Tech that measures our brainwaves is 100 years old. How will we be using it 100 years from now?
Ross Compton’s heart data was used against him when he was accused of burning down his home in Ohio in 2016. Brain data could be used in a similar way. One person has already had to hand over recordings from a brain implant to law enforcement officials after being accused of assaulting a police officer. (It turned out that person was actually having a seizure at the time.) I looked at some of the other ways your brain data could be used against you in a previous edition of The Checkup.
Teeny-tiny versions of EEG caps have been used to measure electrical activity in brain organoids (clumps of neurons that are meant to represent a full brain), as my colleague Rhiannon Williams reported a couple of years ago.
EEG has also been used to create a “brain-to-brain network” that allows three people to collaborate on a game of Tetris by thought alone.
Some neuroscientists are using EEG to search for signs of consciousness in people who seem completely unresponsive. One team found such signs in a 21-year-old woman who had experienced a traumatic brain injury. “Every clinical diagnostic test, experimental and established, showed no signs of consciousness,” her neurophysiologist told MIT Technology Review. After a test that involved EEG found signs of consciousness, the neurophysiologist told rehabilitation staff to “search everywhere and find her!” They did, about a month later. With physical and drug therapy, she learned to move her fingers to answer simple questions.
From around the web
Food waste is a problem. This Japanese company is fermenting it to create sustainable animal feed. In case you were wondering, the food processing plant smells like a smoothie, and the feed itself tastes like sour yogurt. (BBC Future)
The pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences is accused of “patent hopping”—having dragged its feet to bring a safer HIV treatment to market while thousands of people took a harmful one. The company should be held accountable, argues a cofounder of PrEP4All, an advocacy organization promoting a national HIV prevention plan. (STAT)
Anti-suicide nets under San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge are already saving lives, perhaps by acting as a deterrent. (The San Francisco Standard)
Genetic screening of newborn babies could help identify treatable diseases early in life. Should every baby be screened as part of a national program? (Nature Medicine)
Is “race science”—which, it’s worth pointing out, is nothing but pseudoscience—on the rise, again? The far right’s references to race and IQ make it seem that way. (The Atlantic)
As part of our upcoming magazine issue celebrating 125 years of MIT Technology Review and looking ahead to the next 125, my colleague Antonio Regalado explores how the gene-editing tool CRISPR might influence the future of human evolution. (MIT Technology Review)
