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Observations | Opinion

MIND READING AND MIND CONTROL TECHNOLOGIES ARE COMING

We need to figure out the ethical implications before they arrive

* By R. Douglas Fields on March 10, 2020

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Credit: Alfred Pasieka Getty Images

The ability to detect electrical activity in the brain through the scalp, and to
control it, will soon transform medicine and change society in profound ways.
Patterns of electrical activity in the brain can reveal a person’s
cognition—normal and abnormal. New methods to stimulate specific brain circuits
can treat neurological and mental illnesses and control behavior. In crossing
this threshold of great promise, difficult ethical quandaries confront us.

MIND READING

The ability to interrogate and manipulate electrical activity in the human brain
promises to do for the brain what biochemistry did for the body. When you go to
the doctor, a chemical analysis of your blood is used to detect your body’s
health and potential disease. Forewarned that your cholesterol level is high,
and you are at risk of having a stroke, you can take action to avoid suffering
one. Likewise, in experimental research destined to soon enter medical practice,
just a few minutes of monitoring electrical activity in your brain using EEG and
other methods can reveal not only neurological illness but also mental
conditions like ADHD and schizophrenia. What’s more, five minutes of monitoring
electrical activity flowing through your brain, while you do nothing but let
your mind wander, can reveal how your individual brain is wired.

Tapping into your wandering mind can measure your IQ, identify your cognitive
strengths and weaknesses, perceive your personality and determine your aptitude
for learning specific types of information. Electrical activity in a
preschooler’s brain be used to can predict, for example, how well that child
will be able to read when they go to school. As I recount in my new book,
Electric Brain (BenBella, 2020), after having brainwaves in my idling mind
recorded using EEG for only five minutes, neuropsychologist Chantel Prat at the
University of Washington, in Seattle, pronounced that learning a foreign
language would be difficult for me because of weak beta waves in a particular
part of my cerebral cortex processing language. (Don’t ask me to speak German or
Spanish, languages that I studied but never mastered.) How will this ability to
know a person’s mind change education and career choices?

Neuroscientist Marcel Just and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University are
using fMRI brain imaging to decipher what a person is thinking. By using machine
learning to analyze complex patterns of activity in a person’s brain when they
think of a specific number or object, read a sentence, experience a particular
emotion or learn a new type of information, the researchers can read minds and
know the person’s specific thoughts and emotions. “Nothing is more private than
a thought,” Just says, but that privacy is no longer sacrosanct.

Armed with the ability to know what a person is thinking, scientists can do even
more. They can predict what a person might do. Just and his team are able to
tell if a person is contemplating suicide, simply by watching how the person’s
brain responds to hearing words like “death” or “happiness.” As the tragic
deaths of comedian Robin Williams and celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain show,
suicide often comes as a shock because people tend to conceal their thoughts of
suicide, even from loved ones and therapists.

Such “brain hacking” to uncover that someone is thinking of suicide could be
lifesaving. The technique applied to the Columbine high school mass murderers
might have prevented the horror of two troubled teens slaughtering their
classmates and teachers, as well as their own suicides. But this insight into
suicidal ideation is gleaned by judging that the pattern of brain activity in an
individual’s brain deviates from what is considered “normal” as defined as the
average response from a large population. At what point do we remove a person
from society because their brain activity deviates from what is considered
normal?

MIND CONTROL

The ability to control electrical activity in brain circuits has the potential
to do for brain disorders what electrical stimulation has accomplished in
treating cardiac disorders. By beaming electrical or magnetic pulses through the
scalp, and by implanting electrodes in the brain, researchers and doctors can
treat a vast array of neurological and psychiatric disorders, from Parkinson’s
disease to chronic depression.

But the prospect of “mind control” frightens many, and brain stimulation to
modify behavior and treat mental illness has a sordid history. In the 1970s
neuropsychologist Robert Heath at Tulane University inserted electrodes into a
homosexual man’s brain to “cure” him of his homosexual nature by stimulating his
brain’s pleasure center. Spanish neuroscientist José Delgado used brain
stimulation in monkeys, people and even a charging bull to understand how, at a
neural circuit level, specific behaviors and functions are controlled—and to
control them at will by pushing buttons on his radio-controlled device
energizing electrodes implanted in the brain. Controlling movements, altering
thoughts, evoking memories, rage and passion were all at Delgado’s fingertips.
Delgado’s goal was to relieve the world of deviant behavior through brain
stimulation and produce a “psychocivilized” society.

The prospect of controlling a person’s brain by electrical stimulation is
disturbing for many, but current methods of treating mental and neurological
disorders are woefully inadequate and far too blunt. Neurological and
psychoactive drugs affect many different neural circuits in addition to the one
targeted, causing wide-ranging side effects. Not only the brain but every cell
in the body that interacts with the drugs, such as SSRIs for treating chronic
depression, will be affected.

At present, drugs available for treating mental illness and neurological
conditions are not always effective, and they are often prescribed in a
trial-and-error manner. Psychosurgery, notoriously prefrontal lobotomy, also has
a tragic history of abuse. Moreover, while any surgeon faces the prospect of
losing the patient on the operating table, neurosurgeons face the unique risk of
saving a patient’s life but losing the person. Surgical removal of brain tissue
can leave patients with physical, cognitive, personality or mood dysfunctions by
damaging healthy tissu, or failing to remove all the dysfunctional tissue.
Electroconvulsive stimulation (ECT), to treat chronic depression and other
mental illnesses, rocks the entire brain with seizure; in the wake of the
electrical firestorm, the brain somehow resets itself, and many patients are
helped, but not all, and sometimes there are debilitating side effects or the
method fails to work.

Rather than blasting the whole brain with bolts of electricity or saturating it
with drugs, it makes far more sense to stimulate the precise neural circuit that
is malfunctioning. Following the success of deep brain stimulation in treating
Parkinson’s disorder, doctors are now applying the same method to treat a wide
range of neurological and psychiatric illnesses, from dystonia to OCD. But they
are often doing so without the requisite scientific understanding of the
disorder at a neural circuit level. This is especially so for mental illnesses,
which are poorly represented in nonhuman animals used in research. How
electrical stimulation is working to help these conditions, including
Parkinson’s disease, is not fully understood. The necessary knowledge of where
to put the electrodes or what strength and pattern of electrical stimulation to
use is not always available. Such doctors are in effect doing experiments on
their patients, but they are doing so because it helps.

Noninvasive means of modifying brainwaves and patterns of electrical activity in
specific brain circuits, such as neurofeedback, rhythmic sound or flashing
light, ultrasonic and magnetic stimulation through the scalp, can modify neural
activity without implanting electrodes in the brain to treat neurological and
mental illnesses and improve mood and cognition. The FDA approved treating
depression by transcranial magnetic stimulation in 2008, and subsequently
expanded approval for treating pain and migraine. Electrical current can be
applied by an electrode on the scalp to stimulate or inhibit neurons from firing
in appropriate brain regions.

The military is using this method to speed learning and enhance cognitive
performance in pilots. The method is so simple, brain stimulation devices can be
purchased over the internet or you can make one yourself from nine-volt
batteries. But the DIY approach renders the user an experimental guinea pig.

New methods of precision brain stimulation are being developed. Electrical
stimulation is notoriously imprecise, following the path of least resistance
through brain tissue and stimulating neurons from distant regions of the brain
that extend axons past the electrode. In experimental animals, very precise
stimulation or inhibition of neuronal firing can be achieved by optogenetics.
This method uses genetic engineering to insert light sensitive ion channels into
specific neurons to control their firing very precisely using laser light beamed
into the brain through a fiberoptic cable. Applied to humans, optogenetic
stimulation could relieve many neurological and psychiatric disorders by
precision control of specific neural circuits, but using this approach in people
is not considered ethical.

CROSSING THE THRESHOLD

Against the historical backdrop of ethical lapses and concerns that curtailed
brain stimulation research for mental illnesses decades ago, we are reaching a
point where it will become unethical to deny people suffering from severe mental
or neurological illness treatments by optogenetic or electrical stimulation of
their brain, or to withhold diagnosing their conditions objectively by reading
their brain’s electrical activity. The new capabilities of being able to
directly monitor and manipulate the brain’s electrical activity raise daunting
ethical questions from technology that has not existed previously. But the genie
is out of the bottle. We better get to know her.

The views expressed are those of the author(s) and are not necessarily those of
Scientific American.

Rights & Permissions

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

R. Douglas Fields is a senior investigator at the National Institutes of
Health’s Section on Nervous System Development and Plasticity. He is author of
Electric Brain: How the New Science of Brainwaves Reads Minds, Tells Us How We
Learn, and Helps Us Change for the Better (BenBella Books, 2020). Credit: Nick
Higgins

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