I’m Felix Aplin a neuroscientist researching how the human body can connect with technology. Ask me anything about cyborgs, robot arms, and brain-machine interfaces!

Do you think we will be able to integrate tech into the human brain with non-invasive methods that will potentially be available to the public? Or are there any emerging technologies on the horizon that seem promising?

This is a pretty complex question! It’s very hard to communicate with or record from the brain non-invasively because we have this big electrically insulative barrier between the brain and the outside world (the skull).

However, this technology does already exist to an extent – EEG (electroencephalography) and tDCs (transcranial direct current stimulation) let us record and stimulate brain activity, respectively, and both are relatively cheap and accessible.

This tech is already useful scientifically, but the spatial resolution (how specific we can target them) is poor, which limits their usefulness generically.

I do know there have already been attempts to use e.g. EEG as a video game controller, but so far nothing too successful. In the longer term, I would expect we will continue to get better at developing technologies like these and they will become more publicly useful – but I couldn’t guess at a timeframe.

Felix

How realistic is the concept of making an exact snapshot of all neural activity going on in a human and then copying that snapshot to a computer? The objective being to transfer that what makes a person a person from the mortal coil to a more persistent environment.

Would it be sufficient to only consider the brain itself, or do other parts of the nervous system also contribute to personality (e.g. what's inside the spine)? Do you see ways to make this a nondestructive process that can be repeated more than once at various points in the history of a human being?

I'm asking for a friend.

Your question has a lot of parts so I’ll answer them each separately:

a) In theory it is potentially possible to take a snapshot of neural activity, but ‘realistic’ I think not. The resolution required to take a snapshot of every molecular neural interaction strains the bounds of physics and is unachievable given our current understanding of science.

b) The less you take of the nervous system, either by reducing the resolution of your snapshot or the extent of areas captured, the less directly similar that snapshot is going to be to the original. The spine doesn’t contain personality directly, but certainly aspects of the peripheral nervous system contribute to your personality (when you’re in minor pain you might be irritable, for example, and while the final feeling is being processed in the brain, the pain signal could come from signals in the spine). How much of that you can lose before you aren’t ‘you’ anymore is a deeply personal and philosophical question without easy answers.

c) Assuming such a process were possible, which it currently definitely is not, there would be no reason why you couldn’t repeat it any number of times. Again, which copy is the real ‘you’ is a philosophical question. I recommend a sci-fi book by Greg Egan called ‘permutation city’ if you are interested in these kinds of questions!

Felix

Will your work cover repairing those who have had a stroke?

My current work is focused on communicating with the peripheral nerves and the spine using new forms of electrical stimulation, primarily to treat chronic pain.

This isn’t directly helpful for stroke, but my field more generally is working to find ways to help repair the brain or restore function for those who have suffered from strokes.

Current technology is still simplistic, but we are developing ever more sophisticated approaches. Here is a review article that might get you started on this topic.

Felix

Just lost my MIL to a subcranial haematoma, and an uncle a few years back to a delayed-response stroke.

Do you forsee a near future (say 20yrs) whereby someone with a poor prognosis due to brain injury could have the affected area 'bypassed' and hooked up to a machine that can process some of that 'signal'?

Eg. someone who cannot speak following a TBI could have the affected speech or motor neurons/zones emulated by a computer or machine that could 'tidy up' the noise or add in the missing pathways etc and thus use their own voice again. Like a 'hardware offload' for a patient with impaired/impacted brain function.

Really sorry to hear about your loss. The seriousness of stroke I think often doesn’t get the public recognition it deserves, especially for those who survive but have lasting neurological disabilities as a result.

I do foresee such a future where brain injury can be ‘bypassed’ somewhat using technology, but the timeline is impossible to predict. Already we can do this with some areas of the brain in a limited fashion to help locked-in patients that can’t otherwise communicate. I suggest you look up ‘brain machine interfaces’ to get some insight here. For stroke specifically, I quickly found this paper for you which looks at using these BMIs for stroke rehabilitation: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2020.591435/full

Hopefully useful as an insight into the kinds of things already being looked at in these early stages.

Felix

Could you explain us what is neuro engineering??

I find the best way to explain neuro engineering is to break the words down into their meaning: “neuro” means the brain or nervous system, while “engineering” means to use science to build or construct useful things. So, neuro engineering is about using our understanding of neuroscience to build things that can communicate with, control, or repair the brain and nerves.

Felix

What's your take on how things are going with Neuralink?

I don’t have strong opinions on their progress. This field is prone to a lot of hype. Always wait for the pragmatic/functional outcomes and don’t believe the spin, especially when it comes from a company that may have a vested financial interest.

Felix

Hows postdoc life in AUS compare to it in the USA?

I would say it’s a roughly similar experience and I have loved my time in both countries! The big differences are that the lifestyle in Australia is more relaxed and you have a better salary and benefits, which is a huge plus.

Anecdotally, postdocs also have a bit more independence in the Australian system. On the flip side, there is a lot more grant money and career opportunity in the USA, which makes securing research funding and career progression easier in the states (although job stability is difficult for scientists everywhere currently).

Felix

What frequencies do muscles respond to?

Typically, we deliver electricity to muscles in the form of short pulses with a set number of pulses per second (pulse frequency, in Hz). What we find is that muscles tend to respond best to pulse frequencies in the range of 10-100 Hz.

Incidentally, this is within the same range as the alternating current that comes from your power outlets – and is part of the reason household electricity is dangerous (the heart is a muscle too!)

Felix

Could conscience be uploaded into a robot?

That’s a hairy one. What do you mean by consciousness? If you mean from a neuroscientific perspective (integrating sensory information into an internal central model to produce behavioural output), this process is becoming well understood by neuroscientists and I see no reason to believe it wouldn’t eventually be replicable in an artificial system.

If you mean the subjective, personal experience of existing (“qualia”), our understanding of that is very limited, so that’s still a question more for philosophers at this point.

Felix

People always talk about connecting to the brain for input. I want an output jack, so I can dump my thoughts and try to bypass the difficulty I have translating what's in my head to paper (especially imagery). How likely is it that we will eventually be able to do that?

Neural engineering absolutely explores both of these options. The ‘output’ jack is often called a ‘brain-machine interface’ or ‘brain-computer interface’ in the scientific literature.

I’d say it’s very likely because we can already do this in a limited fashion too, for example, read whether a patient intends to move certain muscles, which we can use to drive a cursor on a screen for someone with full body paralysis.

Of course, exactly what we can read from the brain depends on our ability to access that information, our understanding of how to read the ‘code’ of the brain, and just the hard physics constraints of our systems. The devil is always in the details but I expect these technologies will continue to advance in our lifetimes.

Felix

What do you see as the next big advancement that were close to reaching?

I think the next big advancement in my field is applying our understanding of how the brain uses whole neural populations to encode information, rather than the more traditional approach of sending almost like an electrical ‘morse code’ to individual cells or groups of cells. Already we are using technologies that can better capture information from and stimulate a wide range of neurons. My hope is that this enables brain-machine interfaces and sensory prostheses to deliver better outcomes in the near future.

Felix

Is there an emerging technology to raise a person's IQ, and, or significantly improve memory? I am interested in nootropics and technological solutions.

This is a somewhat loaded question because “IQ” is a very reductive concept – but that’s a very separate line of discussion!

There has been some research looking at using noninvasive neuromodulation via e.g. trans-cranial direct current stimulation to improve memory and brain plasticity, however, the field is controversial.

More directly, there are attempts to repair memory recall impairment using neuroprosthetics, although it is still very early days. See this paper for reference: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29589592/.

Exciting stuff!

Felix

Something I’m interested in is a sort of “bypass” that would read information from one side of a severed spinal cord and send it to stimulate the other side. Is this the approach being considered for curing paralysis? If so, what are some obstacles that this solution may face? Is there an issue with precision of measuring neural activity and then stimulating others in the same way?

This approach is definitely being considered as a solution for paralysis. At a most basic level, if there is still a little bit of spine still connected, electrical stimulation can be used to ‘boost the signal’ to get better responses.

You're exactly right, bypassing the injured part of the spine entirely is a bit trickier because there’s just so much information being passed up the spinal cord and our current technology doesn’t have the kind of resolution to detect each individual signal and match up where it should go to.

However, the more we understand about the spine/nervous system, and the better our technology becomes for fine stimulation, the better these technologies will become. Here’s a reference that discusses these approaches in a little more depth: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2021.749465/full

Felix

Do you think that something like AM (I have no mouth and I must scream) could exist in real life? Leaving the human control aside, do you think a huge AI could potentially be a serious threat to the human race?

I sure hope not! I’ve played the game but not read the book – really horrifying! One (maybe) comforting thought is that an AI designed to have similar neural/behavioural processes to us (I.e. one that can simulate hate) will likely be similar enough to us to also simulate concepts like empathy. Social thought processes like these are linked behaviourally and physiologically.

However, we’re a long way off this. Current AI isn’t really simulating anything like human thought processes at all. As for the threat to humans, I think AI scientists can better answer that – but I will say I’m personally more worried about the threat humans already are to the human race than a theoretical ‘rogue AI’!

Felix

What is the current state of prosthetic hands that respond to nerve control, especially hands capable of fine movement of specific fingers? I know that hands that respond to myoelectric impulses and can open and close have existed since the late 1980s or thereabouts, but it seems like hands capable of fine movement and gestures with specific fingers are very recent/experimental.

In brief, from my understanding the biggest difficulty lies in the fact that fine motor control is reliant on what’s called a ‘feedback’ system, where you fine-tune your muscle position in response to feedback from your somatosensory (touch) system. For example, when you pick up an egg, you need to be able to hold it lightly enough to not break it, but firmly enough that it doesn’t slip out and break on the floor.

Without a sense of touch, this is impossible or at minimum very highly mentally taxing to achieve. So, the current state of prosthetic hands has been research into finding ways to provide ways to electrically simulate this touch feedback at the same time as delivering motor control. There has been some good progress in this field, and here is a review paper that might get you started if you are interested:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36097134/

Felix

Is humanity doomed to be taken over by machines?

Biology has a lot of advantages over machines, like self-repair and the ability to constantly evolve and adapt. Just look how quickly cities are overrun by nature the minute they aren’t maintained! So, I think we aren’t going to be taken over any time yet ;)

Felix

This is a super fascinating topic, so thank you for the AMA! I have two specific questions:

1) Realistically speaking, how likely is it that freezing someone's brain and reanimating it later will be possible?

2) Ignoring the moral complexities and challenges, is it actually possible to transplant someone's head onto another body?

No problem at all, really love answering questions like this!

1. There are a lot of issues here. Think of the brain like a painting we are trying to restore, but for which we have no copy. If most of the painting is still intact then perhaps you can fill in the blanks and restore something that resembles or is even identical to the original. But, if too much of that brain has been damaged, we can’t restore it. At the moment, freezing and storing brain tissue damages it too much to allow us to bring it back in a way that would allow it to function again. Possible in theory but realistically not yet doable.

2. Purely scientifically, in theory, yes this is perfectly feasible. In practice, it is extremely difficult to achieve for many reasons, and so currently impossible to do.

Felix

What's a game you would recommend that isn't already very mainstream?

The game I’m playing a lot at the moment is Dominions 5. It’s a very strange (and definitely not mainstream) turn based fantasy game with ugly graphics but deep gameplay, and lore taken from real-world mythology (the dev is a history/religion professor). I like it because you can play multiplayer even when you are time poor like me, as you can take your turn whenever you want.

Felix

Will I ever be able to record and playback my dreams?

Definitely in the realm of possibility and we can already do this very crudely, but actual ‘record and playback’ will not be any time soon I would think – the brain has a big electrical shield around it (the skull) which makes getting specific information about what it is doing very hard without actually going in there and poking around – definitely not something you’d want to do just to record a dream!

Felix

Do you think that your type of research could potentially help people suffering from dementia or other similar conditions?

Yes I think this type of research could potentially help with these kinds of conditions. Already neuromodulation and neural stimulation is being investigated as a means to delay the onset of symptoms, although I think a cure will require a molecular biology solution.

Dementia is a tough one because it involves loss of function across the entire brain – at the moment it’s a bit like we have the technology to replace the wheels of your car or individual parts of the engine, but when the whole car is rusting away, there’s not a lot we can do.

However, the more we understand these conditions through neuroscience research, the better we can create technologies and medicines to help combat them.

Felix

I am getting a cochlear implant tomorrow. I have been "warned" numerous times that things will sound very different due to the acoustic vs electric input. Do you think a day will come where the technology is at a point to provide a more natural sound?

Good luck with your upcoming CI surgery, very exciting! I’ve worked with and met many CI recipients before. It’s definitely a different kind of sound perception and you will have to get used to it. I can warn you upfront that music specifically often sounds pretty cruddy through a cochlear implant.

Progress in cochlear implants has been slow over the past decade, after the initial breakthroughs in the 90’s-2000s. However, there has been a recent resurgence in research that can improve the sounds that a cochlear implant can encode. For example, some of my colleagues at Johns Hopkins University (Prof. Gene Fridman) are interested in how we can use different types of electrical stimulation to mimic a more ‘physiological’ nerve response. There’s a lot more work to be done but I am sure the day will come when the technology will be at a point it will be able to distinguish sound as well as the natural cochlear. Just a matter of how long that will take, which is difficult to predict.

Felix

Did you ever stop to ask whether we should, not just whether we could?

We think about the 'should' every day. The ethics of this field is strongly linked to its practise and our jobs as scientists and neural engineers.

If it is not justifiable to a strict ethics committee, we don’t do it (and would not want to do it – unethical science is almost always also just bad science).

Felix

Do you think humans that don't merge with technology will ultimately go extinct like Neanderthals?

It’s impossible to say. A less exciting but more optimistic answer might be to say that humans have always been merged with technology in a broader sense – using tools is a fundamental part of what makes us human. Are you less ‘human’ because you use a phone? What if you have a hip replacement? How about a hearing aid, or cochlear implant? I would not say so.

Felix

Do you think technology akin to the eyePhone from Futurama would be useful for daily life, or would it be a novelty much like Google Glass?

For a lot of these kinds of technologies, the biggest question I always ask is ‘how much time and energy does it save someone’ vs ‘how expensive/difficult is it to install/learn to use’.

I think phones are already so easy to use for most of us, and directly accessing the brain is very hard, so it seems unlikely we’ll be installing anything in our brains like that directly any time soon unless it makes things dramatically easier for our daily lives.

Plus, we humans find implanting things in our bodies instinctively just kind of ‘icky’ a lot of the time, which is a big barrier for these kinds of technologies.

Felix

Hi, Meli! And also Felix.

Where did you find a pigeon that looks like a shiny Pokemon version of a pigeon? (And I thought ginger pigeons were the rare shiny rock dove.)

Also, does your research happen to involve cyborg pigeons who can control cursors on the screen with their minds for birdseed rewards, and if so, how likely are they to replace me at work?

I have a really easy job that I'm certain a pigeon could do with a proper interface and a little training.

Hello back from Meli! We rescued him when he was 6 months old (now he's 8 years).

He's very loving. Domestic pigeons come in many different colours, crests and sizes beyond the standard grey. Sadly, lost domestic pigeons often remain unadopted at rescue shelters because people don't want a 'pigeon' pet.

In terms of cyborg pigeons... Meli has long since trained my wife and I to deliver seed treats on coo command, no neural interface required!

Felix

Hey! I'm from melbs and named my son Felix, do you like your name? I hope he likes it as he grows up!

On a more serious note, I'm a teacher, hold a bachelor of education and completed a professional certificate of educational neuroscience at melb uni a few years back. I DESPERATELY want to do more with neuroscience, particularly focusing on early childhood development, but I have no idea what paths I can take that don't require starting at the ground floor and restarting a bachelor. Do I just need to suck it up and start again?

I realise this is probably more appropriate for a uni advisor, but I saw your name and read your intro and I have no self restraint 😆

Hi! I did my PhD at Uni Melbourne and absolutely love the city. I didn’t like my name as a kid as it was ‘unusual’ so I was bullied over it, but over time I grew to like it more and now I really like it.

Yes, come do more neuroscience! We always need more switched-on researchers, especially those who know how to teach and communicate their neuroscience research to the public! Hard for me to answer your specific question though unfortunately, I think you do have to talk to a uni advisor. The academic system can be quite inflexible at times but there may be a way for you to get some ‘credit’ for the work you have already done.

Felix

Can you tell us more about how you are helping people with chronic pain? Any links to studies or products?

I’m interested in how we can use different types of stimulation to reach the peripheral nerve fibres responsible for creating hypersensitivity to painful sensations (hyperalgesia) or making non-painful sensations become painful (allodynia).

The idea is we might have a technology that can reach and ‘suppress’ pain fibres while leaving the touch and motor fibres responding normally – the pragmatic implications are hopefully obvious.

I can’t go into detail as I have a non-disclosure about the specifics which unfortunately coincides with this AMA – however, I can link you to these papers that might give you an idea of the scientific basis for what we are working on:

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2019.00379/full https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.aaq1438

Felix

Autistic people often have a higher level of sense, and many feel pain at a higher intensity than others. Do you see any of the technology you are researching reducing sensory input for this population?

One of the big emerging fields right now is the concept of neuromodulation, where instead of trying to stimulate nerves to create individual functions (like seeing an image) we instead control them more subtly to influence their ‘plasticity’ (how easy they are to change) and their sensitivity.

It’s also relevant to autism because neuromodulation can potentially influence inflammation, which is thought to play a part in autism spectrum disorder.

This is definitely on the minds of a lot of researchers right now but is still in very early days so we don’t know how effective it will be. Here is a recent reference looking at this: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30732986/

Felix

Hi Felix, Is there any good work being done with neuroscience technology to assist with Alzheimer’s patients? 3 of my 4 grandparents died with/from that disease and I am worried for my parents and myself. Thanks!

Alzheimer’s is a big field of research in neuroscience and currently, a big concerted effort is going into understanding it and trying to find ways to treat it or at least slow it down.

I don’t work on Alzheimer’s directly, but I think there’s a lot of hope for your parents and yourself (and me!) that treatments will be developed and continue to improve over our lifetimes.

Alzheimer’s is a scary complex beast a bit like cancer and there are no ‘easy’ solutions – but over the past decades, a terminal diagnosis for cancer has become rarer and rarer and I expect (and hope) we will see the same slow progress ‘chipping away’ at Alzheimer’s too.

Felix

What is your favourite game to unwind to? Anything unusual that others might not have heard of?

Answered a previous redditor, but in short, I have been playing a lot of an unusual turn-based strategy called ‘dominions 5’ recently. A real oddball but a lot of fun once you get past the (admittedly terrible) UI.

Also excited about the latest dwarf fortress release too but I don’t have a lot of time to sink into it unfortunately.

Felix

Hi Felix, hope your doing well. My Q was, with the up coming researches and technologies you've seen, is it possible to have a super precise prosthetics that can replace a human's originally functioning body part for professionals in the near future?

For example, if I'm a guitarist I've lost my left arm, do you see a future where I could simply replace it with a prosthetic and mimic all the motor function at that level? If so how soon do you think we're at, or the other side is how far away are we from that?

Also, have you watched Full Metal Alchemist? If so, how'd you rank their version of prosthetics that require an actual neurogical link with cables like in that manga/anime?

Hi, I’m well thanks! I’m a pianist, used to play in a jazz band when younger, so I can relate to your question. In short, yes it’s possible and I definitely foresee this future given our current progress in technology and understanding.

But.

The timeframe is always hazy with scientific progress. Sometimes things move quickly, sometimes they take decades or centuries due to unforeseen roadblocks. If I was to very roughly guess I’d say we’re still some decades off neuroprosthetic body parts that function as well as their human analogues, although it might occur in our lifetimes. But, that’s really just a guess.

I haven’t seen FMA although I hear it’s a great show. I can say though that real-life prosthetics will probably eventually become indistinguishable from their biological analogues, with an artificial ‘skin’ etc – generally, people like to fit in and having prosthetics look like a normal limb increases their broad psychological and social acceptance.

Felix

Are we close to having chips in or arms/hands so we can buy stuff? Like a debit card chip in our arms? Would be handy.

We can already have these kinds of chips, the limitation isn’t the technology.

We, humans, have an instinctive fear of implanting inorganic things into our bodies – it is why so many people are afraid of needles, for example.

This is a useful instinct for survival but it means that technologies we implant into our bodies usually have to achieve something pretty major (like a hip replacement or restoring your hearing with a cochlear implant) or people are (perhaps rightly) not comfortable with them.

Felix

Hi Felix, thanks for dropping by!

There are currently ongoing operations on people with spinal cord injuries suffered from physical trauma to bridge 'disconnected' neural connective tissue to stimulate and try regain function of parts of the body through electric stimulation by the devices that are operated into these patients with, to my knowledge, varying results of success (although the successful once are absolutely fascinating to read about).

All this is still quite new and very experimental, and the ability to regain maximum recovery potential of the treatment is heavily dependent on the patient's ability to 'train' through physical therapy to regenerate these neural networks (not to mention the huge variation to, and severity of injuries) makes it a huge challenge for these people, but the reward of success is absolutely worth the try. Any thoughts on these types of operations you'd like to share?

I think there are some smaller scale and less invasive methods of treatment already existing to regain muscle function between limbs (or just general muscle function in certain areas of the body) through small electrical devices applied to the skin? I'd love to hear more on how far this type of research and development has resulted in these types of treatments and solutions, with examples if you know of them!

Thanks in advance!

Hi, no problem, love answering questions!

It’s certainly very new and experimental but I think there’s a lot of promise both to help train the brain and make it more ‘plastic’ for rehabilitation, but also to potentially bypass the damaged tissues and stimulate/record directly.

I answered a very similar question previously as well, so copying that answer here too:

This approach is definitely being considered as a solution for paralysis. At a most basic level, if there is still a little bit of spine still connected, electrical stimulation can be used to ‘boost the signal’ to get better responses.

You're exactly right, bypassing the injured part of the spine entirely is a bit trickier because there’s just so much information being passed up the spinal cord and our current technology doesn’t have the kind of resolution to detect each individual signal and match up where it should go to.

However, the more we understand about the spine/nervous system, and the better our technology becomes for fine stimulation, the better these technologies will become. Here’s a reference that discusses these approaches in a little more depth: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2021.749465/full

Felix