The mouse that runs out of battery life. The trackpad that gets stuck, unresponsive to a swiping finger. The “sent from my iPhone, please forgive typos” disclaimer.
You might consider these annoyances as inevitable byproducts of an otherwise evolved digital age. Thomas Reardon sees them as proof that our relationship with computers is fundamentally broken.
Reardon, a neuroscientist who created one of the earliest portals to the Internet—Microsoft’s Internet Explorer—envisions a world where machines take direct orders from our brains.
His New York City-based startup, CTRL-Labs, is working on an external body sensor that can operate a computer by decoding thoughts. Reardon talked to National Geographic about his work on a brain-machine interface and its role in the future of computing.
How does it actually work? Where do you put the sensors?
We don’t go into a lot of detail, because there’s some very active intellectual property work on our part right now. [But] our company doesn’t care where the sensors are on your body. One place happens to be on your wrist. It could be around your neck, inside your ear, your ankle. None of that really matters to us. What we care about is having access to the electrical signals that motor neurons generate as they connect to muscle.
When you think about all of the different ways that you move in the world, all the different ways that motor neurons turn things on and off, the most densely innovative part of your body is your hands. We experience all the things we do with our hands as skillful, and in particular, adaptive. Something as simple as picking up a glass of water in front of you and raising it to your lips is an incredibly, incredibly skillful task. It’s not for free. Your brain dedicates a ton of effort and a ton of computing, if you will, to that task—something that you just take totally for granted.
Today you do all of that interaction with a device in between you, whether it’s a mouse or a keyboard or a joystick. It’s only by removing the device and directly decoding the nerve that we can break through to a new kind of interaction between humans and machines.
You can input tons and tons of information into your brain, and you can analyze it in real time. You are a phenomenal processing machine. Where you are restricted is when you actually want to output something. That’s because you have to do it through muscles, which are biomechanical. That’s where everything gets gummed up, and that’s what we’re trying to solve through.
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