Tag Archives: transcranial neuronal stimulation

Password Prevents Spilling out Private Thoughts

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A brain–computer interface (BCI) can decipher the imagined sentences of people who have conditions that interfere with speech — and it comes with password protection to avoid revealing private thoughts. The system begins decoding users’ internal speech only after they think of a specific keyword. This internally spoken “keyword” can enable a user to “lock” and “unlock” the BCI to prevent the broadcasting of their private thoughts or spontaneous ‘self-talk’.

Excerpt from Gemma Conroy, A mind-reading brain implant that comes with password protection, Nature, Aug. 14, 2025

Mass-Market Brain Manipulation and Human Rights

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Scientific advances are rapidly making science-fiction concepts such as mind-reading a reality — and raising thorny questions for ethicists, who are considering how to regulate brain-reading techniques to protect human rights such as privacy.

On 13 July, 2023 neuroscientists, ethicists and government ministers discussed the topic at a Paris meeting organized by UNESCO, the United Nations scientific and cultural agency. Delegates plotted the next steps in governing such ‘neurotechnologies’ — techniques and devices that directly interact with the brain to monitor or change its activity. The technologies often use electrical or imaging techniques, and run the gamut from medically approved devices, such as brain implants for treating Parkinson’s disease, to commercial products such as wearables used in virtual reality (VR) to gather brain data or to allow users to control software… Neurotechnology is now a US$33 billion industry.
One area in need of regulation is the potential for neurotechnologies to be used for profiling individuals and the Orwellian idea of manipulating people’s thoughts and behaviour. Mass-market brain-monitoring devices would be a powerful addition to a digital world in which corporate and political actors already use personal data for political or commercial gain.

Commercial devices are of more pressing concern to ethicists. Companies from start-ups to tech giants are developing wearable devices for widespread use that include headsets, earbuds and wristbands that record different forms of neural activity — and will give manufacturers access to that information.

The privacy of this data is a key issue. Rafael Yuste, a neuroscientist at Columbia University in New York City, told the meeting that an unpublished analysis by the Neurorights Foundation, which he co-founded, found that 18 companies offering consumer neurotechnologies have terms and conditions that require users to give the company ownership of their brain data. All but one of those firms reserve the right to share that data with third parties. “I would describe this as predatory,” Yuste says. “It reflects the lack of regulation.”…Another theme at the meeting was how the ability to record and manipulate neural activity challenges existing human rights. Some speakers argued that existing human rights — such as the right to privacy — cover this innovation, whereas others think changes are needed.

Yuste and his colleagues propose five main neurorights: the right to mental privacy; protection against personality-changing manipulations; protected free will and decision-making; fair access to mental augmentation; and protection from biases in the algorithms that are central to neurotechnology.

Excerpt from Liam Drew, Mind-reading machines are coming — how can we keep them in check?, Nature, July 24, 2023

Registrar Brain: humans in war

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Two millivolts is enough to show that someone has seen something even before he knows he has seen it himself. The two millivolts in question are those associated with P300, a fleeting electrical signal produced by a human brain which has just recognised an object it has been seeking. Crucially, this signal is detectable by electrodes in contact with a person’s scalp before he is consciously aware of having recognised anything.

That observation is of great interest to the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).  DARPA’s Neurotechnology for Intelligence Analysts programme is dedicated to exploiting it in the search for things like rocket launchers and roadside bombs in drone and satellite imagery. To that end it has been paying groups of researchers to look into ways of using P300 to cut human consciousness out of the loop in such searches.

Among the beneficiaries are Robert Smith’s group at Honeywell Aerospace, in Phoenix, Arizona, and Paul Sajda’s at Neuromatters, in New York. Both of the “image triage systems” designed by these groups require the humans in them to wear special skull-enclosing caps. Each cap is fitted with 32 electrodes that record the brain’s electrical responses to whatever stimuli it is subjected to. Wearers have pictures flashed before their eyes at the rate of ten a second. That is too fast for conscious recognition, because the brain’s attention will have moved on to the next image before consciousness can come into play. It is not, though, too fast for the initial stages of recognition, marked by a P300 signal, to occur when suspicious items are present. Images that provoke such a signal are then tagged for review. According to Dr Sajda, this triples the speed with which objects of interest can be found.

Speed is important, of course. But in matters such as this, accuracy matters more. And some people think they can improve that, too—not by reading the brain, but by stimulating it. Many studies have shown that zapping the brain with a weak electric current, a procedure called transcranial neuronal stimulation, enhances what is known as “fluid intelligence”. This is the ability to reason, as opposed merely to recall facts. Another American military-research establishment, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), hopes to exploit this phenomenon for the purpose of target identification….[W]ith a current of just two milliamps, the stimulation is painless and safe, says Vincent Clark, a neuroscientist at the University of New Mexico. In a project paid for in part by IARPA, he and his team have stimulated the brains of more than 1,000 volunteers using a 9V battery connected to electrodes on the scalp. After half an hour of stimulation, volunteers spot in test photographs 13% more snipers, makeshift bombs and the like than do volunteers given a “sham” current of 100 microamps (5% of the experimental current) that mimics the skin-tingling induced by the experimental current.

Excerpts from Know your enemy: How to make soldiers’ brains better at noticing threats, Economist,  July 29, 2017