As we may think and be: brain-computer interfaces to expand the substrate of mind

Citation: Serruya MD (2015) As we may think and be: brain-computer interfaces to expand the substrate of mind. As we may think and be: brain-computer interfaces to expand the substrate of mind Over a half-century ago, the scientist Vannevar Bush explored the conundrum of how to tap the exponentially rising sea of human knowledge for the betterment of humanity. In his description of a hypothetical electronic library he dubbed the memex, he anticipated internet search and online encyclopedias (Bush, 1945). By blurring the boundary between brain and computer, BCI could lead to more efficient use of electronic resources (Schalk, 2008). The advantage of the well-designed direct interface is not simply the discarding of a cumbersome mouse or keyboard in exchange for whispered thought, but the creation of a new, fundamental language bridging essential brain states to discrete items and functions in computers. Should we achieve such BCI integration, we would come up against the attentional, multi-tasking and global processing limitations of the brain. Both in terms of overall spatial architecture and in moment-to-moment engagement of the world, we appear to have a limited amount of real-estate or bandwidth to work with (Müller et al., 2003; Busse et al., 2005). Just as a stroke may take away a person's ability to do something-such a perceive half the world, or be able to speak—so too one might wonder whether adding on to the brain, at a direct biological level, might provide us with new abilities. We could expand the substrate of the mind itself rather than merely interfacing it to external computers. Components of brain-computer interfaces (BCI) could be rearranged to create brain-brain interfaces, or tightly interconnected links between a person's brain and ectopic neural modules (Serruya and Kahana, 2008). Such modules—whether sitting in a bubbling Petri dish, rendered in reciprocally linked integrated circuits, or implanted in our belly—would mark the first step on to a path of breaking out of the limitations imposed by our phylogenetic past (O'Doherty et al., 2011; Deadwyler et al., 2013; Vidu et al., 2014). Constructed properly, this system could allow us to experience sensations and movements here fore only granted to other animals— perceiving in true infrared or ultraviolet rather than false-color extrapolations—and we could begin building an architecture to interface with abstract data forms, and indeed with other people, otherwise not possible in 2015. We could extend our nervous systems beyond being a puppeteer of …