I attended a talk recently by a scientist who implants sensors into the brains of “locked in” patients — people who are so severely paralyzed that they have no way of communicating. The implanted sensors contain thousands of tiny wires. When the patient thinks about, say, moving her arm, the neurons in her brain will produce a flurry of electrical impulses.
Even though the arm cannot physically move, nonetheless these minute electrical signals can be sensed and analyzed on a computer. By looking at the difference between the signals produced by different thoughts, such as “move arm to the left” or “move arm to the right”, the computer can then drive a robotic arm, which essentially becomes a brain-controlled puppet.
Right now the results are crude. People can use these techniques to move robot arms slowly and imperfectly. And of course the whole endeavor requires having a computer chip implanted in one’s head — not something most people would feel comfortable with.
Yet this is also the beginning of something entirely new in human history. For these first 200,000 or so years that Homo Sapiens has been in existence, the only way for a human to communicate has been brain→nerves→muscles. Without the ability to move one’s muscles (whether to speak, or walk or write or move the eyes), a brain is just an isolated blob of tissue, cut off from the world.
But if we imagine a future in which direct neural control becomes cheap and universally available — perhaps a future in which neural sensor implants are given immediately after birth as a standard procedure — then we can envision a time when the brain will become free of the constraints of moving muscles. We will then be able to create any mapping we want from thought to physical reality. We will be able to interact with the world through pure thought, our brains able to directly move machines, operate computers, or transmit our conscious thoughts to the minds of our fellow humans.
What will life be like when any thought we have can be expressed directly, and enacted in the world around us?
You mean everyone can be a Paganini at any age? 🙂 What will happen to emotion->movement? Is that the same thing you think with this kind of nervous system external control? I might need this for my violin playing in about 20 years. Or maybe even right now (my trills are kind of slow these days 🙂 Seriously, as Pavalotti said “singing is controlled screaming”, I like to say “violin playing is controlled spasm” with absolutely no force necessary. To prove it, my teachers played well into their 90s.
There are interesting questions here. I suspect that in trying to understand what makes you outstanding at the violin, or Michael Jordan at basketball, or Meryl Streep at acting, the most important consideration is what is happening inside the brain, not outside of it.
Of course this is pure conjecture at this point, since there is no way to test such an hypothesis as yet. I’m just going from the principle that the most complex processes involved in playing the violin or basketball or a film role are happening inside the brain itself, not in the brain/nerve/muscle connection.
If this is true, then in a world gone over to direct brain-interfaces, those who excel at a skill now will likely still excel at it. And as you point out out, they will continue to excel into their nineties — perhaps even at basketball.
Also, we will start to see more outstanding geniuses at basketball who are a lot shorter than Michael Jordan.
It is true that you don’t need to only practice physically, but a lot can be done by ‘visualizing’. I know gymnasts do that (certain aspects very akin to violin playing I think), and also for me, I don’t want to play more than 5-6 hrs /day max, but I have ‘practiced’ by visualizing learning a piece of music without violin in my hand. In fact my Subharmoncs very much works like this–I have to ‘believe’ that I can do it before I play, since I’m relying on my kinetic memory to draw my bow in a very particular and precise way. I don’t want it to seem like a some kind of voodoo but in fact I wrote about visualizing Subharmonic bowing stroke since that’s the only way I could explain how to produce Subharmonics.
On another note, instead of getting wired, I think I’ll hold out for mi-fi 😉