An Insider's Take on Brain-Computer Interface (BCI)

Malcolm: [00:00:00] And I was like, oh, brain computer interface. That's the next big thing. And I really invested my early career in brain computer interface.

Malcolm: It's what I did my thesis on in college. It's what my first job was. It's, you know, I, I did a lot of stuff in the space.

Malcolm: people think you'll have this like super fast communication system that communicates with your brain as easily as your brain can think.

Malcolm: And that is just not what you're going to get.

Malcolm: They are imagining like a computer feeding them facts in a way where they are aware that the computer is feeding them facts and they are asking for those facts.

Malcolm: That is not what's happening. A computer is overriding your consciousness because your brain can't tell the difference between what's coming from the computer and what's coming from, you know, that's what's actually happening. And you're not getting that much benefit from it when compared with just checking the internet or something.

Simone: Hello, Malcolm.

Malcolm: Hello, Simone. I am excited for this topic because it involves my old job and my actual specialization. [00:01:00] So when I was younger and I was trying to chart out what would be the big technology of the future that I should try to get on top of before everyone else. You know, I saw it like, okay, imagine I saw computers coming down the pipeline and I want to become a computer scientist before anyone's into computers.

Malcolm: That was how I saw the way I planned for my career, which seems like a very Malcolm thing to do. And I was like, oh, brain computer interface. That's the next big thing. And I made a big mistake by overinvesting my early career in this, but I really invested my early career in brain computer interface.

Malcolm: It's what I did my thesis on in college. It's what my first job was. It's, you know, I, I did a lot of stuff in the space. I actually, I worked as , the R& D marketing lead of the first commercially successful brain computer interface company, which was called NeuroSky which created these little headsets.

Malcolm: So Nekamimi was one of our big projects, which was like a little headset and it would control like cat ears on your head. And then another, like a lot of people used it for various things that like went. Memetically viral. And essentially what it was, was a really, [00:02:00] really simplistic EEG system that was using capacitive sensors.

Malcolm: So EEG stands for an electrocephalograph. It was really simple. The things it was reading in your brain just think of it like, it's, it's, it's an ear listening to the room of a party trying to catch the general vibe of what's going on. Is this a fun party or a funeral? Is this a, you know, but you can't really determine much more than that.

Malcolm: And the other thing is, is that whenever the sensor moved around, and so this is a big problem with any of these sensors that are like actually wearable. It would make a ton of noise. So the electricity, like the static electricity that's generated by like your hair moving or like a sensor moving just a little bit is so much louder than anything generated by your brain.

Malcolm: But even louder than that, but just. If you, the, the electricity generated by muscle. So if I like blink my eyes, that's like an explosion going off. So this is

Simone: an [00:03:00] incredibly noisy system. Like it's basically, you're saying it's picking up not just the sound of the party, but also a bunch of instruction outside and a football game that's playing in the background and all the commercials.

Malcolm: What I'm saying is it's imprecise. It's actually doing what it says it's doing. But it is wildly imprecise, but another thing to note here is it's functioning in a way that your brain is not really meant to function. So when you're communicating with an EEG using your brain you are communicating with that EEG in a way that's I mean, that's just not the way your brain evolved to communicate with things, right?

Malcolm: You're, you're, you're causing tons of neurons to fire at once in a way they weren't really meant to fire at once. And we don't know the effects of this really, not long term. And, and that's a potential problem because, you know, fire together, wire together. I, okay, what I'm talking about. So the way that your brain forms connections is when neurons Fire at around the same time or in around the same region of the brain, they begin to wire together.

Malcolm: That's how [00:04:00] like I do. That's the fundamentals of how the brain works. It's way more complicated than that, but that's a broad scope of it. Okay. For reasons that like you're using your prefrontal cortex, which is like not at all meant for external communication and firing it all at the same time. I don't know.

Malcolm: I would, I don't want to say anything on record, but I'd say it's probably not the best, but this actually becomes really interesting when you're then talking about The existing brain computer interface systems, because a lot of people, they look at brain computer interface technology and they think, oh, this is going to be like really, really, really transformative in the way that we engage with technology and it might not be and a lot of the systems we're using now might not be the systems that end up becoming popular.

Malcolm: They might be like those you know, I dunno, people from our generations, we had VR in our generations, but it was like ridiculous, [00:05:00] big machines that you would go to it like Epcot or like it's special centers. And they don't function at all the way our existing VR works. Or we had, you know, three day movies, but you would wear like colored glasses.

Malcolm: It was functioning in an entirely different way than the current movies. Right. So I'll get into more. What I mean was this, when I talk about the current. Field of brain computer interface. So first, let's talk about why the field stalled. So I was wrong. I made a bad gamble at the beginning of my career.

Malcolm: It didn't take off. And that's why I left the field. And instead of doing a PhD, got a business degree instead and went into a boring

Malcolm: I mean, I've always stayed interested in neuroscience, but I realized pretty quickly that it was a bad bet for the rest of my career because the field was moving slowly. Why was the field moving slowly? Is moving slowly due to astrocytic scar formation. So, an individual's immune system does not go into our brains because of the blood brain barrier.

Malcolm: A lot of people know that, right? They're like, oh yes, the blood brain barrier protects the brain from bacteria and viruses. [00:06:00] This is why if you get like a bacteria or virus in your brain, it's really bad. That doesn't mean your brain doesn't have cells to deal with that. They're just modified neurons called glial cells.

Malcolm: And Galil cells can have all sorts of support functions in your brain, but one is something very similar to white blood cells, where they like surround intruders or build scar tissue or something like that. It's, it's very interesting. Like our brains basically evolved like all of the support cells that the rest of the body has, but they're modified neurons.

Malcolm: It's, it's like independently evolved them. Very interesting. Anyway, back to Galil cells. Astrocytic scar formation is a type of scar formation that's created by glial cells, astrocytes when you insert something into the brain. So when there's a forward body in the brain, right? And so these early neural interfaces that go into the brain and it would incite an immune response.

Malcolm: And astrocytic scar tissue would begin to build around the, you know, inserted probe, [00:07:00] right? And this probe would become less and less good at what it was doing over time and therefore it would need to become louder and louder to communicate with the brain and the brain would have to become louder and louder to communicate with it, which of course caused more and more astrocytic scars.

Malcolm: scar formation. Yeah. The way you would prevent this is with immunosuppressants. Now this is not something that you can do long term, like how long it works in a human is variable. And if we're in a chimpanzee where a lot of these studies were done is variable. And do you really want to do that for some sort of recreational implant?

Malcolm: Right? No, you don't. You don't immunosuppressants. I don't know if I need to say that's a terrible idea to be on long term immunosuppressants for a recreational or productivity enhancing

Simone: product. Unless you want to be like a bubble boy. Yeah, yeah. So a lot

Malcolm: of people get these because look, people get dumb, you know, surgeries for little like aesthetic things.

Malcolm: Of course, they'll get surgeries for this, but they're not thinking about the cost. Anyway, so, all that's the case. Now, the [00:08:00] field has moved on from there. If you look at what Neuralink is doing, they have found a way around the astrocytic scar formation problem, and someone was pointing out that, I don't know if I'm allowed to talk about it, but they, they have a way around it.

Malcolm: It's not a problem for them. However I have always thought that even if you were able to build this into a person's brain, you are likely to not get all of the benefits that people think you're going to get. And the core reason is, is people think you'll have this like super fast communication system that communicates with your brain as easily as your brain can think.

Malcolm: And that is just not what you're going to get. So if you think of a transformer model, we've talked a lot about AIs and stuff like that. Imagine trying to communicate with an AI at random parts of the code instead of the input output part of the code. That's not gonna work very well.

Malcolm: Your brain did not evolve to communicate using random parts of your brain. It evolved to condense the information and send it out. through [00:09:00] very specific pathways. Okay. And these pathways that were your central nervous system is meeting your peripheral nervous system, which means that you might actually be slower at communicating with your central nervous system than your peripheral nervous system.

Malcolm: And almost certainly won't be faster at communicating. If you're plugging directly into your central nervous system, you might be able to passively get ideas from a person. So this is what we've seen in some studies. We're like fMRI data, and this means that you can probably do this with an invasive system as well.

Malcolm: fMRI, by the way, probably the most brilliant machine ever invented. So what it does, is it like, puts this strong magnetic field into your body. And that means because all of your blood cells have iron in them and they're, they're all magnetic to an extent. And when you put this magnetic field, they all align, right?

Malcolm: They're all facing the same direction because they're facing the same direction as a magnetic field. And then the magnetic field turns off and this is when you're in a firmware area, boom. Boom, boom. That's this magnetic field turning on and off. And every time it [00:10:00] turns off, they go back to their original positions, right?

Malcolm: Think of it like an elastic thing. Like they've been forced into one position, but they're really naturally at another position. When they do that, it releases a form of energy, which you can measure with the fMRI machine, which allows us to see where blood is in a human. And with more advanced MRIs, we can even tell where oxygenated versus deoxygenated blood is.

Malcolm: So with the original fMRIs, you could tell where brain activity was happening. Because blood would be sent to that area after a thought had happened because you would just have oxygen in that blood and you needed to compensate for that. But the modern fMRI machines, fMRI meaning Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, is doing it real time.

Malcolm: MRIs are doing it like a picture. Anyway we can actually see the brain beginning to take the oxygen out. You know, as it's using it to replenish the electromagnetic potential of action potentials in your brain. I'm not going to get into that right now. You don't need to know that. But what you do need to know is that there isn't a strong reason.

Malcolm: So, so we can quickly tell now you [00:11:00] can tell what song a person is thinking about, or tell what movie they're watching by combining AIs. With the output from these MRI systems and analysis of what's going on my brain. So you want to be able to tell really quickly what they're thinking as like an AI or using this AI layer, but you're unable to be able to have this like bilateral communication bilateral communication will almost always be done better by a.

Malcolm: Peripheral nervous system brain computer interface, which is interesting because those systems have been stable for a really long time. Communicating directly with my peripheral nervous system is actually much easier to do because you're not dealing with as much as much. And we've been able to do this with stuff like amputees and their arms and stuff for a while, like direct interfaces.

Malcolm: So I don't know the reason why those haven't taken off is because they're just not very good, which again, at like fast communication. Which again, leads me to believe we're just not going to get that much of a benefit in terms of communication speed [00:12:00] from the systems. Now there are ways we could be wrong about this.

Malcolm: So ECOG, which is like an EEG. EEG is the thing I was talking about that goes on the top of your head, except it goes under your skull and over your dura matter, which means. That you're not getting the low pass filter that your skull is acting as. So what's the low pass filter basically means only low frequency waves can get through it.

Malcolm: Low frequency waves are very imprecise. And if you're talking about targeting so anyway, so I'm boring you. What, what do you, what do you want to ask? What

Simone: does this mean? Functionally like right now I'm reading things AI changes everything. What do you expect we're going to see in the next 10 to 50 years in terms of what brain computer interface will enable either from I don't know, computers being able to see what we're thinking to like us using this in therapeutic technologies to us using this for entertainment, like, where do you think this is going to end up?

Simone: Are humans going to get chipped? Are we going to be able to just no. And then, okay. So tell me what do

Malcolm: you see? Right. People are [00:13:00] just way okay. So people in the industry. So I'm one of the few people that has no stake in the industry, but actually understands all the technology. And, and so most people in the industry, they need to tell you for their sake of their job that we can do this.

Malcolm: But I just, I don't think that it's doable. And I don't think it'll give us that much of an advantage. And I don't think that we're going in that direction as a species. I think you could genetically modify human brains to be more compatible with these systems. That's interesting. There was some great stuff that was done that showed that we could use bioluminescence and actually create neurons that release bioluminescence when they have an action potential, which will allow them to communicate with these systems even better than existing neurons.

Malcolm: So you can modify genetically modified future humans to better integrate with these systems, which is something I guess we could do with our kids if we were going to CRISPR them with like jellyfish DNA. But again, the, the efficiency gains are just, I don't. Think high. [00:14:00] I think that max, you may be able to communicate with a computer 50% faster than you can type, but.

Malcolm: Not much more than that. And I do think that a computer might be able to get a faster shot of what you're thinking, but you are not going to be able to intentionally communicate with the computer much faster. And this is the big problem. Do you really want your computer to have a better understanding of what you're thinking, like an advanced AI, but not what you want the computer to know you're thinking?

Malcolm: Well, so, but

Simone: isn't this. Cool. Because couldn't this mean that instead of being tortured, people will just be scanned

Malcolm: for information? Well, and another thing to remember, and this is really important. And we talked about this in our, you're probably not sentient video, which I'd strongly suggest you watch.

Malcolm: It's one of my favorite videos I've ever made. Really high, high, high praise for this video. is that humans essentially will pretend their brain is very good at pretending that it consciously came up with any idea whether or not they consciously came up with it. [00:15:00] So you can induce an idea to people by doing these experiments where you know, you're, you are like.

Malcolm: Oh, which girl do you find most attractive? And then you're like, oh you, you do a little sleight of hand and you go, why did you find this girl most attractive? But it wasn't the girl they picked. And like a big portion of them will be like, oh, I found her most attractive for these complicated set of reasons.

Malcolm: Or you look at brain patients, you know, you can talk to one part of their brain without talking to the other. And you can tell one part of their brain by covering one of their eyes, which only communicates with, with one side. It's as if the corpus callosum had to sever in it. And so you're talking with the other side of their brain and you're saying You know, pick up, pick up a Rubik's cube.

Malcolm: So they'll pick it up and you ask the other side, but why did you do that? And they're like, Oh I've always, I've always wanted to try to solve one of these. They don't know what they did. They're making up like their consciousness will take credit for things that we know it didn't do during open brain surgery.

Malcolm: If you stimulate a part of the brain, you can get a person like, raise a hand. And you're like, why did you do that? And they're like, Oh, I felt like doing it. They won't say that like they were forced to do it. Well, this means that if you integrated an AI directly with a [00:16:00] person's. You know, prefrontal cortex, for example they are going to believe that everything that the AI is telling them is something that they are thinking, and their brain will just naturally believe that they came up with all these ideas.

Malcolm: So if the AI is feeding them ideas, or if the AI is You know, drawing for them. If you plugged a person into like Dolly, they would think that they had created that art 100% believe it. And this is any human, you know, this is just the way our brains function because our brains have to synthesize a lot of pretty distinct.

Malcolm: Like we are not actually like singular entities. We're actually a bunch of distinct systems in the brains, which are then conflated to be a single entity by this system that essentially has to lie to us. To create what we perceive as our consciousness. Again, the sentience video, we'll go into this in a lot more detail, but other questions, Simone.

Simone: So basically you just think that nothing interesting is going to happen with brain computer interface and

Malcolm: some things interesting will eventually happen, but it will be at a level of technology that is far above where we are today. And I think that the really interesting work now, the real work that's going to [00:17:00] change the future of humanity is the genetics work.

Malcolm: It's genetics and AI are the most, I mean, eventually we're going to need to get brain computer interface good. So I'm glad that people like Elon are working on it. Why do we need to get it good? Because AI is continuing to develop. And if we can't figure out a way to integrate with AI, to create entities that are both biological and synthetic then we are almost intrinsically antagonistic towards AI, and we might end up in a future where only the synthetic or only the biological exists, and both of those futures are going to be pretty horrifying if we continue advancing, but it's, it's, I guess the combined future is pretty horrifying to some as well but it's, it's less horrifying because at least humanity continues to survive.

Malcolm: Or something that looks, you know, that broadly like a descendant of current humanity surrise.

Simone: Yeah. In in the culture series that, that I love by Ian Banks there's this technology called a neural lace which is what it sounds like basically it's, it's something that starts really, [00:18:00] really small, I guess, like a piece of biosynthetic material that goes into your brain, goes past the blood brain barrier, and grows into your brain and integrates with it. And then over time creates a backup of your consciousness because it's, it's just being really possible. Yeah. So like keeping an eye on everything that's possible.

Simone: And I think it's really interesting because Ian Banks, you know, wrote about all this stuff, like well before the technology was there well before, you know, people had, had even gotten close to developing technologies like this. And I find it really interesting. That, you know, that, that exists. But yeah, it's it's, it's, it, once it grows to its full size in this science fiction universe, it's thousands of years in the future the theoretical future that I like love and want to live in so bad.

Simone: You know, if the thing, if you like incinerate a human, like you could hold this really fine, like netting. This lace in your hand, you know, and it's just about the size of a brain. And I think that's yeah, that, that seems doable. But I guess what you're saying is that until we [00:19:00] develop technology that can literally grow into a brain and then transmit,

Malcolm: we develop that technology.

Malcolm: Yes. We'll be able to do things like back up the brain, but the core promise that people have right now is seamless integration with the brain in a way that we can consciously control. And that is not possible with near future technology. They are imagining like a computer feeding them facts in a way where they are aware that the computer is feeding them facts and they are asking for those facts.

Malcolm: That is not what's happening. A computer is overriding your consciousness because your brain can't tell the difference between what's coming from the computer and what's coming from, you know, that's what's actually happening. And you're not getting that much benefit from it when compared with just checking the internet or something.

Malcolm: Right,

Simone: right.

Malcolm: Yeah. Because your brain, evolved to deal with like optic information, auditory information, and you could create a brain that's optimized for this type of interface, but that would likely require genetic manipulation. So what I really hear

Simone: you saying then is that this is a lot like the flying cars [00:20:00] issue, where like forever, you know, people were told, were promised, they like to say, they would have flying cars and it would be so amazing and so cool, blah, blah, blah.

Simone: And that we actually can make flying cars. There was a flying car company out there, but just like from a practicality standpoint, like flying cars, aren't terribly energy efficient. We don't exactly have infrastructure that accommodates their landing and takeoff. You know, just, they'd be really expensive.

Simone: So okay, no one has flying cars because there's just no reason. For the they're not that good. They're not that affordable. There's no reason to have flying cars when we already have good enough technology that does everything else. We basically, we have Uber instead, like we got Uber instead of flying cars.

Simone: So you're saying that this is roughly the same, but yeah, I mean, theoretically we could do it, but it's, it's actual utility, given what we're going to be able to achieve and given the cost is going to be pretty limited. Right. And it's just going to be a flying

Malcolm: car. Eventually it'll be an important part of where our species goes.

Malcolm: Crucial part. It's just not one of the [00:21:00] technologies to be watching right now. And I really like eventually humans will primarily travel in flying vehicles. I absolutely believe that to be the case when we are like an interstellar species, right? And when human cities may look different and stuff like that, right?

Malcolm: But there's no reason for us to do it with current levels of technology. And yeah, I really appreciate how smart you are and how good you are at communicating this stuff.

Simone: I'm not the one who just explained in great detail the problems of neuroscience. So let's put that back to you. And I just, no, no,

Malcolm: no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Malcolm: I'm sure you could explain something to me. What did you get your degree in?

Simone: Business and technology policy that, you know, it's not that. Why did

Malcolm: I allow that? I'm joking.

Malcolm: You know, I harass her at undergrad in business, I'm like, that is not a big brain thing

Simone: to do. It was [00:22:00] my point of shame. Yeah. But I think that you also

Malcolm: I screwed up too. I got a pointless degree, but it makes me look smart. It helps with this sort of narrative of Malcolm's a smart guy, even if he doesn't Yeah.

Malcolm: You

Simone: had told me that, like Oh, what are the list of the top degrees that are often taken by like a high class students at universities when it was like philosophy and neuroscience.

Malcolm: No, it is true. Students from yeah, the higher socioeconomic backgrounds, they disproportionately

Simone: take that. You notice that at university that like of, of the students that were getting those degrees, like a lot of because they're seen

Malcolm: as high status degrees was in certain groups.

Malcolm: It wasn't philosophy. It was actually specifically. You would get a degree in classics with one that drew a lot, right, which was almost a flex because of how pointless it was, or art history, which is also a flex because of how pointless it was, or if they went into the biological fields, it was typically neuroscience or genetics.

Malcolm: And that was like a flex because of how technically difficult it was. [00:23:00] Oh, but

Simone: genetics is what we'd actually be thrilled that our kids got into for sure. Yeah.

Malcolm: So I love you, Simone. So let's, let's make these kids high status individuals.

Simone: Yeah. Yeah. Well, status in the future is going to be super interesting.

Simone: So there's

Malcolm: an interesting thing about neuroscience degrees. And this is something I noticed in my department, which I, I, I tell people to look at. They were disproportionately the most attractive people in the biology or psychology schools.

Simone: So if you're looking for someone that's hot, go onto LinkedIn, check has graduate degree in neuroscience and then you don't even have to look at their picture.

Malcolm: You're like, no, no, no. Women with degrees in neuroscience. Now this might be because of attractiveness. Correlates with intelligence. And so that's what's causing it. But I don't know, but yeah, if you were to look around like our biology or psychology classes, then you're like, okay, who are the top 10 hottest women?

Malcolm: They were almost all in the neuroscience class.

Simone: Good night. Well, I love it. I love you. Have a fun one. You too.[00:24:00]

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