The Troubled Marriage of Brains and Computers

That moment was the culmination of two decades of work in brain-machine interface technology, a research field I pioneered with my colleagues at Duke University. Early experiments involved rats and monkeys moving levers, robots and avatar bodies using their thoughts. My colleagues and I believe that we can apply what we've learned about neuroplasticity--the ability of the brain to change over time--to a range of neurological diseases, including Parkinson's disease, epilepsy, stroke, cerebral palsy and even autism. Scientists from university labs to Silicon Valley are working on two additional ideas conceived in my lab: connecting brains to form a network, or brainet, and developing a communication method that lets people message one another directly brain-to-brain. Once brains are connected they could become a hackable system in which the thoughts and actions of connected individuals can be accessed and manipulated.