The Infinite Monkey Cage - Mind-reading computers – Phil Wang, Anne Vanhoestenberghe and Luke Bashford

Episode Date: November 12, 2025

For once, Brian Cox and Robin Ince are on the same wavelength – with thinking caps firmly on, they plug into the science of brain-computer interfaces. Helping them decode the tech are neuroscientist Luke Bashford, biomedical engineer Anne Vanhoestenberghe, and comedian Phil Wang. Together the panel switches on to the possibilities of using implanted and wearable devices to restore movement, speech, sight… or even to decode thoughts themselves. From the ethics of cognitive enhancement to the future of mind-reading and immersive gaming, strap in for this electrifyingly thought-provoking episode.Producer: Melanie Brown Executive Producer: Alexandra Feachem A BBC Studios Production

Hello, on my right is Robin Ince. And on my left is Brian Cox. So obviously it's the other way around for those of you listening on the radio. If you are looking directly at the radio, anyway. And for those you prefer to imagine, we present the show from the bunk bed. We live in in Broadcasting House. I'm on the bottom bunk and Brian is on the top bunk. I did actually once have the top bunk,

but due to the weight that I pushed down the mattress due to the size of my backside, Brian was very worried that the universe was suddenly expanding towards him and was quite unable to sleep. Just to say, because I was a little bit later, I being, I didn't edit that bit of Robin's scripts. I would have taken that out. No, because then people think we like the Markham and White. No, the bunk beds, not side by side, Brian. You were fine. There's a ladder between us, both metaphorically and physical.

Anyway, this is the Infinite Monkey Cave. That's the longest period of time it's taken to get to that bit. So today we're discussing the new science of Brian Computer Interfaces. What is Brian Computer Interface? What new possibilities will these technologies create for human beings? Brian's. Can Brian have a computer implanted into his brain? And if so, would we do it now and see what happens? Because I have actually, I've got a chisel and I've got some detal. And apparently, that is all you need to do this experiment. There's obviously a bit of comedic

license there in Robin's introduction. But it is actually remarkably correct, up to a slight rearrangement of the letters and the words. It is actually genuinely, it's written here, right? It was written in the notes that I would say that today we were looking at Brian computer interface. that was in the notes but it should say brain computer interface nevertheless we can still use the detoll and chisel so we are joined today by a professor of active implantable medical devices

a lecturer and researcher into brain computer interfaces that investigate the neural mechanisms underlying human sensory motor and cognitive function and a comedian and they are my name is dr luke ashford i am a lecturer in neuroscience and neurotechnology at newcastle university and the brain computer interface that would have the biggest impact on my life is one that i could offer to anyone who had a neurological problem who came into the clinic who came into the lab and who could walk out with the problem that they were having resolved

my name's anne van hostenberg i'm a professor of active implantable medical device technology at King's College London, and the brain computer interface that would the most influence my life would be one that would enable people who are not able to be part of the conversation, they can't communicate and we don't hear them to become

part of the conversation. I'm Phil Wang, I'm a comedian and slob, and the brain computer interface that would most improve my life is a bionic arm that will throw a ball in the direction I want it to go.

because currently my actual arm is apparently a ball direction randomiser. And this is our panel. Phil, I've got to pick you up on that, first of all. Are you someone who, when you walk through the park, decides to leave because you see people playing a ball game and go, if that comes anywhere near me, it's a disaster. And the social embarrassment is so great. And that is why you became a comedian.

Yeah, to stay away from the balls. I've thrown balls literally perpendicular to the way I wanted them to go. I understand the science behind it. I can't make the magic happen. Anyway, welcome to today's episode of In the Psychiatrist's chair. Luke, could we start with the definition? So we've heard the term several times now, brain computer interface.

What is that? So it's a device that is comprised of three main components. There is a part of it, which is actually sort of contacting the brain. This part records the brain signal. Then that signal is taken to some sort of computer, that processes that signal, and then that goes to the final part of this chain, which is the effector, which is whatever it is that someone is going to use or control,

be it a robotic arm, be it a computer on a screen or some other device. And Anne, it sounds quite futuristic, I suppose, that doesn't it? It sounds rather science fiction. But historically, well, there's a long history of such devices. It's a long history of trying to interact with a nervous system. I don't think we initially imagined them as being brain computer interfaces, but the concept of trying to modify the way people move using electricity is not new. Research groups creating devices back in the 60s and even before.

Really good examples are cochlear implants. Pace makers as well, we've seen them develop. No, they are something that you are completely familiar with. You don't see them as sci-fi, but the technology that is used is similar to what we're talking about today in brain computer interfaces. So we in the UK have a long history within research and industry of creating these devices. So what was that turning point that allowed this kind of new adventure in terms of the brain computer interface to begin?

For brain computer interface, it's miniaturisation, definitely. You usually have a sort of a moment when there is a technology that's created, like we've got electricity, how can we use it? And then people will find medical applications amongst a lot of other applications. And then the engineers run behind the idea of the medical visionaries, trying to give them the engineering that they need, which is usually make everything smaller. And nothing's more true than brain computer interface.

smaller and then make it last longer. You don't want to drop your mobile phone in water and then just pick it up and just go, it's dead. And we're trying to put things in the brain, which is wet and aggressive. It tries to destroy everything you put in it. That's an incredible image, the idea that you've got a BCI in your head, and then you accidentally put your head in the toilet and then go, oh, I better just put my head in a bucket of rice for a while. I've heard that works. I now really have an image of rice-headed humans. I suppose the science. I suppose the fiction image is literally implanting things through your skull into your brain. Which in certain cases is what happens, but there are a variety of devices. I mean, to this point

of miniaturization, when we were performing these studies 10, 15, 20 years ago, you would go into a room and you would look like the road crew for a touring band with just boxes and boxes and racks of everything. And you would need that in order to do now what we can do with a device, you know, the size of a 10p piece and all of the computing that you need. need is actually embedded into it. So the fundamental signal that drives these devices is the individual firing of individual brain cells. So implanted devices that go through into the brain and sit next to these cells physically, they record the activity of these individual units. From that most implanted version, you can sort of abstract out all the way through to a device

that sits purely on the scalp of the head and records the electrical activity of whole populations of cells, but non-invasively from the surface of the brain. In between then, you have electrodes that rest on the brain's surface but don't actually penetrate it. You have electrodes that sit under the scalp but above the skull. And this is just the devices that record the electrical activity. You can then have devices that interact, you know, via sound or light. So, Phil, which one would you choose just at the moment? If we said, well, you can have either the one where the things are actually stuck into your brain or the one where it just kind of I've been perusing the options of the last five seconds and I don't know. I'm liking the ones

that don't require a hole in my skull. I think the one I just put on the top maybe. Is it too casual? It depends what performance you want from it. So at the moment, the most implanted, those that are closest to the cells, will give you the most performance. So the fine resolution control that you might have seen or that is achievable, that comes from the most implanted. What does performance mean? Like graphics quality? not quite it means for example if you're controlling a device the precision with which you can control it so that the amount of degrees of freedom the amount of manipulation that you have the speed that you can do it sure this comes from the most implanted devices the least implanted devices you can maybe control

one or two or three things so a left a right and up a down a click the amount of physical coordination I have at this point might as well just have it on the top of my skull to be honest I don't think I'm working at pre-rote you might need the implanted version for your throwing on. Yeah, definitely. Is it because you're one of those... Because I think I would... If I've got a, like, a hole in my tooth,

I can't stop fiddle-faddling around with it until I've broken the tooth. So if I had a hole in my head, I know that I shouldn't stick my finger in and kind of wobble it all around, but I would. Yeah, you'd start stroking it. Yeah, it's not stroking it.

Oh, that stops me... Oh, oh. Yeah, no, that kind of thing. It'd be great if you could go to sleep by just pressing a button in the top of your head at night. I find going to sleep really home. Yeah, the only problem then.

who turns the button back on again? There's a flaw in the plan, yeah. So, Anne, what is this? Because I remember once having that, I think it was EEG, but watching the way that my brain was reacting to different pieces of music. I forget where it was now, and it did somewhere near Putney.

And so what can we do, someone near Putney? Literally, I met a guy, he said, can I put some electrodes on your head? And you know me, I'm very much a yes person. So it wasn't it a university or isn't? No, it was, it was, it was this incredible research institute, which was, you know, trying to work out different ways. It was a long, long time ago, and I'm 56, I can't remember everything. It was just someone's house.

I'm just imagining a guy in a van in Puddy saying, hey, come and we can do it. I wish it was their house. It was a well. But so, for instance, without actually any form of invasive, so without even, like, say, going under the skin, in what ways might we be able to change? behavior. The skull unfortunately sort of disrupts almost all of the signals that you would use to record from the brain precisely. Which is probably the point of the skull. Which is probably the point of the skull. Yes, to protect your brain. You know, from all kinds of things, but, you know, these devices

too. So there, I mean, you can influence activity. You can influence movements. You can influence certain behaviors with these kinds of non-invasive stimulations. And that's quite well established, even in clinical standard. Okay. Can I ask you about the magnet, say, because I've had that done, I've had it to the right side of, that's the left side of my brain, isn't it, to the motor region there. And I had a magnetic thing to stop me talking. Brian used it. And no, it was it's not bloody working. Yeah, sorry. You arrived late and I'd cut the wires. But I remember, and then they did another little movement where it was another part of the motor region, so it meant that I had what I would consider me involuntary actions in my hand. So moving that magnet

around the top of the head, you know, what other things might occur? occur as we move from, say, the left-hand side with the motor region is, what other things can be manipulated with a magnetic force? In principle, you can manipulate any population that is the focus of that stimulation. The thing is that there are certain populations, for example, of cells in the motor cortex that directly control the outputs of your muscles. So in that case, you would see exactly these involuntary movements that you saw. Some are sort of more subtle. So, for example, if you move forwards into something like the prefrontal cortex, this is more associated with cognitive function.

So actually, if you were being stimulated in that region, you may not necessarily notice anything unless you were engaged in a very particular cognitive task. Something would be happening, but it wouldn't be as obvious visibly as a twitch. So these implants, they can allow you to control machines, but information can also go the other way around? It can be used to control your arm movements?

Yes. The sort of technical term for that is an open loop versus a closed loop device. So an open loop device is one, that records the brain activity, monitors it, models it, and then outputs it into something. The closed-loop version of a brain computer interface is that then whatever you're using, be it a computer or a robot arm, when you touch something, will trigger an impulse back to your brain that will allow you to feel or sense what you have just been doing. So a stimulation in sensory cortex, after you've made a movement, you will feel the consequences

of that. And you build these devices. So could you give us a sense of what they are? What are they made out of? What do they look like? There is a range of them, depending on which one you're looking at. I mean, Luke brought one, so I'll try to describe, but what you've got is long threads at the end of which you're going to have the electrode arrays.

So each of these little square, which for everybody else's interest is much smaller than the nail of my little finger, are containing several hundreds of electrodes. So these are what's been pushed into the region of your brain that you're trying to listen to. And then what nobody realizes is that on this type of device, there's this. This is the connector to connect to the cable. It's about the size of the top phylogy of my little finger. And this sticks out. The thing as a whole looks like C3PO's Bolo time.

And it's got a thread on it. And what you do is you thread a cable that's going to be outside, and that's what's connected to your computer. And this is never removed. So for anybody who's participated in a study where they've had one of these implanted. Of this type of device, they will have the electrode array, the thread, and then the interconnection. Now, more modern devices that aren't as able to record as many electrodes, so they don't have the same precision of information. This one is really a neuroscience device,

but some of the ones that are more targeting a clinical application, less precise, fewer electrodes, but instead of having a connector like that, they're implanted the electronics. So they then become completely hidden under the skin. So it is essentially some wires, what about five centimetres long or so, and then a data port. And so you connect the wires into the brain, the data ports on the outside,

you read the data out. Exactly. And the advantage of these types of wired devices, so connected via cable, as Anne was saying, is that here you have access to the full bandwidth of brain activity, We record at sort of 30 kHz, which is a sort of a sampling rate that's fast enough that you can capture the individual activity of individual brain cells. So with this kind of device, you can record all of that raw signal, and then you can record sort of the summed electrical activity from that population as well.

This is called the local field potential. So if an individual cell is one cell that fires, the local field potential represents the summed activity of all of the tens, hundreds, thousands of cells in that population. and then that is fed out through this device. The problem is that it leaves this port that comes through the skin and that in principle could be a source of infection. When you implant, though, all of the electronics, all of that processing because you don't have the cabled connection, has to happen on the device,

which there are limits to the amount of battery that that takes. There's the limits to the amount of heat that those computations generate. So you get out what you need for the application, but you don't get out the full brain activity that you might want for a scientific question. Could you not recharge yourself every night, like with a little USB port in the back of your head? I mean you do, you have devices like a clear implants

don't have a battery implanted. You only use them with an external battery and then the power is transferred like your toothbrush charger. So you sort of have power transferred directly. But for brain computer interfaces if you think about something that has to work 24 7, at what point in your life or in your everyday activity

would you say, oh, it's stopped working? Everything I was doing that I was enabled to do, I can't do any more because I need to go recharge or my battery is no longer working. So they take different approaches, compromises on what they're doing. In terms of the engineering challenges, because this is a medical device that, as you said, it's implanted, the infection control and so on.

So how much of a constraint is that on the engineering that you're building something that goes inside the brain? I mean, it's terrible, but it's also my career, so I can't complain about it, but it's really challenging. As I was describing earlier, if you drop your phone in motor, it will stop working. We're making devices that are more powerful than your phone, or trying to, that are hopefully going to last a lot longer than your phone. We're talking decades long.

And that are smaller, that have to resist shocks and bumps and whatever you do to your head. Can't stop working because somebody threw a ball at you and it landed on your head. And all this, I mean, the body is not just wet. It's really, really apt at destroying anything that invades it. In fact, it's what it does best. And so we're, as I said, yeah, it's a real challenge. In terms of the first versions of this, you know, we're talking about challenge. I mean, these tiny little things that you mention, small than your fingernails.

I think to me, I would describe them as being the size I imagine a baby ladybird might be. And you've got these tiny, you know, when that is placed inside human tissue, what were the early failures? What are the things which we went thought that would work? That doesn't work. the invasive nature of this, the body has a way of dealing with it. So what happens when you implant a device into the brain tissue is that your brain responds, much like the rest of your body does to this foreign object, by forming a scar. So a glial scar around each of these electrodes that goes in.

And this glial scar that sort of forms and kind of encapsulates the device prevents you from being able to record the neurons that you're there to record. so over time what you find is the very first sort of moment that you implant this and you switch it on you'll look at it and across all of these different channels you'll see hundreds and hundreds of very well-defined neurons firing and you can see the sort of the shape of each of these firings over time you start to lose those and so that is because of things like the glial scar forming around the device it's also to do with very small movements so you're never really recording the same cells day to day because the brain moves a lot so you get very subtle changes in in which cells you record from, you can compensate for that from recording from the population.

But you can also then kind of compensate for all of this with smarter materials. What you described as a baby ladybird, it's also got a hundred legs. I don't know if you've, in your vision of the lady bird, you see the hundred legs. You can't see them with the naked eye.

On these legs are tiny little hair, I guess, or points that are the area of recordings. It's really very small. And one of the things that was happening is the material at these area was deteriorating. and there's been a huge amount of progress in improving the quality of this material, so it stays stuck on there.

It doesn't get dissolved by the body. It doesn't get so affected that it would delaminate or see other deterioration. And it also has to keep conducting the electrical signal that it's recorded, has to stay connected with the back end where you have your interconnection to your cable. So each of these interconnection, each of these interfaces are areas of fragility in some way we try to control the foreign body response, the scarring. In some other ways, we try to make sure that nothing decomposes into the body. So what are they actually made of?

What is the material that I'm holding here now with the... As you said, they look like tiny little legs or like a kind of tiny hairbrush, whatever it is, you know, this... That's silicon. That's the same as all of the chips that are in your phone, all the electronics runs on integrated circuits on silicon. What's the brain using to deteriorate that? Like acid?

Just too juicy? It's water with salt, mostly. It's water with salt and some reactive oxides and species. So the top layer of the silicon, you have a few nanometers of a metal. And so the first thing it will do, it will corrode the metal. And then it will start attacking the silicon itself. I love this brain acid image of yours. Does brain have acid? I don't know.

I feel like I know nothing about the brain. What can these do? I love the way Brian's just tried it straight over that. He's at that moment of going, I'm sorry, even I know more about biology than that. We're moving on. What can these devices do today? They can restore movement.

They can restore speech. They can be used to restore sensation. So you get the signal from the brain, and then you re-inject it into the body. If you have, for example, a high-level spinal cord injury, the brain activity that underlies all the behavior that you attempt to do isn't affected by that injury. It's preserved. This is different, for example, if you have a stroke because that brain area is physically damaged and it might not

function as it should. But in, for example, a spinal cord injury, the brain activity is doing everything that it normally would. It's just that those signals can't pass the injury and they can't make their way to the muscles and you don't make any movements or behaviors. So what these devices do is they're implanted. We start to record. the brain activity, and we ask people who are involved in these studies to say, okay, attempt to do this certain thing. Imagine doing that. And attempting or imagining to do something produces a very stereotyped brain activity that is very similar to actually doing it if you were really doing it. And so what we do is to start to pair up all of the kind

of stereotypical brain responses to their behaviours. And once you've done this over thousands and thousands of different repetitions and trials, you can build a very good model of, okay, a certain brain activity means that I'm attempting to move to the right. And this particular pattern means I'm attempting to move to the left. This might be because if I'm moving to the right, a certain cell increases its firing rate, you know,

compared to baseline. And if I was moving to the left, that same cell or even a different cell decreases its activity. So once you've built this model, you can track the brain activity in real time. And as someone imagines doing something, when you see that pattern, you say, oh, with a certain confidence, they're probably trying to move to the right. And so the device would see that and then move to the right.

And then, you know, the individual knows that, oh, that's what I were trying to do. So you're not reinserting the signal into the muscles in the arm, for example. Not in that type of brain computer interface. So once you have a good stable recording device and then you have a good model, what you restore is a control signal. So if you control, you know, up, down, left, right, backwards and forwards, however many degrees of freedom that you have, you can then, in principle, plug that into whatever.

So if you plug it into a computer, it looks like you're moving the computer around. If you plug it into a powered wheelchair or a car, you know, you'll drive the car around. If you were to attach it to electrodes that stimulate the muscle, you can then stimulate muscle. The problem is those electrodes are still, quite a kind of a coarse thing and you lose that fine precision that you could get with a device.

One example of a team, French-Swiss team that have done just what you're describing, Brian, where they have one implant in the brain that records the activity, as Luke has explained, has the dictionary, the mapping, and then another implant on the level of the spinal cord below the level of the injury

that can then activate or attempt to activate a person. And with this combination of two devices, each of which are relatively sizable but remarkable in the fact that they can talk to one another that's been demonstrated to provide some degree of control over movement of a person who's otherwise not able to do it.

If you want to contribute, so I'm looking at Phil here, so let's say Phil has said I believe in this sign so much I would like to provide my brain my head as an experimental

subject. As your new lawyer, I would like to say Anything you say will lead to you being taken back to Newcastle University. That's what his expression is saying. But it seems because it's an invasive, or at least the electrode implanting is invasive, is that always done on people who need it from a medical point of view? Or are there, could feel, volunteer indeed. Can Brian volunteer me?

No, I mean, you couldn't volunteer for an invasive procedure. Thank God. It's not done on people so much. On your brain. Everyone that has contributed to these studies so far or the implanted BCI studies so far have volunteered because they have had this sort of situation where they've had a paralysis.

So that's been the fundamental kind of inclusion criteria into these types of studies. And actually, I mean, their contribution cannot be sort of, you know, understated. It's been an enormous effort from them. When we work with participants in the lab, actually they join these studies for more, multiple years and they will do multiple hours every day with us.

You know, they sort of become a part of the lab in a way that their contribution is so much of a commitment. And they do all of this signing an informed consent, which essentially says, you know, you probably shouldn't or you can't expect any benefit from this because we're developing the science. But they have done it with the view that if not us, you know, we won't progress these technologies to a point where the generations behind us with these same injuries would have something and I think for that you know they really sort of all of our respect so Phil I mean now that you know that it's probably highly likely that Luke and Anne will come into your room tonight press the button that switches you off for a while and probably invade

and steal some of your patterns of your brain what are the ones you'd like them to avoid most in terms of the thieving of your electric any any folder that's titled private please stay out of that It's got a very high megabyte number. It's got very high file sizes, to ignore that. I think you'll have a wonderful time in my brain. It's fanciful, but stayed. It's very reasonable in there. You won't have any accidents.

So we've spoken about movement, which is probably the obvious one that springs to mind. But vision, for example, or hearing. Is that an example of where the two-way interaction has to work? I think that's really interesting. it's so it wouldn't fall under a category of what we might call brain computer interface because you don't record for vision and hearing from the brain you record from the environment so it's the one direction that provides the interaction with the neural system is a stimulation

direction so it's environmental input stimulation output and in terms of vision so that essentially I suppose the picture we'd all have is of some cameras and then there would be implants in your brain that would allow you to see what the cameras we're doing. Is that the goal, presumably, is that where we are? So where we are with the visual prosthesis is that if you implant or place electrodes over visual cortex and stimulate them, you generate these what are known as phosphines. So if you sort of close your eyes and you imagine you're not looking at anything, you would see these sort of bright flashes in various different sort of parts of your visual field.

and that sort of correlates to which part of visual cortex you're stimulating. At the moment, you can maybe sort of perform an edge detection or try and get something on the right side of the field or the left side of the field. The hope with that field, not the visual field, the actual scientific field, but the hope with these visual prosthetics is that if you can engineer a sort of a stimulation array that's fine enough that you can access enough discrete parts of visual cortex, you would build up a pattern of these phosphenes that would give you a sort of, sense of what the image was around you. I think that's sort of quite a long way off because

with all of these stimulation inputs to the brain, it's very difficult to really target precisely a certain neuron or groups of neurons or population. Really, when you're stimulating the brain, it's orders and orders of magnitude above the electrical activity of the brain. So when you do it, you stimulate sort of everything. And it's up to your brain to sort of interpret in a way what this blast of activity just meant and in certain regions your brain can kind of do that quite well it might take something in the sensory area as a feeling in the visual cortex it would take it as a as a phosphine but there's a lot of research still to be done and being done to try and understand that mapping between the stimulation and actually what it's evoking in the brain right oh god phil oh i just wondering is there any way

of how far are we from actually reading each other's minds i was trying to think of a more grown-up way to say that, but as in the actual content of the thoughts, because currently what is being recorded is the fact of activity in the brain and then trying to guess what the activity means. But the content of the activity, there's no way of qualifying quantifying. You're really worried about that private folder, aren't you?

I suppose the question is, in a way, what is the difference between a thought, you're thinking of it in the abstract, aren't you, and your brain activating something like, like a muscle. Is there a fundamental difference? There are fundamental differences in the way that activity is represented. One interesting example of this is in these speech prosthetics. If you are imagining speaking, and one of the ways these devices work is they sort of implant electrodes over the areas of the brain that control the muscles of the face and the throat. So that's when you think

about producing a sound, you're really just changing the activity of these muscles and that produces the speech. So if you imagine saying something, you can decode that activity, you can put it through one of these large language models, and you can reconstruct very accurately and very quickly sentences that people are trying to say. The problem is, how do you know the bits that you want to say out loud and the bits that you want to sort of keep in your head? We should ask Robin initially, because Robin has that problem anyway. I don't say it as a problem. I see it as a wonderful freedom. What we're finding, and this is sort of an interesting issue in the privacy of these brain computer interfaces more broadly, is, you know, what signals can we use to actually

sort of differentiate between the activity that we want to express and the activity that we want to sort of keep internally? And here we're finding that there are features in the brain signal that we can identify that tell you which mode you're switching between and we can use those in the devices. And if you measured that, would it be difference in comedians? I did do an experiment where We went into, you know, the brain measuring place. In a well, in a company. We went to an fMRI, and they were trying to see if anything was different in a comedian's brain or anyone who improvised is a lot to see what was going on.

And all they generally found out, well, one, it didn't work very well because a lot of the comedians got really competitive and stopped worrying about the experiment, just worried about their individual performance. So it said a lot about ego, but very little about neuroscience. But then the only thing that they seem to, actually come up with was the fact that because we yap away so much, we don't have to concentrate so much on how to yap. So yapping starts becoming a conscious decision.

Yeah, yeah. It's just a necessary technique to survive in late night clubs. In terms of the technology, so Robin described actually, so you imagine measuring brain waves would be some kind of huge machine and you'd stick your head in it. So where are we now the state of the art in terms of the non-invasive measurements? measurements. I'm going to be really pedantic here on the idea of invasive and non-invasive because to my mind something that's external and imagine an EEG cap, so some 20 or even five electrodes, however many you want it, you have to apply with some sticky gel and we're going

to ask you to shave your hair as well, by the way, to put it on. Is that... I won't do it, but I'm halfway there, so that's fine. And, you know, every time you want to use it, you have to have somebody that helps you place them and then you wear the cap and you have the thing, is that really less invasive than something that's taken you one through a surgical procedure and then no one knows that you have it, no one can see it, it's there when you wake up in the middle of the night, having had a nightmare, you know, it's there wherever you want to go, it's this idea of external, internal, implanted, non-implanted, but I'm not sure the idea of the word invasive is still a valid term. Sorry for that. No, no, it's a good point

to make, isn't it? What I was trying to talk about in terms of the thing that doesn't go through your skull. Actually, these are still quite big devices. You cannot make smaller something that's trying to, if you want to reach different areas of the brain, you're going to have to be over different areas of the brain. So if your focus is on one point only, then you need one external thing and you have to find a way of sticking it there. So that's fine. If you try to do something that's bilateral, you have two and you still have to find a way of sticking them there and hope they don't move, especially if you're moving your head, and then you start increasing the number of electrodes.

We can miniaturize what we put inside the brain, but if you're trying to, even internally, if you try to map a lot of different areas of the cortex, you're going to have to place them in a lot of different areas. What's the most implants you've put in one head? Is this the kind of question you get at the university? It sounds like a Guinness record. Firstly, how many have you done,

and secondly, how many would you? you'd like to. So these types of devices that we implant in clinical trials, we would typically implant up to six different brain locations. So on this particular device that I brought, there's there's sort of two ends. And we'd implant three of these so we could cover six different brain regions. Each of those arrays covers a fraction of one percent of the brain. And it would be unreasonable to just start adding and adding and adding and adding, you know, you'll turn the skull into Swiss cheese for all the different holes that you made to put these devices in. We're looking to the future now. So at the moment, as you've described it, remarkable technology,

can you see a point somewhere where this becomes so easy for the person that rather than being something that's necessary for them, it becomes an option as, you know, playing VR games or something like that, which is, I suppose, where people think about these technologies going. probably the most widely adopted versions of these devices are going to be non-implanted. We're probably sort of 10 or 15 years away from having a good, you know, plug-and-play, non-invasive type of device that anyone would go out and get.

But the... So like a VR headset type thing. And something that really actually works for people. So I think these devices currently, they are very good at what they do, but they're nowhere near close to some of these sort of more... kind of sci-fi examples. And it's, it's appetite for these devices will sort of change.

You know, there is a moment with all technologies where people are potentially hesitant about them, you know, but then there's, you know, a moment in the future where actually if you don't have it, you're almost at a disadvantage because everything relies on the fact that everyone now uses this device to interact with the world and communicate. And, Anne, do you see the engineering progressing at that rate? So you gave a time scale, their 10 or 20 years or something like that before they become commonplace? I think there are already a few externally worn devices that are available as wellness devices. And there will be engineering challenges to make devices that have the complexity that is required to do something that's really useful.

At the moment, whatever you want to do, you do it through your phone because you have your fingers, your voice, your activation. You're so much more dexterous with the part of your body that you're used to using. And especially with the AI assistance, you're going to be able to do so much more through that. It will take longer than 10 years for us to have a new way of interfacing with whatever means of communication and social interactions we have. I think that's longer. But in terms of the timeline that Lou gave us for having externally worn devices that can perform some type of activity, well, we already have some no as wellness. So we're just going to see them grow, but not quite reach a universal or not universal.

because there will always be people who don't benefit from them. We can't access them, but a sort of widespread use in a certain kind of the population. So that brings us in, I suppose, to the ethics. Where do we draw the line in terms of, again, the neoliberal advantages that come with going, well, I can afford to do, though, that have that BCI in my brain. Therefore, now I am going to be the best at chess or whatever it might be. I think it depends on what these devices are sort of ultimately. capable of. I mean, what we are working on sort of as a community at the moment is specific

clinical cases where you have a neurological deficit because of some injury or because of some disease. We're trying to improve performance back to sort of a baseline kind of healthy activity. So the real ethical questions start to come when you start to maybe think about improving above a baseline, someone's performance. There aren't to date really medical devices that can give you a performance above a baseline and in the case that these do then of course you know access to them and how equitable these things are and sort of you know who should benefit from and you know that that becomes a sort of a very very difficult question because it should be the you know all or no one in a certain sense it's not because it's we're not there yet that we shouldn't think

about the consequences of what we're working towards and we can engineer ways of making more accessible technologies having said that we've been aware of lack of accessibility to care across the world for centuries. So here me being telling you, we have to engineer solutions to this. It's probably very naive, but not trying is also not an option. And in terms of the interaction with research into the brain itself, because we've talked about how useful these devices are, but in terms of just understanding what the brain is, how do those fields cross over? This is a sort of a watershed moment for understanding, and advancing sort of human neuroscience.

Because for the first time, we're actually across a number of different devices at a very high resolution in an ever-increasing number of individuals collecting human brain data, and it's out in the real world. It's not just in these kind of lab-based settings, which gives us, for the first time, a data set that hasn't existed before. And the potential of that to help understand the brain in health and in disease, you know, for clinical applications, for purely just basic science, is enormous. And that's probably the most exciting part of this field evolving.

And Phil, just a final question for you. Do you think when we are able to actually analyze and translate the thoughts in our head, we will have discovered the secret of human consciousness? As in like, you think there's an answer in every head that tells us what human consciousness is. like the little glowy golden bit in the middle. Yes, to answer your question, yes. That's what I was hoping you were going to say. And then a follow-up question,

have you changed your opinions now on BCI? I mean, in terms of you already have volunteered and signed the forms that you are now going to be donating your brain, body, mind and private folders to Newcastle. But how do you feel now at the end of this in terms of thinking about, you know,

DCI and thinking about the possibilities? Well, I mean, it's interesting Luke saying that we're 10, 15 years away from having a BCI helmet. That's not very long. I'm going to be in my mid-40s just in time for my mid-life crisis. I'm going to be able to have...

Oh yeah, nice one. Yeah, brother. So, we asked our audience question as well, and we asked them, if there was one thing they could do to enhance their brain, what would it be? I've got one which is grow and shrink in size, so I fit any hat that I choose. Not sure that's actually

I think we've moved on to an extra level there in terms of the inflation and deflation. This is a physics. It combined my brain with all my other selves across the multiverse, which is kind of interesting. What I got there, Phil? Sally and Steve say,

an autosave function in my thalamus to help me recall my de-reams. There's always one of them. I don't get that. Is that a band? It was a novelty band in the early 90s. Anyway, so... Thank you to our panel.

Professor Anne Baner. Holstenberger, Dr. Luke Bashford and Phil Wang. So that brings this episode to an end. Next week, we hope that we won't be back at the normal time because we're discovering that time has been measured very shoddly over the last few centuries. So whatever time we will be on will be far more specific than this week's time.

So set your atomic clock. Yeah, because next week we'll be exploring timekeeping. And what better place to discuss clocks, watches and prime meridians than the Royal Observatory Greenwich? Thank you very much. Good night In the infinite In the infinite monkey cage

Until now nice again Nature Bang Hello And welcome to Nature Bang I'm Becky Ripley I'm Emily Knight And in this series from BBCZ Radio 4 We look to the natural world to answer some of life's big questions.

Like, how can a brainless slime mold help us solve complex mapping problems? And what can an octopus teach us about the relationship between mind and body? It really stretches your understanding of consciousness. With the help of evolutionary biologists, I'm actually always very comfortable comparing us to other species. Philosophers. You never really know what it could be like to be another creature. And Spongologists. Is that your job title? Are you a Spongologist?

Well, I am in certain spheres. It's science meets storytelling, with a philosophical twist. It really gets at a heart of free will and what it means to be you. So if you want to find out more about yourself via cockatoos that dance, frogs that freeze, and single salamabas that design border policies, subscribe to NatureBang. From BBC Radio 4, available on BBC Sounds. Bye!