Would monitoring thoughts soon be possible? We are approaching this possibility in any case, with the discovery of the areas of the brain which manage the function of calculation.
“We can now spy on the brain in everyday life. This is how Josef Parvizi, professor of neurology at theStanford School of Medicine (California, United States) summarizes its discovery, published on October 15 in Nature Communications. His team has identified the region of the brain that activates when numbers, precise or subjective, are evoked by thought: the intracranial groove. This area also controls the movement of the eyes and hands. If we are still far from espionage and thought control, we still know how to interpret brain activity.
Electrodes spy on brain activity
“It’s exciting and a little scary,” said Henry Greely, chair of ethics in biomedicine at Stanford. “It shows first that we know when someone uses numbers, second that we could manipulate the mind to change the way a person thinks about numbers. “
The researchers observed the activity of the brain using electrodes, implanted on the surface of the brain. They used a method called “intracranial recording.” This involves removing part of the bone during the analysis. The process is innovative since it makes it possible to analyze brain activity in real life conditions. The other methods do not allow this. For a week, study participants stayed connected to a device, almost without moving from their beds. But they received visits from their relatives, watched videos, ate, drank, thought… all under close surveillance.
Each electrode spied on a group of nerve cells and reported the results to a central computer. The patients were also filmed in order to match the brain’s reactions to their activity.
Some areas are activated when we talk about quantities
The Stanford team’s discovery is unexpected, to say the least. The peaks of the intraparietal groove, which they assumed to be related to computational functions only, activated outside of the test situations. When a patient mentions a number or quantitative reference (“more than”, “a lot” or “greater than”), a spike in electrical activity occurs in the same nerve cells as during a stone.
The scientists do not hide their enthusiasm: “Nerve cells do not trigger chaotically. They are specialized, they are activated only when the subject brings up numbers, ”explains Josef Parvizi. It is therefore possible, simply by observing brain activity, to know when participants evoke a quantity.
“If it was a baseball game, we wouldn’t even be in the first inning. “
This advance could lead to different types of applications. A dumb patient could communicate through thought with a “mind reading.” The implantation of microchips would also make it possible to spy on and even control people’s thoughts. There is only one step towards science fiction. The researchers do not cross it, but react with humor.
“In practice, walking around with electrodes implanted in people’s brains is not the easiest thing in the world. It’s not for tomorrow and it won’t be easy or low-key, ”jokes Henry Greely. Josef Parvizi recalls that the research is still in its early stages: “We are still in the early days. If it was a baseball game, we wouldn’t even be in the first inning. We just have a ticket to enter the stadium. The stadium here is infinitely more complex than a baseball field.
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