Hack and the Bean Stalk

I know some days I get inside your head. I share some disturbing news and you find yourself thinking about it more than you want to. It’s like an earworm melody that gets stuck in your head long after you’ve stopped listening. Songs and words get inside your head the old fashioned way—through your eyes and ears. The next generation of technologies aren’t taking such a meandering route. They’re attaching directly to your brain. Like all new technologies, that’s both good news and potentially really disturbing news. Let’s join Linda Kinstler in the NYT Magazine (Gift Article) as she does something as simple as putting on what looks like an ordinary pair of grey eyeglasses. Before long, she was using her mind to move a robotic soccer ball set on a table in front of her. “The ball had been programmed to light up and rotate whenever my level of neural ‘effort’ reached a certain threshold. When my attention waned, the soccer ball stood still. For now, the glasses are solely for research purposes. At M.I.T., [scientist Nataliya] Kosmyna has used them to help patients with A.L.S. communicate with caregivers — but she said she receives multiple purchase requests a week. So far she has declined them. She’s too aware that they could easily be misused.” The Next Privacy Battleground Is Inside Your Brain. Scientists have used these kinds of brain computer interfaces to allow “people with locked-in syndrome, who cannot move or speak, to communicate with their families and caregivers and even play video games. Scientists have experimented with using neural data from fMRI imaging and EEG signals to detect sexual orientation, political ideology and deception, to take just a few examples.” (I’m thinking of wearing a pair of brain-sensing glasses while I write NextDraft. I want to see how many news tabs I have to open before the robotic soccer ball rolls off the table and deflates.)