Supernatural powers are highly popular among the subjects of paranormal phenomena, so if I say that a new technology called “Brain Machine Interface (BMI),” which links cranial nerve science with information and telecommunications technology, is turning some of these powers into reality, people outside of this field will probably be astonished. There are tricks and gimmicks behind this.

“Telekinesis,” which is an ability to move objects with only the mind, has been realized as BMI that manipulates computers only by thinking, generates orders to control robots, and moves wheelchairs. “Psychography,” which produces images that were visualized in the mind on photographic printing paper, has been realized as decoding (decoding of brain information) technology that reproduce images from the activity of the visual area of the cerebral cortex measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging. “Teleportation,” which is instantaneous transportation to a remote location, has been realized as a two-way communication through the internet that uses the brain activity of a monkey in the east coast of the U.S. to control a humanoid robot in Kyoto.

Also, research on “telepathy,” which is direct information exchange between minds, has been started as a research theme of neural science. There are two ways as described below on how the dreamlike BMI technology can enrich our lives.

The first way is to apply BMI technology to the medical/welfare fields. Here, BMI can be considered as follows: “An attempt to reconstruct, treat, and enhance the three main functions of the brain; sensation, nerve center and locomotion with electrical artificial circuits.” This might sound like a wild imagination in science fiction movies, but the sensory and nerve center functions have already been put to practical use. A representative example of artificial sensory BMI is the cochlear implant, which restored the hearing of two hundred thousand people around the world. The artificial retina is almost at the stage of practical use, and the artificial vestibular organ to cure dizziness is also being researched. Deep brain stimulation to stop tremors of Parkinson's disease patients which could not be treated by drugs has been good news for one thousand people just in Japan.

Regarding the locomotion control type BMI, various countries around the world are fiercely competing in the research and development to restore the physical functions and communication abilities which were lost by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, spinal cord injury or stroke, and to treat them. It has been said that Japan is 10 years behind the U.S. and Germany, but aided by the support of Strategic Research Program for Brain Sciences by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, it has now emerged to the top position in the world in two applications: minimally invasive type BMI that uses electrocorticogram and treatment type BMI that promotes rehabilitation.

The second way is to apply BMI to the information and telecommunications field. It can be said that communication, and information and telecommunications such as language, characters, printing, telegraph, telephone and internet are the most important technologies that distinguish humans from other animals, but we are still just communicating data such as characters, codes, sounds or images, and have not gone beyond the bounds of data communication. In another words, we still do not have the technology that selects what we really want to know and tell through communication, such as emotion, feelings, affectivity or information within the brain, and to transmit them directly. Because of this, a large amount of useless data is wandering around the internet, consuming tremendous energy and damaging the environment.

If we take a wider view without being limited to the medical and welfare areas, BMI can also be described as “a technology to directly connect the brain with information and telecommunications equipment.” Whereas the conventional information and telecommunications technology, no matter how advanced, could only realize communication between brains through the bottleneck of human sensory receptors and locomotion effectors which have narrow bandwidths, it will become possible to communicate by a kind of telepathic, nonverbal communication. As a result, if we can choose only what we really wish to communicate and transmit a small amount of data, it will become possible for us to instantly understand the intention without feeling any stress from the flood of information, and we will enjoy happy communication with low carbon consumption. Apart from this, as for civilian use of BMI, games have already been commercialized, and manipulation of robots has been under research.

It is said that in revolutionary technology, the stronger the brightest side is, the darker the shadowy side will be. BMI is literally such an example, and although it has the potential to change not only medicine/welfare but even the future industrial structure, on the other hand, various ethical problems could occur. First, there is a danger of military use. Also, when the brain is connected directly with information and telecommunications equipment, the brain will change through synaptic plasticity. Since BMI is directly connected to the brain, there is a possibility that a drastic change will occur in the brain, more than the changes that occurred when humans used automobiles or word processors. Also, electric stimuli such as deep brain stimulation is considered to be safer because unlike medicine, it only affects certain parts of the brain; but on the other hand, it is hard to foresee what sort of long term effect might emerge as it is different from medicine which has a history of thousands of years.

Also, even if treatment with BMI is accepted, there may be criticism that it would be morally unacceptable to use it for enhancing abilities that could create supermen, or that it would be questionable to use it for games when there is a possibility that it could drastically change the brain. The Japan Neuroscience Society is dealing with BMI in its newly revised ethics rules, and the Strategic Research Program for Brain Sciences by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology tried a revolutionary approach to request the involvement of several ethics specialists from the start of the projects in order to address the so-called “neuroethics” head-on. We, researchers, need to tell the society about the reality of BMI research and future effects as comprehensible as possible, and must widen and deepen our communication with the society.

BMI technology is not just an application, but it is useful as a tool for new researches that can fundamentally transform system neuroscience. In most of the conventional brain research at the system level, the methodology was to perform experiments in limited aspects according to a certain hypothesis, and examine whether or not the obtained brain activity or the behavioral data correlates with certain explanatory variables that appear in the hypothesis to verify this hypotheses. This was done because the objects of the research were things such as higher cognition functions of the human brain, which were overly complicated. Accordingly, discussions that went across the deep hierarchies unique to brain science inevitably became anecdotal.

In summary, the conventional research method was led by hypotheses, used correlation as the main tool, and interpreted the data. More and more researchers are not satisfied with this. The method is changing direction toward being led by data, predicting the dynamics of brain activity or behavior, experimentally manipulating the expression of information in the brain, and to verify the theory or model including the principle of cause and effect.

The trigger for this new academic trend is largely due to matters such as the ability to predict various physical/mental conditions from the brain activity by making use of BMI or its basic technology, the algorithm to decode brain information; also by the ability to extract contracted common expressions of the brain, body, and environment from a huge amount of data; and also the possibility to manipulate the expression of information in the brain in real time by incorporating the brain within the experimental system.

I sincerely hope that BMI continues growing to become a respectable major application field of brain science in the future and contributes to the society, and also becomes an impetus to transform brain science itself.

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