“Told you I always come prepared” exclaimed my little brother from the other side of the room we were debating in. Confidently he took the prize money turned and walked to the door. Eyes filled with the delight of finally beating his elder brother. The gauntlet I had once laid now remained in shambles. His victory was well deserved. “Pass-thoughts” who would have guessed It would lead me to lose 100 Rupees. After my unanticipated demise, I busted out my laptop and aggressively typed these words on google only to realize he was well-prepped this time around. Reading minds seems to be a common part of the science fiction canon, a genre admired by everyone. Whatever the admiration you have for telepathy nobody’s crazy enough to consider it a part of reality. Nobody except a few scientists at the University of California in Berkeley has presented the idea to replace the traditional Biometric systems (fingerprint, iris scanning etc ) with ones that are mind-controlled.
They use the in-development Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) technology to transmit thoughts directly into the computer. When we perform a mental task for example imagining an octagon or singing Blinding lights by the weekend (A great song by the way) our brains generate unique neuronal electrical signals. An electroencephalograph (EEG) would read those brain waves using noninvasive electrodes that record the signals and the unique patterns can be used like a password or biometric identification.
It’s mind-boggling that work has been done over the last few years in bringing telepathy to life, however, those experiments hadn’t tried to optimize in-ear EEGs for use as pass-thought readers. It is only in recent years that the cost of real-time EEG decoding has become affordable. Even though this technology is now more accessible than ever but its accuracy remains the biggest problem. Although Neurosky Mind wave, a consumer-grade single-electrode EEG headset prototype, provides promising results the creator and pioneer of pass-thought John Chuang says “Clearly a lot more work needs to be done for this to be effective and useful in the real world, But at least we know this is an area that we can continue to investigate.”
Let’s bring this conversation to a bigger topic, if allowed another decade of development would the pass-thought replace the traditional system? Despite advances in logging in with your mind, there might always be a need for an old-fashioned eight-plus character phrase with no spaces. “Passwords will never go away,” says Chuang, who reasons that for a computer, a typed password may be the easiest way to verify identity, while a finger swipe may be best for a touch screen.
So far, pass-thoughts are just a really exciting but extremely rudimentary development in neurotechnology. But with new companies like Neuralink, formed just last year, intending to investigate and develop these types of devices, who knows what the future might hold?
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