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[ethereal music plays]
[Randal Koene] There are all kinds of situations
where we would love to have more control
over what the brain can do, so that you have these choices
of what exactly you are taking in, what you're learning,
and where you're going with that.
And there are also situations where we simply wish that we could experience more.
Say, for example, that you would like to be able to perceive
things that we currently can't perceive.
You want to be able to see the ultraviolet,
or you want to be able to hear ultrasound,
or what if you wanted to be able to,
uh, remember more things than you normally can remember.
[computer beeping, computer processing]
The most exciting part of the future to me
is the potential to achieve humanistic intelligence.
This idea that the late Marvin Minsky talked about,
which is being able to create an environment
where we have a symbiotic relationship with artificial intelligence,
uh, and we will see a blurring of our physical, digital,
and biological worlds, and not so much being separate parts,
but as being seamless parts of one integrated human organism.
It probably will be possible to read out
what's inside a person's brain, to understand what's there,
by translating it into something you can understand,
and maybe even putting it back, giving it to someone, teaching.
When we make a decision now,
we are under the impression that we are the ones who are making the decision,
and we make it because we want to make it,
but if our brains are connected to the net, to a computer cloud,
uh, and their algorithms that they are using are decision making,
well, who is deciding?
[theme music playing]
[intense music playing]
We are curious to understand who we are, and why we think the way we think,
and what is the reason of our thoughts,
our memories, our imagination, our feelings.
[ethereal music playing]
Understanding this incredibly complex organ,
that gives rise to everything that makes us human.
Everything we see, feel, hear, our sense of identity,
and so, given the vast complexity of the brain,
you know, a hundred billion neurons,
you know, hundreds of trillions of connections,
um, operating in a dynamic network that's constantly changing,
it's just a really very, very complicated system
for us to study with science.
So it's a big challenge, but one that I really enjoy undertaking.
In the human brain, you have about
three million kilometers of fibers connecting it,
so it's enough to go around the Moon a couple of times, just in one brain.
[narrator] The place in the universe
that is likely the most complex and mysterious…
the place where emotions, thoughts and memories arise,
that place in the universe that tries tirelessly to understand itself,
an unsolved enigma.
We don't know and we cannot build
today anything that is even as closely
connected to what we see in the human brain.
There is one hypothesis
that suggests that what brains are doing,
what our brain is doing is generating a virtual reality,
a model of the world that is running in our heads all the time.
This has to do with ideas that have been floating around in philosophy
for a few centuries,
in particular, with the suggestion by Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher,
that the reason why the world, on our minds,
our views of the world agree…
is not because our minds reflect the world.
No, no, it's the opposite.
Is that the world is created by our minds.
In other words, that what we perceive is not out there. It's in here.
[narrator] It weighs less than three pounds.
It consumes scarcely 20 or 30 watts of power,
and nevertheless, it's able to make calculations
more complex than a supercomputer.
There are a hundred to a thousand trillion synapses about the size of bacteria.
They basically are chemical machines.
They receive an electric pulse, and then they release chemicals.
They hit receptors, a very complex machinery is triggered.
These results in a change in the behavior of the neurons.
It causes genes to express, new proteins to come in…
The cascade of biochemical and biophysical processes
is enormously complex.
If you would try to describe how the networks of cells is working,
I would say that imagine you are having
phone calls for 10,000 people at one and the same time,
and the same what you are doing,
everybody is doing, who is living on our planet, on the Earth,
about seven billion people.
And when you then try to describe all this communication
that is going on of all the seven billion people,
and then you imagine that this is only one-tenth, perhaps, of the capacity,
and everything is only within your skull,
it is restricted to one and a half kilogram,
and this is complexity in my view.
[ethereal music continues]
[dial rattling]
In spite of a hundred years of neuroscience,
we still don't understand how the brain works.
We still don't have a general theory of the function of the brain.
The first reason why I would argue is critical to understand
how the brain works has to do with our own definition as human beings.
We are a mental species. We are defined by our minds,
not by our bodies, so we are a very special type of animal.
We don't understand the organ that generates our minds,
so when we understand how the brain works,
we will be able to understand how our mind is from the inside,
and we'll understand ourselves for the first time.
[suspenseful music playing]
The second reason has to do with the clinic, with patients.
Humankind should understand how the brain works because we need…
Uh, it's urgent
that we help these patients that have mental and neurological diseases,
and we have to understand the system in order to fix it.
We estimate that, possibly, one person out of two
to one person out of three in Europe
have some kind of a disorder that is related to the brain.
Altogether, it's maybe up to more than 200 million person in Europe
who have one of these disorders.
And it's also associated with a huge cost for the society.
The cost of all disease affecting the brain is more than the cost
of all cancer, plus all cardiovascular disease, plus diabetes.
[Rafael Yuste] And then the third reason has to do with technology and the economy.
And it is very likely that brains,
not just of humans but brains of all animals,
have discovered through hundreds of millions of years or evolution…
ways to compute that could be much more efficient and powerful
than what we're doing currently with our digital computers.
So if this is the case, if we understood,
if we were able to break this neural code and understand how the brain computes,
and what are the algorithms that are present
in our nervous systems,
we will likely revolutionize, uh,
computer science,
computer technology,
and I would say, the economy, at the same time.
[monitor whirring]
[Tan Le] The Holy Grail for this would be to create
a much more symbiotic relationship with artificial intelligence.
As we can see today, artificial intelligence
is moving forward in leaps and bounds,
offering us a myriad of new ways of being
more productive and more efficient in how we conduct our businesses,
and how we manage our daily lives.
With the introduction
of more and more devices that actually understand the human,
and how humans optimize their own performance,
we will have a way to create a much more…
a different type of intelligence.
What I would call humanistic intelligence.
The distinction between the biological world,
the physical world, and the digital world will just blur,
and we will integrate seamlessly across all of these dimensions.
[narrator] A deep understanding of the functioning
of the human brain could bring answers to great philosophical questions
such as what consciousness is and how it is built,
or if there is free will.
Concepts such as the inner self, guilt,
or even reality could change forever.
We are opening the door to a world
where we will communicate directly with a computer through thought,
a world where we will be able to share our thoughts
and our emotions through the internet.
We can envision a future in which we are able to read
the thoughts of others and even to manipulate them.
We are building technology to read the activity
of all the neurons in these brains
and to write activity to control
and manipulate the activity of these neurons in the brain.
And these technologies are necessary to be able to cure human patients.
But the same technologies, technology is neutral,
it could be used for good or for a bad.
The same technologies to read and write activity into brains
can be used to decipher what people are thinking,
or to influence the activity of the minds of people.
So you'll say, "Well, this is science fiction."
Well, not really.
[ethereal music playing]
[narrator] In the middle of the '90s,
the last decade of the 20th century and the second millennium,
a whole revolution in the world of neuroscience occurred,
the neuro-imaging techniques appeared.
Neuro-imaging techniques are important for this revolution,
out to learn and explore the brain
because it's a nice non-invasive way to get inside the brain.
[narrator] One of the imaging techniques
that had the greatest impact was magnetic resonance imaging.
For the first time ever, we could see the inner functioning of the brain
while it experiences sensations and emotions.
In fact, functional magnetic resonance imaging,
able to detect the presence of oxygen in the blood in the brain,
has allowed us to discover
something unimaginable years ago,
how different areas in the brain interact
while the patient talks, sees an image,
listens to a sound or simply thinks.
But if you ask him to focus on one task,
like listening to a sound,
only the region from this specific task, the auditory cortex, for example,
will have more conception of oxygen,
and this region will pop out into contrast
if you analyze the data, listening to sound
against not listening to sound.
The reason why we don't understand how the brain works
is not because of its complexity,
but because we've been lacking methods to study it at the right level.
Now, if you think about it, trying to understand
a system as complex as the brain,
that has a hundred billion neurons,
by recording from one neuron
is a little bit like trying to watch a movie in a TV screen
that has a million pixels by looking at a single pixel.
So no matter for how long you study a single pixel,
you study a single neuron, you will be missing the figures
in the screen and the shapes of the images
because they are an emergent property of the correlations in space
and time between the individual pixels.
[adventurous electronic music playing]
We think that neuroscience should embark
on this period of new technology,
to develop the methods so that neuroscientists
and clinicians will be able to see for the first time in the future
the activity of complete neural circuits
and be able to decipher the functional meaning of this pattern.
How can one measure the activity
of each and every one of the neurons in the brain at the same time?
The methods that we and many other people are using are optical methods.
We use light because light can penetrate the tissue in a non-invasive fashion.
In particular, the method that I pioneered is called Calcium Imaging,
and we used it for the first time to measure the activity of neural circuits.
Every time a neuron fires, every time it's activated,
calcium comes into the neuron,
so that means if you have his little calcium indicators,
these fluorescent molecules in all the neurons,
you can directly see who is firing,
who is being activated in the entire group at once,
because you see these as changes in fluorescence
that are happening in different neurons at different times.
[narrator] Thanks to neuro-imaging techniques,
we have learned more about the brain
the last 15 years than in the whole history of humankind.
The advances already made allow us to think that in the near future,
we will be able to solve neurological damage,
diseases like Parkinson's or Alzheimer's,
depression or schizophrenia.
Yeah, I think that the revolution we're experiencing now is,
first, the birth and the success of human neuroscience.
We now have fields like cognitive neuroscience,
where we use functional brain imaging and non-invasive brain stimulation,
to study the functioning human brain.
And that was, I think, the first step.
[adventurous electronic music playing]
From my perspective, I've been doing neuroscience research for 30 years
and this is the revolution now.
But now, it's the time that neuroscience
is starting to reach into people's lives directly.
And to me, that's what we need to have a revolution.
We need to advance from the lab into the real world.
[Kim Old] This is a super application
to be able to control the puzzle box orbit.
I'll first connect it to the emotive NCIG headset.
[app beeps]
And it's now connected.
What we have to do is train two patterns.
Um, the first is a resting state,
so that we understand when you want to control the orbit versus no.
And then, the second pattern is to control
what you want to apply for flying the orbit.
[orbit whirring]
-Woo-hoo! -[orbit clattering]
-[indistinct chatter] -[laughter]
[narrator] This leap from the lab to the real world,
can already be seen in the form of the perfecting of what
belonged to the realm of science fiction just a few years ago,
brain-computer association.
The so-called Brain-Machine Interfaces
have solidified this revolution in the world of the neuroscience.
BCI really just means Brain Computer Interface,
so anything that makes a connection between processing going on
inside your brain and a machine, or some other devices.
Brain computer interfaces can be grouped as a group
of technologies that can help both from a hardware and software perspective,
able to both decode, process and activate
the interface interactions between humans and machines,
decoding the brain of course.
But the typical definition would be a platform that can help us interact
from the brain to the world.
[ethereal music playing]
[narrator] The Brain-Machine Interfaces are bringing great advances
in various therapeutical applications.
Up to now, one of the main practical applications
is the treatment of different pathologies associated with paralysis.
At the Federal Polytechnic School of Lausanne, Switzerland,
Dr José Millán has been working for years on an ambitious project
based on the development of a brain-machine interface
that allows paralytics to control a robotic exoskeleton with their minds,
thanks to which they can walk again or move a hand.
The patients wear an electrode helmet
that detects their cerebral electrical activity.
What we ask people to do at the very beginning,
because they need to go through a training
in order to acquire the capability to modulate voluntarily their brain signals,
is to imagine the movements that they want to accomplish,
and this requires some time because it is not easy to do that.
Our algorithms are capable to discover which are the areas,
the specific areas
that they are activating and de-activating,
at which frequencies this is happening,
and this is the input to our machine-learning algorithms
that will build the model of the decoder
that will differentiate an opening,
a closing of the hand, a right step,
a left step and so on and so forth.
So during this training, people at the very beginning
need to imagine the movement of their own body,
and in many cases, people, after some training,
and because of the fact that, as they imagine the movement of their body,
this is executed via the exoskeleton,
they don't need to think any longer about their own body.
They think in terms of the exoskeleton
because the exoskeleton has been integrated, somehow,
in people's body scheme that we have in our brain.
[amusing music playing]
[narrator] The possibilities that this technique offers to these patients,
have allowed to a quadriplegic patient
to be able to drive a Formula One car just with his mind.
In 2017, Rodrigo Hubner Mendes became the first person
to reach such a milestone.
[Tan Le] This opportunity to work with Rodrigo was incredible.
Globo TV in Brazil created a vehicle,
a Formula One vehicle that was completely controlled
just using the power of thought.
So, what they used was a 14-channel EPOC+ headset,
uh, measuring electrical fluctuations from Rodrigo's brain.
He spent a few months mapping and training the algorithms
to understand how he associated specific thoughts
whether it'd be drive forward, turn right, left, or stop,
and then he was able to use those commands
to drive this car completely just using his mind.
So no steering wheel, no pedals, just him inside the vehicle.
This was a very fortuitous moment when Lewis Hamilton,
who is obviously world's reigning F1 champion,
was in the same place as Rodrigo in the UAE.
Rodrigo posted a very exciting challenge for Lewis, which is,
"Would you like to race me?"
Surprisingly, Lewis accepted the challenge,
so I'm not sure when we are going to start
seeing the two of them start practicing,
but I know that Rodrigo is very excited about the ability
and the opportunity to race with the reigning world champion
just using his mind.
[keyboard clacking]
[narrator] Around the world, a wide variety of projects
based on brain-machine interfaces
are currently being developed.
In Boston, the company Neuroelectrics has developed a technology
based on the use of mind-controlled video games
to learn to regulate brain activity.
Okay. So, today, we are going to measure
your brain waves with this device.
Uh, this device physically uses dry electrodes
to measure your brain waves like this.
[man] Mm-hmm.
And today, we are going to measure your, specifically, alpha brainwaves,
and you're going to be able to control an object
in these screen going up and down.
So I'm gonna put you the cap.
Then we are first going to measure your baseline,
which is the baseline of your brain waves,
the level in which your brain is right now.
[techno music playing]
So the way we have developed our brain-computer interface is,
we are collecting brain signals, for example,
alpha or beta or gamma, which are different frequencies, right?
And we are capering your brain or power spectrum, your brain bands,
to something in the screen, which is, in this case, a little avatar
that goes up and down,
according to if your brain waves are up or down.
So this submarine here,
this is going up and down according to your brainwaves
and you're controlling it.
So you need to focus on it and keep relaxed
and try to control it, moving it up and down.
[game ringing]
[narrator] The mind-controlled video games
are proving to be an efficient treatment for diseases
like depression or hyperactivity disorder in children.
At Neuroscape, a neuro-technological company
based in San Francisco,
they are using these video games controlled by the mind
for therapeutic uses.
All of our research right now
relies on using the closed-loop video games that we've created,
so far, just using the performance, not the cognitive brain computer interface.
That's still very much a research,
in the research phase.
And then we apply these, uh, these closed-loop video game treatments
to see if they can improve attention abilities
in many different clinical populations,
including ADHD, which is attention deficit hyperactivity disorder,
but also post-traumatic stress disorder,
traumatic brain injury, depression and autism.
We developed this closed-loop video games
that record your performance and use that data to challenge you
in a very personalized manner.
So if it's too hard, the game could back off.
If it's too easy, it can make it more challenging.
Just puts it right at that sweet spot.
And then the game mechanics target different neural networks
that we're trying to improve.
So it could be a prescribable treatment,
just like we currently use stimulants to help improve attention abilities
in children that are suffering ADHD.
[dreamy music playing]
[narrator] In the last few years, there has been a progressive
blossoming of neuro-tech start-ups that are revolutionizing
the way to intervene in our mental processes.
Nowadays, most of them are focused on helping patients
with different types of damage or neurological disorders.
However, in the not-so-distant future,
these companies will end up transferring
all these advances to our daily lives,
radically modifying the way we interact
with each other and even understand the world.
Investing in novel neuro-technology today
could be the best way to generate an economic revolution
in the future by the development of this new technology,
which instead of biotechnology, in the case of the Human Genome Project,
now it would be neuro-technology.
And this is something that is starting to happen.
Last year, Elon Musk created a neuro-technology company, Neuralink.
Brian Johnson, another billionaire,
has created a similar company called Kernel,
so we start to have some new companies
that are based on the promise
that these new neuro-technologies
are going to be causing an economic revolution.
Emotiv is a neuro-informatics company,
so what we do is we are a platform that allows us
to interface directly with the brain.
Today, it's using non-invasive methods.
So we start from the sensor input,
so measuring the brain activity itself,
through to the translation
of the electrical signals from the brain
and then we map those to control
and influence the environment around us.
-[Tan Le] Look at your brain, Kim. -[both laugh]
So you're wearing a 14-channel EEG,
and this is just picking up electrical fluctuations
that resolve from neurons firing inside your brain.
The brain is made up of billions of neurons
and when they interact, the chemical reaction
just emits an electrical impulse that we can pick up.
You can see the different parts of your brain is lighting up
depending on what you might be thinking
or whether you're paying attention to what I'm saying.
So, what we're doing here is we're mapping those electrical fluctuations
into a 3D model of what your brain is doing,
and each of the colors represent a different frequency band,
which indicates how fast the information is traveling
from one part of the brain to another.
[ethereal music playing]
[narrator] Located in Lausanne, Switzerland, in the centre of Europe,
is the headquarters of MindMaze,
one of the largest neuro-technological companies in the world.
Our big goals are really to disrupt industries from health care,
so really improving quality of life after a neurological injury,
all the way to being able to help healthy individuals,
you know, enable the ability of the brain to learn,
to play, to interact, and entertain.
[narrator] One of those technologies
designed to help the rehabilitation of patients
who have suffered stroke is MindMotion PRO.
It's the first device a stroke or a brain,
a brain injury patient sees after the injury.
You know, the first two days
when they come out and they need to recover.
It's one of the first devices that's able to start training
of both the brain and the body.
So it's about neuro-plasticity, tricking the brain.
So we're gonna put markers
on you so that the camera can see your arms
while we do some activity.
So it's pretty intuitive.
You just need to move your hand to the start button,
and similarly, if you move it
in the direction that isn't indicated, you'll see how to correct it.
So let's say, someone who has a stroke
cannot move the left hand,
and he can move the right hand,
the camera in the MindMotion PRO tracks the right hand
and puts it on an avatar on the left side.
And then the brain suddenly says,
something's happening there, so I should try more,
and it starts activating the pathways that used to control that hand,
and slowly accelerates recovery.
[upbeat electronic music playing]
[narrator] The latest and most ambitious proposal of MindMaze,
the CogniChip, goes one step further
and merges neuro-technology with artificial intelligence.
Some entrepreneurs are looking into augmenting our brains
so that we can develop super-intelligence
that allows us to collaborate with artificial intelligence.
It would be a way to reduce the risk for human beings
to become irrelevant due to the rise of artificial intelligence.
It is the next frontier. Neuroscience and neuro-technology,
brain technology, is definitely the next frontier.
Now, we truly are at the frontier
where we can do some impactful things with the brain.
So, yeah, neuro-technology is now really going to kick off.
[NASA operator] Ignition sequence starts.
Six, five,
four, three, two,
one, zero.
All engines running.
[narrator] One of the greatest technological
and scientific milestones in history
was the arrival of man on the moon.
[surreal music playing]
The Kennedy era was one of the periods
of the greatest scientific splendor the world has ever known.
As a consequence, an important economy grew around it,
which led in a very short time,
to unprecedented technological development.
[water splashes]
Ideas are what power our economy.
We do innovation better than anybody else.
And that makes our economy stronger.
We have had many interactions
with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy
and they had explained to us that they were interested in grand challenges
for the US government to pursue any different areas of science
that they thought could really be of the same ilk
as, for instance, the Apollo moon landings,
a big project that really would allow the entire US community
to get behind something that would make a huge impact in science.
[upbeat synth-wave music playing]
[narrator] They found that great science project in the BRAIN Initiative,
a research megaproject that Obama announced in 2013,
with the goal of unveiling the mysteries of the brain.
It's a very exciting moment, uh,
there are many groups around the world developing new methods,
and this is now leading to reenergizing of neuroscience,
and to the perception that we can really do it,
that this is doable, that we can actually end up
being able to record the activity of every neuron in a brain
and decipher it, and this could really revolutionize neuroscience
just like the Human Genome Project revolutionized genetics.
[narrator] Very soon after the launching of the BRAIN Initiative,
the European Union announced its own megaproject,
the Human Brain Project.
[Rafael Yuste] It turns out that similar initiatives
have been created in different countries.
So there is a brain initiative in Japan,
in Canada, in China, in Australia, South Korea and Israel.
[whooshing, crackling]
[narrator] The development of all these projects
could change the scenario of brain research
and lead humanity to unprecedented advances.
So this is very exciting. This is just happening,
and I hope that this will provide the ability to generate, uh, knowledge
and send this knowledge throughout the world, into different countries,
uh, in a way in which no one is left behind,
and we're all part of the same exciting moment in history.
[surreal music playing]
[narrator] We've started the path to a new world
in which a deeper knowledge of the brain
will radically transform our human condition.
[powering up]
[sweeping music playing]
[whirring]
[computer beeping]
Brain-machine communication will grow progressively more efficient and precise,
and will open up a vast range of possibilities for human beings
to benefit from the potential offered to us by artificial intelligence.
[sweeping music continues]
With the introduction of more and more devices
that actually understand the human
and how humans optimize their own performance,
we will have a way to create a much more…
a different type of intelligence,
what I would call, "Humanistic intelligence."
The idea is that you can create a myriad of devices and sensors around us
that interface and interplay with artificial intelligence
in a way that makes humans much more symbiotic with their environment.
So, you know, the distinction between the biological world,
the physical world, and the digital worlds will just blur,
and we will integrate seamlessly across all of these dimensions.
And so, when you feel confused,
your AI will recognize that and will prompt you with commands.
If it recognizes your fatigue,
it will send a command to brew the coffee pot,
or a message to your phone reminding you to go out
and take a short walk and stretch your legs.
So you will become integrated with your environment,
and your environment becomes an extension of your brain.
And I think that's the type of humanistic intelligence
is really what we are going to see the future go.
[electronic whirring]
[coffee dripping]
[electronic whirring, beeps]
[narrator] The cognitive capacities of human beings will be enhanced.
There are experiments by colleagues, um,
such as Roi Cohen Kadosh, that have shown
that you can improve numerical abilities in children,
um, that have dyscalculia,
people who have difficulties in doing arithmetic and so on.
I think enhancement via implants, um, and things like this
is definitely gonna be possible.
[beeping, electronic whirring]
[Rafael Yuste] Technologies are going to enable humans
to augment ourselves mentally.
Just like holding an iPhone,
we can have access to an enormous amount of information.
If that comes directly piped into our brains,
we are going to be able to operate at the cognitive level
above what we operate at normally.
So they're going to be augmented humans.
So this could cause major difference in the society.
Can accentuate the difference
between different social groups and different countries.
And we have to ensure that there is equal access to all of that.
That there is a principle of fairness
that runs across the application of these new neuro-technologies
and artificial intelligence algorithms.
-[surreal music playing] -[electronic whirring]
It gets more interesting when you can think about neuro-prosthesis
in the cognitive parts of the brain.
So let's take for instance this hippocampus prosthesis.
The patients who are going to be the first ones
to use these devices are going to be the first people
with some kind of superhuman memory ability.
The very first type of memory ability
is going to be that they can choose
when they do remember something and when they don't.
Because they can say, "Okay, the stuff that I…
The experiences that were coming through at three o'clock yesterday…
I want those to be enhanced."
[surreal music continues]
[electronic whirring, beeps]
[piano music playing]
[narrator] Brain-Computer communication will make way
for Brain-Computer-Brain Interfaces.
You take what this person has learnt,
you run it through the translator, and you give it to someone else's brain.
Or you just want to be able to communicate
through something like telepathy.
You can read out what a person is trying to say
or what they're imaging, what they are imagining,
and you can try to give those imaginings,
or those sounds, to someone else.
[dramatic music playing]
Or you could try to detect what a person is feeling,
and you can translate that in a way, and then give it to someone else.
So you can imagine this as a…
as a communication pathway that wouldn't just work for words,
but it would work for images, it would work for feelings.
It would work for anything that we share in a sense
where you can say, because we are all humans,
we all have feelings of happiness, and of sadness and of pain,
and we have a smell, and we have vision.
So you can transfer smells,
you can transfer vision, you can transfer auditory, you can…
eventually, with enough translation,
even translate knowledge and memory.
Connecting brains is gonna be done.
Um, there are definitely hurdles,
and it's gonna take very important technological breakthroughs.
I think in the future, we will definitely have
uh, very powerful synthetic telepathy technologies.
[energy pulsating]
[computer alarming]
[narrator] It will be possible not only to read other's thoughts,
but also to manipulate them.
Let's think about it a little bit more,
about the impact and repercussions
of this new knowledge to society, to humanity.
[electronic whirring]
We can, uh, using mice.
We cannot read the activity of every neuron in the brain from ours,
but if you look at the visual cortex,
you can actually read the activity of a few thousand neurons there.
And we can decipher some of the patterns of activity,
as they relate to what the animal is seeing,
what the animal is looking at.
And then we can go in with optical methods, with optogenetics,
and selectively change the patterns of activity
and fool the animal into thinking that he's seeing one thing or the other thing
by essentially playing the piano with his neural circuits
in the visual cortex of the brain.
This is something we can do today.
[circuits scrambling]
People could do this with humans, not today.
We don't have the methods to control,
to read the activity of a…
of many neurons in the brain of humans and to change that,
but these methods are going to be developed
because we need them for the patients.
In fact, there is a project supported by DARPA,
by the foundation of military research,
to build an electronic chip
to record the activity of one million neurons…
in a human, in a human patient,
and to stimulate 100,000 neurons at the same time.
And this is not science fiction.
This is something that is being built as we speak.
In fact, we are helping to build them
because they need to use this for patients.
And this could be in the clinic in four years.
[dramatic music playing]
[narrator] A whole new world of opportunities is opening up
before our eyes,
a world where we will have the ability
to co-evolve with the artificial intelligence.
There is even a hypothesis that in the distant future,
we won't need our biological structures.
If all we are, are our thoughts, our memories, our emotions,
our whole "self" can be transferred into a computer,
our biological bodies will no longer be necessary.
So now we are getting into the more far future
science fiction aspect of this whole endeavor.
There is a science fiction term called "mind uploading."
What it means is that, mind, or who we are,
is then no longer dependent on the biological brain as such.
You still need a brain, of course,
there is no such thing as no device
running your mind, but it could be all sorts of devices.
It could be a device that is better suited for, say,
for example, living in space, or living on another planet,
or living underwater, or something like that.
So when you get to a far future where the technology of all brain emulation,
which is, really, the more scientific concept,
what is it you're actually doing here?
You are trying to emulate what's going on in the circuitry.
When you have that, then you can start thinking
about the personal and social consequences of doing that,
which is really what mind uploading means.
It's a very philosophical term, in a sense.
It's, like, what happens if you can take who I am,
my mind and move me to something else.
So many things are then, potentially, possible.
You could make backups of your mind,
so that if something happens, you can restore and it's not, uh…
You know, it's not as devastating.
[whooshing]
[mellow music playing]
[narrator] The knowledge we have acquired in recent years
about the brain has given us possibilities
until recently-considered science-fiction.
We're advancing at very high speed.
We can't know where a deeper knowledge of the brain will lead us,
but it's in our hands to steer it in the right direction.
It's critical to have guidelines,
ethical guidelines, for the development of these technologies.
We propose to add to the human universal declaration
of human rights, new rights,
to protect individuals from the abuse
of neuro-technologies and artificial intelligence.
So this is what we call the neuro rights.
And they have to do with protecting the mental privacy of people,
so this is our first one.
Not just the data privacy of our phone. No, no, the mental privacy.
Our thoughts, and even worse, our subconscious thoughts,
things that we don't even know, we are not aware of knowing them.
Those should be protected, should be…
This is the ultimate human right, our mental privacy.
[ethereal music playing]
We should also have protection as we connect ourselves
to computers through brain computer interfaces.
Look at the effect that connecting us to the net through our iPhones
has had in our culture.
Well, imagine if that connection could be direct
through some brain-computer interface that could be, maybe, wireless and, uh…
and non-invasive. That could happen in the future.
So this is going to affect our sense of identity, of who we are.
We need to protect the sense of identity, the I, the self.
This is something that humans never had to worry about in the past. [chuckles]
No one ever had that problem before.
[computer alarming]
Related to this is also our sense of agency, our free will.
There could be someone who wants to actually change the way you're operating.
So that's another fundamental right that has to be protected.
So these are the neuro rights and now we have to convince…
um, the leaders of the world
and the leaders of the society
that this is a very important issue.
Discussing the future of our society, the future of humankind,
and that we have to make sure
that these technologies, which are so powerful,
and they could cause so much good,
not just in patients but in among ourselves,
we'll be able to finally understand who we are.
It's like a new renaissance,
that these technologies are not used against us. [chuckles]
Um, we have to be vigilant
and we have to put this ethical framework in place,
so that doesn't happen.
[Randal Koene] This understanding is just going to give us the tools
to develop in many different directions,
to explore in many directions,
and also to be versatile and adaptable.
So that maybe the human species has a really long-term future,
not the kind of future where, you know,
it works for a while and then we're not adapted well enough and that's it,
but a really long-term future.
That's what I'm hoping, that this could ultimately lead to.
I hope it could provide us with the tools to have basically, uh…
like, you might call it another Cambrian explosion
where the new species develop in all kinds of directions, except it's us.
It's the human species deciding
that we want to try out this direction,
try out that direction and so forth.
[Rafael Yuste] Science can change the world.
It can change society, it can change the course of history,
and it can do that for good or for bad.
It's up to us to make sure that it goes in the right direction.
[narrator] We've entered a new age,
the age of neuroscience,
an age in which the way we experience and feel the world
will radically change.
Welcome to the world of tomorrow.
[upbeat epic music playing]
[music ends]