IEEE Spectrum reports on progress in, well, mind-reading – of monkeys:
“To be or not to be. That is the question.” That is also the text that Monkey J typed out using a brain implant to control a computer cursor.
To be clear, the monkey didn’t know it was copying Shakespeare, and it had no deep thoughts about Hamlet’s famous monologue. Monkey J and its colleague, Monkey L, were both trained to use their neural implants to move a cursor over a computer screen, hitting circles as they turned green. Stanford University researchers placed letters on those targets to simulate the typing task. So to tap out the line from Hamlet, first the “T” circle was illuminated, then the “O,” and so on. …
By simulating this typing task, they demonstrated that their brain-computer interface could greatly benefit people who can’t communicate otherwise. That category includes people in the late stages of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, which leaves the mind intact but gradually paralyzes the body, including the mouth and other face muscles.
This experiment set a new record for typing-by-mind, with one monkey tapping out 12 words per minute. “To our knowledge, this is the highest communication level ever achieved,” says Paul Nuyujukian, a researcher at Stanford’s Neural Prosthetics Translational Lab. Nuyujukian is coauthor of the paper describing this research, published today in Proceedings of the IEEE.
I’m a little puzzled how this can be called communications, unless they’re referring simply to being able to decode the brain’s signals into directives for moving the cursor; suggesting the monkeys are actually communicating on an intelligent level is not evident from this report.
But my actual concern is probably a common concern: while this is represented as a step for helping those with ALS and other dread paralytic diseases to communicate, implicit in this exercise is the possibility of decoding higher level thoughts. Is this another step on penetrating a person’s most private thoughts? Am I someday going to be looking at sophisticated legal treatises on whether or not the SCOTUS should be declaring the use of a technology that is arguably related to this one as being legal during the questioning of suspects? The ineffectuality of polygraphs as lie detectors has, so far, not permitted a real legal test. If this technology progresses to that level, we may see a very interesting legal test.
