The Future of the Mind (16 page)

“WE WILL BE PART OF THEIR OPERATING SYSTEM”

When I interviewed Dr. Nicolelis, he told me that he became interested in science at an early age while growing up in his native Brazil. He remembers watching the Apollo moon shot, which captured the world’s attention. To him, it was an amazing feat. And now, he told me, his own “moon shot” is making it possible to move any object with the mind.

He became interested in the brain while still in high school, where he came across a 1964 book by Isaac Asimov titled
The Human Brain
. But he was disappointed by the end of the book. There was no discussion about how all these structures interacted with one another to create the mind (because no one knew the answer back then). It was a life-changing moment and he realized that his own destiny might lie in trying to understand the secrets of the brain.

About ten years ago, he told me, he began to look seriously into doing research on his childhood dream. He started by taking a mouse and letting it control a mechanical device. “We placed sensors into the mouse which read the electrical signals from the brain. Then we transmitted these signals to a little robotic lever that could bring water from a fountain back to the mouse’s mouth. So the animal had to learn how to mentally move the robotic device to bring the water back. That was the first-ever demonstration that you could connect an animal to a machine so that it could operate a machine without moving its own body,” he explained to me.

Today he can analyze not just fifty but one thousand neurons in the brain of a monkey, which can reproduce various movements in different parts of the monkey’s body. Then the monkey can control various devices, such as mechanical arms, or even virtual images in cyberspace. “We even have a monkey avatar that can be controlled by the monkey’s thoughts without the monkey making any movement,” he told me. This is done by having the monkey watch a video in which he sees an avatar that represents his body. Then, by mentally commanding his body to move, the monkey makes the avatar move in the corresponding way.

Nicolelis envisions a day in the very near future when we will play video games and control computers and appliances with our minds. “We will be part of their operating system. We will be immersed in them with mechanisms that are very similar to the experiments that I am describing.”

EXOSKELETONS

The next undertaking for Dr. Nicolelis is the Walk Again Project. Its goal is nothing less than a complete exoskeleton for the body controlled by the mind. At first, an exoskeleton conjures up an image of something from the
Iron Man
movies. Actually, it is a special suit that encases the entire body so that the arms and legs can move via motors. He calls it a “wearable robot.” (See
Figure 10
.)

His goal, he said, is to help the paralyzed “walk by thinking.” He plans to use wireless technology, “so there’s
nothing sticking out of the head.… We are going to record twenty to thirty thousand neurons, to command a whole body robotic vest, so he can think and walk again and move and grab objects.”

Nicolelis realizes that a series of hurdles must be overcome before the
exoskeleton becomes a reality. First, a new generation of microchips must be created that can be placed in the brain safely and reliably for years at a time. Second, wireless sensors must be created so the exoskeleton can roam freely. The signals from the brain would be received wirelessly by a computer the size of a cell phone that would probably be attached to your belt. Third, new advances must be made in deciphering and interpreting signals from the brain via computers. For the monkeys, a few hundred neurons were necessary to control the mechanical arms. For a human, you need, at minimum, several thousand neurons to control an arm or leg. And fourth, a power supply must be found that is portable and powerful enough to energize the entire exoskeleton.

Figure 10
. This is the exoskeleton that Dr. Nicolelis hopes will be controlled by the mind of a totally paralyzed person. (
illustration credit 4.1
)

Nicolelis’s goal is a lofty one: to have a working exoskeleton suit ready for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, where a quadriplegic Brazilian will deliver the opening kick. He told me proudly, “This is our Brazilian moon shot.”

AVATARS AND SURROGATES

In the movie
Surrogates
, Bruce Willis plays an FBI agent who is investigating mysterious murders. Scientists have created exoskeletons so perfect that they exceed human capabilities. These mechanical creatures are super strong, with perfect bodies. In fact, they are so perfect that humanity has become dependent on them. People live their entire life in pods, mentally controlling their handsome, beautiful surrogate with wireless technology. Everywhere you go, you see busy “people” at work, except they are all perfectly shaped surrogates. Their aging masters are conveniently hidden from view. The plot takes a sharp twist, however, when Bruce Willis discovers that the person behind these murders might be linked to the same scientist who invented these surrogates in the first place. That forces him to wonder whether the surrogates are a blessing or a curse.

And in the blockbuster movie
Avatar
, in the year 2154 Earth has depleted most of its minerals, so a mining company has journeyed to a distant moon called Pandora in the Alpha Centauri star system in search of a rare metal, unobtanium. There are native people who inhabit this distant moon, called the Na’vi, who live in harmony with their lush environment. In order to communicate with the native people, specially trained workers are placed in pods, where they learn to mentally control the body of a genetically engineered native. Although the atmosphere is poisonous and the environment differs radically from Earth’s, avatars have no difficulty living in this alien world. This uneasy relationship, however, soon collapses when the mining company finds a rich deposit of unobtainium underneath the Na’vi’s sacred ceremonial tree. Inevitably a conflict arises between the mining company, which wants to destroy the sacred tree and strip-mine the land for its rare metal, and the natives, who worship it. It looks like a lost cause for the natives until one of the specially trained workers switches sides and leads the Na’vi to victory.

Avatars and surrogates are the stuff of science fiction today, but one day they may become an essential tool for science. The human body is frail, perhaps too delicate for the rigors of many dangerous missions, including space travel. Although science fiction is filled with the heroic exploits of brave astronauts traveling to the farthest reaches of our galaxy, the reality is much different. Radiation in deep space is so intense that our astronauts will have to be shielded or else face premature aging, radiation sickness, and even cancer.
Solar flares shot from the sun can bathe a spacecraft in lethal radiation. A simple transatlantic flight from the United States to Europe exposes you to a millirem of radiation per hour, or roughly the same as a dental X-ray. But in outer space, the radiation could be many times more intense, especially in the presence of cosmic rays and solar bursts. (During intense solar storms, NASA has actually warned astronauts in the space station to move to sections where there is more shielding against radiation.)

In addition, there are many other dangers awaiting us in outer space, such as micrometeorites, the effects of prolonged weightlessness, and the problems of adjusting to different gravity fields. After just a few months in weightlessness, the body loses a large fraction of its calcium and minerals, leaving the astronauts incredibly weak, even if they exercise every day. After a year in outer space, Russian astronauts had to crawl out of their space capsules like worms. Furthermore, it is believed that some of the effects of muscle and bone loss are permanent, so that astronauts will feel the consequences of prolonged weightlessness for the rest of their lives.

The dangers of micrometeorites and intense radiation fields on the moon are so great that many scientists have proposed using a gigantic underground cave as a permanent lunar space station to protect our astronauts. These caves form naturally as lava tubes near extinct volcanoes. But the safest way of building a moon base is to have our astronauts sit in the comfort of their living rooms. This way they would be shielded from all the hazards found on the moon, yet through surrogates they would be able to perform the same tasks. This could vastly reduce the cost of manned space travel, since providing life support for human astronauts is very expensive.

Perhaps when the first interplanetary ship reaches a distant planet, and an astronaut’s surrogate sets foot on this alien terrain, he or she might start with “One small step for the mind …”

One possible problem with this approach is that it takes time for messages to go to the moon and beyond. In a little over a second, a radio message can travel from Earth to the moon, so surrogates on the moon could be easily controlled by astronauts on Earth. More difficult would be communicating with surrogates on Mars, since it can take twenty minutes or more for radio signals to reach the Red Planet.

But surrogates have practical implications closer to home. In Japan, the Fukushima reactor accident in 2011 caused billions of dollars in damages.
Because workers can’t enter areas with lethal levels of radiation for more than a few minutes, the final cleanup may take up to forty years. Unfortunately, robots are not sufficiently advanced to go into these blistering radiation fields and make needed repairs. In fact, the only robots used at Fukushima are quite primitive, basically simple cameras placed on top of a computer sitting on wheels. A full-blown automaton that can think for itself (or be controlled by a remote operator) and make repairs in high-radiation fields is many decades away.

The lack of industrial robots caused an acute problem for the Soviets as well during the 1986 Chernobyl accident in the Ukraine. Workers sent directly to the accident site to put out the flames died horrible deaths due to lethal exposure to radiation. Eventually Mikhail Gorbachev ordered the air force to “sand bag” the reactor, dropping five thousand tons of borated sand and cement by helicopter. Radiation levels were so high that 250,000 workers were recruited to finally contain the accident. Each worker could spend only a few minutes inside the reactor building doing repairs. Many received the maximum lifetime allowed dose of radiation. Each one got a medal. This massive project was the largest civil engineering feat ever undertaken. It could not have been done by today’s robots.

The Honda Corporation has, in fact, built a robot that may eventually go into deadly radioactive environments, but it is not ready yet. Honda’s scientists have placed an EEG sensor on the head of a worker, which is connected to a computer that analyzes his brain waves. The computer is then connected to a radio that sends messages to the robot, called ASIMO (Advanced Step in Innovative Mobility). Hence, by altering his own brain waves, a worker can control ASIMO by pure thought.

Unfortunately, this robot is incapable of making repairs at Fukushima right now, since it can execute only four basic motions (all of which involve moving its head and shoulders) while hundreds of motions are required to make repairs at a shattered nuclear power plant. This system is not developed enough to handle simple tasks such as turning a screwdriver or swinging a hammer.

Other groups have also explored the possibility of mentally controlled robots. At the University of Washington, Dr. Rajesh Rao has created a similar robot that is controlled by a person wearing an EEG helmet. This shiny humanoid robot is two feet tall and is called Morpheus (after a character
in the movie
The Matrix
, as well as the Greek god of dreams). A student puts on the EEG helmet and then makes certain gestures, such as moving a hand, which creates an EEG signal that is recorded by a computer. Eventually the computer has a library of such EEG signals, each one corresponding to a specific motion of a limb. Then the robot is programmed to move its hand whenever that EEG signal is sent to it. In this way, if you think about moving your hand, the robot Morpheus moves its hand as well. When you put on the EEG helmet for the first time, it takes about ten minutes for the computer to calibrate to your brain signals.
Eventually you get the hang of making gestures with your mind that control the robot. For example, you can have it walk toward you, pick up a block from a table, walk six feet to another table, and then place the block there.

Research is also progressing rapidly in Europe. In 2012, scientists in Switzerland at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne unveiled their latest achievement, a robot controlled telepathically by EEG sensors whose controller is located sixty miles away. The robot itself looks like the Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner now found in many living rooms. But it is actually a highly sophisticated robot equipped with a camera that can navigate its way through a crowded office. A paralyzed patient can, for example, look at a computer screen, which is connected to a video camera on the robot many miles away, and see through the eyes of the robot.
Then, by thinking, the patient is able to control the motion of the robot as it moves past obstacles.