{"id":9882,"date":"2025-11-28T06:09:36","date_gmt":"2025-11-28T06:09:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/?p=9882"},"modified":"2025-11-28T06:09:36","modified_gmt":"2025-11-28T06:09:36","slug":"if-you-could-read-my-mind-wait-you-can","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/?p=9882","title":{"rendered":"If You Could read My Mind \u2013 Wait, You Can?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By KIM BELLARD<\/p>\n

Over the years, one area of tech\/health tech I have avoided writing about are brain-computer interfaces (B.C.I.). In part, it was because I thought they were kind of creepy, and, in larger part, because I was increasing finding Elon Musk, whose Neuralink<\/a> is one of the leaders in the field, even more creepy. But an article in The New York Times Magazine <\/em>by Linda Kinstler<\/a> rang alarm bells in my head \u2013 and I sure hope no one is listening to them.<\/p>\n

Her article, Big Tech Wants Direct Access to Our Brains<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>doesn\u2019t just discuss some of the technological advances in the field, which are, admittedly, quite impressive. No, what caught my attention was her larger point that it\u2019s time \u2013 it\u2019s past time \u2013 that we started taking the issue of the privacy of what goes on inside our heads very seriously.<\/p>\n

Because we are at the point, or fast approaching it, when those private thoughts of ours are no longer private.<\/p>\n

The ostensible purpose of B.C.I.s has usually been as for assistance to people with disabilities, such as people who are paralyzed. Being able to move a cursor or even a limb could change their lives. It might even allow some to speak or even see. All are great use cases, with some track record of successes.<\/p>\n

B.C.I.s have tended to go down one of two paths. One uses external signals, such as through electroencephalography (EEG) and electrooculography (EOG), to try to decipher what your brain is doing. The other, as Neuralink uses, is an implant directly in your brain to sense and interrupt activity. The latter approach has the advantage of more specific readings, but has the obvious drawback of requiring surgery and wires in your brain.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a competition held every four years called Cybathlon<\/a>, sponsored by ETH Zurich, that \u201cacts as a platform that challenges teams from all over the world to develop assistive technologies suitable for everyday use with and for people with disabilities.\u201d A profile of it in NYT<\/em><\/a> quoted the second place finisher, who uses the external signals approach but lost to a team using implants: \u201cWe weren\u2019t in the same league as the Pittsburgh people. They\u2019re playing chess and we\u2019re playing checkers.\u201d \u00a0He\u2019s now considering implants. \u00a0<\/p>\n

Fine, you say. I can protect my mental privacy simply by not getting implants, right?\u00a0 Not so fast. <\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

A new paper in Science Advances<\/em><\/a> discusses progress in \u201cmind captioning.\u201d I.e.:<\/p>\n

We successfully generated descriptive text representing visual content experienced during perception and mental imagery by aligning semantic features of text with those linearly decoded from human brain activity\u2026Together, these factors facilitate the direct translation of brain representations into text, resulting in optimally aligned descriptions of visual semantic information decoded from the brain. These descriptions were well structured, accurately capturing individual components and their interrelations without using the language network, thus suggesting the existence of fine-grained semantic information outside this network. Our method enables the intelligible interpretation of internal thoughts, demonstrating the feasibility of nonverbal thought\u2013based brain-to-text communication.<\/p>\n

The model predicts what a person is looking at \u201cwith a lot of detail\u201d, says Alex Huth, a computational neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley who has done related research. \u201cThis is hard to do. It\u2019s surprising you can get that much detail.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSurprising\u201d is one way to describe it. \u201cExciting\u201d could be another.\u00a0 For some people, though, \u201cterrifying\u201d might be what first comes to mind.<\/p>\n

The mind captioning uses fMRI and \u00a0AI to do the mind captioning, and the participants were fully aware of what was going on. None of the researchers suggest that the technique can tell exactly what people are thinking. \u201cNobody has shown you can do that, yet,\u201d says Professor Huth.<\/p>\n

\u00a0It\u2019s that \u201cyet\u201d that worries me.<\/p>\n

Dr. Kinstler points out that\u2019s not all we have to worry about: \u201cAdvances in optogenetics, a scientific technique that uses light to stimulate or suppress individual, genetically modified neurons, could allow scientists to \u201cwrite\u201d the brain as well, potentially altering human understanding and behavior.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat\u2019s coming is A.I. and neurotechnology integrated with our everyday devices,\u201d Nita Farahany, a professor of law and philosophy at Duke University who studies emerging technologies, told Dr. Kinstler. \u201cBasically, what we are looking at is brain-to-A.I. direct interactions. These things are going to be ubiquitous. It could amount to your sense of self being essentially overwritten.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Now are you worried?<\/p>\n

Dr. Kinstler notes that some countries \u2013 not including the U.S., of course \u2013 have passed neural privacy laws. California, Colorado, Montana and Connecticut\u00a0have passed neural data privacy laws, but the Future of Privacy Forum details<\/a> how each is different and that there is not even a common agreement on exactly what \u201cneural data\u201d is, much less how best to safeguard it. As is typical, the technology is way outpacing the regulation.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhile many are concerned about technologies that can \u201cread minds,\u201d such a tool does not currently exist per se, and in many cases nonneural data can reveal the same information,\u201d writes<\/a> Jameson\u00a0Spivack, Deputy Director for Artificial Intelligence for FPF. \u201cAs such, focusing too narrowly on \u201cthoughts\u201d or \u201cbrain activity\u201d could exclude some of the most sensitive and intimate personal characteristics that people want to protect. In finding the right balance, lawmakers should be clear about what potential uses or outcomes on which they would like to focus.\u201d<\/p>\n

I.e., we can\u2019t even define the problem well enough yet. \u00a0<\/p>\n

Dr. Kinstler describes how people have been talking about this issue literally for decades, with little progress on the legislative\/regulatory front. We may be at the point where debate is no longer academic. Professor Farahany warns that having the ability to control ones thoughts and feelings \u201c\u201cis a precondition to any other concept of liberty, in that, if the very scaffolding of thought itself is manipulated, undermined, interfered with, then any other way in which you would exercise your liberties is meaningless, because you are no longer a self-determined human at that point.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2025 America, this does not seem like an idle threat.<\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/p>\n

In this digital world, we\u2019ve gradually been losing our privacy. Our emails aren\u2019t private? Oh, OK. Big tech is tracking our shopping? Well, we\u2019ll get better offers. Social media mines our data to best manipulate us? Yes, but think of the followers we might gain. Surveillance camera can track our every move? But we need it to fight crime!<\/p>\n

We grumble but mostly have accepted these (and other) losses of privacy. But when it comes to the possibility of technology reading our thoughts, much less directly manipulating them, we cannot afford to keep dithering.<\/p>\n

Kim is a former emarketing exec at a major Blues plan, editor of the late & lamented\u00a0<\/em>Tincture.io<\/em><\/a>, and now regular THCB contributor<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By KIM BELLARD Over the years, one area of tech\/health tech I have avoided writing about are brain-computer interfaces (B.C.I.). In part, it was because I thought they were kind of creepy, and, in larger part, because I was increasing finding Elon Musk, whose Neuralink is one of the leaders in the field, even more…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":9880,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9882","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9882"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9882"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9882\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9880"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9882"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9882"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9882"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}