'Battle for your brain': What the rise of brain-computer interface technol... https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2023/03/17/computer-brain-interfaces-bat...

'Battle for your brain': What the rise of brain-

computer interface technology means for you

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Computer brain interfaces used to be the stuff of science fiction.

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Now, headphones and earbuds with sensors that can read your brain waves – and
sell your data – are hitting the market.

"Nobody should walk into this blindly thinking that this is just another fun tool,"
Nita Farahany says.

"This is the most sensitive organ we have. Opening that up to the rest of the world
profoundly changes what it means to be human and how we relate to one another."

But that brainwave information can also be used by corporations and

governments.

"China has very clearly said that they believe that the sixth domain of warfare is the
human brain," Farahany adds.

"They are investing tremendous dollars into developing brain computer interface,
but also figuring out ways to disable brains or to spy on brains."

Today, On Point: Big business, big government and your brain.

Nita Farahany, professor of law and philosophy at Duke University. Her new book
is titled The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age
of Neurotechnology
Neurotechnology.
Neurotechnology (@NitaFarahany
@NitaFarahany)
@NitaFarahany

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Margaret Kosal, teaches international affairs at the Georgia Institute of

Technology, currently on leave to the Savannah River National Laboratory.
@mekosal)
(@mekosal
@mekosal

Tan Le, CEO of EMOTIV, which manufactures wearable neural sensing devices.
(@TanTTLe
@TanTTLe)
@TanTTLe

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Wearable tech, your Fitbit, smartwatch and the like.
They can already do things like measure your heart rate or how well you're sleeping
just based on how you're moving or signals through your skin. So, what do you
think the next frontier might be in wearable tech? The next new thing devices can
monitor and measure. Just think about it. Really think.

TAN LE: I use my earbuds every day because I want to know how my brain changes
based on all of the things that I do, because my brain is changing all the time. It's
the most sophisticated learning apparatus that we have.

So I use my earbuds as a way to understand what's happening to my brain as I play

with my daughter, hang out with my cat, listen to music, work. And it's really
interesting. I learn a lot about myself. I learn a lot about what makes me happy and
perform better. And when I'm really stressed, what impact that has on me.

CHAKRABARTI: This is Tan Le, co-founder and CEO of EMOTIV, one of a new crop
of companies that sees great potential in BCI or brain computer interface
technology.

Le believes the possibilities for such tech are endless. Helping the elderly
experiencing cognitive decline, empowering the disabled community to perform
actions simply through thinking. Even helping you understand yourself better how
to be happier or more efficient.

Le says brain computer interface tech will one day be able to do all of these things.

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Through major advances in miniaturized electroencephalography technology or

EEG, which can read signals from the human brain and send them to amplifiers,
which in her company's case are in those earbuds.

LE: It's giving you feedback on your computer. So if I click on the icon to see what's
going on in my brain at the moment, I can see what's happening in my brain. And
then I can also see a report over the course of the day, when during the day my
brain was in an optimal state. And then I can correlate that with what I was doing
at that time.

So when I look back on my afternoon on Sunday, I knew exactly what I was doing.
So I knew why that was different to the barrage of back-to-back meetings I had on
Friday afternoon, which caused my brain to be a much more intense state. And so
that allows me to change my day a little bit, carve out more time for focused work
so that I can actually work more optimally.

CHAKRABARTI: Well, Tan Le isn't the only one who thinks this is utterly
fascinating. Her three-year-old daughter sees her at her desk, wearing her earbuds
and checking in on her state of mind.

LE: She said, Mommy, I want to see. And I said, This is mommy's brain. And she
said, I want to see my brain. And I said, You're too little. So it doesn't fit her. But
she's so intrigued by it.

CHAKRABARTI: Currently, EMOTIV earbuds are available only on their website. Le

says she hopes that one day they'll be available in stores for widespread use in the
consumer market. But for now, her main clients are not consumers, they're
employers.

LE: One of our clients is JLL. JLL is a large real estate organization, and JLL came to
us saying that, you know, the future of work is changing rapidly. How can we
design our workplaces better so that we can make sure that when people are at
work, they're getting what they want from the work environment?

So in that case, we will invite volunteers within the organization to sign up for a
research study where they will wear a device for a certain period of time. And what

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we do is we capture brain data from those experiences in order to try and map out
what is the relationship between an environment that's conducive to teamwork
and collaboration. This is something that doesn't actually achieve those desired
outcomes.

CHAKRABARTI: By the way, JLL is also known as Jones Lang LaSalle, Inc, one of
the largest real estate companies in the world, ranked 185th on the Fortune $520
billion in revenue last year and 100,000 employees worldwide, some of which have
been asked to participate in the kind of research study Le mentioned. So what
happens to the data those employees' brains are pumping out into EMOTIV
earbuds?

LE: What's really important about EMOTIV is that fundamentally we do not believe
in how companies have transacted with data in the past. We are a company that
was born about ten years ago. And so we've seen a lot of the changes in the public's
view of how data is mined for corporate advantage without the informed consent
of the users and participants.

And so we conduct ourselves in a very thoughtful and ethical manner in regards to

data. The users need to have control of when they collect data, how data is shared,
and in fact, we don't sell or share your data with anyone without explicit consent.

CHAKRABARTI: Well, this is On Point. I'm Meghna Chakrabarti and that was Tan
Le, co-founder and CEO of the Neurotechnology firm EMOTIV, one of a new group
of companies that's rapidly advancing the possibilities of brain computer interface
technology. Well, my guest today says the positive possibilities of such tech are
exciting and essential. But it's naive to think that power to read brainwaves will be
used exclusively for good because the potential for exploitation is just too great,
both by corporations and governments. So she says now, as brain computer face,
technology is starting to enter our lives and our minds. Now is the time to
establish new rules, to defend the right, to think freely and to keep our minds, our
own private property.

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124 | The Battle for Your Brain

banned to prevent players from being coerced into using them by

their coaches, or by government entities in state-sponsored games.
By understanding these welfare-based concerns, we can also
see why some enhancers are permitted. Caffeine and creatine
supple- ments, for example, are allowed because they are
generally viewed as safe, even though they do provide some
competitive edge.

Mind Games

We may want to prohibit the use of cognitive enhancement when

zero-sum games are played with our minds. When the World
Chess Federation sought to have chess classified as an Olympic
sport, they adopted a “cognitive doping” prohibition for
tournament players for all the drugs banned by the International
Olympic Committee (IOC), many of which are stimulants with
known beneficial effects on concentration, focus, and memory.
When scientists studied over three thousand games played by forty
chess players, they discovered that at least two drugs could

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From The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of
Neurotechnology by Nita A. Farahany. Copyright © 2023 by the author and reprinted by
permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

This program aired on March 17, 2023.

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