several times via her thought process correct and the technology embedded . Guest that is right. The upside of this is she gets to play with pretty cool technology. She work would the arm for a long time. She also flew a simulated supreme courts s30. There are two ways people craft a bci and get to unlock motion. One is to think about unrelated thoughts. So for instance, if i wanted a cursor to move from the left to the right i might think about flexing my elbow. If i want it to move up and down i might think about making a first. So completely unrelated thoughts but things that will create real recognizable neuro pattern. The problem is you can not have Spontaneous Movement and explore the environment the way you would with a biological arm. And another way is to not think about it in those terms. Think about it naturalistically. Instead of thinking i am going to make a first to move the arm up you thing about moving the arm up. When people are quadriplegic the brain is extraordinary plastic and the motor cortex, the seat and highly influential in motor action, it often times those neurons are recruited for other activities. Nevertheless, when that individual, even though they are motor impaired thinks about moving their arm or clenching their first, the motor cortex will spring into action as though they were intact bodily. Host where is the future of this Technology Going . Guest good question. I think the future of this technology is going to start in the medical field. Really in the rehabilitative realm of stroke. I think from there that is a good possibility to create, Good Opportunity to create kind of proof of principle and show it has a medical benefit. Once that medical benefit has been shown, i think that other bcis will have an easier time of getting investors on board. I think the foothold of stroke and the foothold of these earlier bci will allow most sophisticated ones in the future. Host malcolm gay is a reporter with the boston global and writes about arts and food for the boston global but here is his book the brain electric. The