Developing a direct brain interface

The alternative is having electrodes implanted directly in your head, which is what Matthew Nagle did in 2004. Last year, researchers used an updated version of this implanted ‘Braingate’ interface to give three paralysed people the ability to type up to eight words per minute with their brains. Unfortunately, the current state-of-art for this system requires roughly 100 electrodes and a thick set of cables to be plugged in directly through the top of your skull, risking infection and resembling something out of The Matrix.

In Freiburg, Stieglitz’s team is trying to build an implant that can suppress the brain signals leading to an epileptic seizure – a step, perhaps, towards widespread use of brain-computer interfaces for the more able-bodied. “Our dream,” he says, “would be that the implant has a program that says ‘Okay, this seems to be a seizure event in six seconds and I know that I should stimulate this part of the brain to interrupt the seizure.’” In fact, he adds, there’s already one implantable device, a neurostimulator from the company NeuroPace, that’s approved as a medical product for this purpose.

Five years ago, a team at the University of California, Berkeley, first described neural dust. Using implants the size of grains of sand, they’ve shown that they can record and stimulate nerves in rats. They picture a future where we would have a bunch of neural dust motes implanted to keep tabs on our health via fitness trackers, and treat everything from heart issues to asthma just by tweaking the right nerves. Iota’s motes would be wireless and batteryless, potentially doing away with cable connectors and solving the problem of providing power for a lifetime.

But how do you get the implants into the brain without opening the skull? One approach might be to wait until the technology scales down even further, so the motes could be injected, perhaps into spinal fluid. DARPA imagines something similar for its military devices. Its recent document covers nano-sized devices that would be delivered to the brain by “ingestion, injection or nasal administration”.

Maharbiz questions whether implants that small could do anything useful. In fact, the Iota pair believe it’s possible to achieve “mind-boggling” things without even tapping into the central nervous system. Instead, their dust motes could access the brain via its nerve branches in our limbs and organs, in a similar way to NeuroPace’s blood pressure device. “There are other places in the nervous system where we think you can actually put these ports,” says Maharbiz. “It won’t give you the same bandwidth as having a thousand channels in your cortex, but you’ll be surprised at how many things you can do – such as enhancement of your cognitive capabilities – by stimulating these peripheral nerves.”
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